Retail

BonLook—the leading eyewear brand in Québec—was founded in 2010 by the brother and sister duo Sophie and Louis-Félix Bélanger. Their story began in the Montréal neighborhood of Saint-Henri. The dream? To provide locally produced eyewear at a competitive price. Which is exactly what BonLook is known for today.

Looking Beyond Simple Management

Prior to hiring Jérémy Dion, the current human resources director, BonLook had no HR department. And no clear standards as far as employee management went throughout its network of stores. The payroll team still processed the timesheets the old-fashioned way. “We really had to start from scratch,” Jérémy admits. “We relied on good old Excel spreadsheets.” Further, since each store operator managed its staff differently, streamlining the data could be challenging for the head office.

As the HR director of this growing business, Jérémy now makes staff management one of his top priorities. Since BonLook was growing rapidly throughout all of Canada, he knew full well that he had to find a piece of software that was both bilingual and easy to use. The BonLook team then set their eyes on Agendrix.

Agendrix really helped us work faster, about 10x faster in total for schedule and timesheet management.

Working as a Team

For Marie-Pascale Boudreau, manager of the Sherbrooke store, having easy access to the schedules of her employees helps her never lose sight of any and all schedule changes and communications. Her employees, in turn, can also access the schedule of their colleagues to see who is in charge of opening or closing the store, for example.

The employees often comment on how easy it is for them to access their schedule and communicate with the other members of the team.

A Perspective on Objectives

Nowadays at the store level, each manager is responsible for setting their daily objectives in the Agendrix app. This makes it easy to track whether the labor costs objectives are met regarding the schedule.

For the head office, keeping an eye on key performance indicators throughout the network is important. This data used to populate the various internal dashboard is collected using the Agendrix API (application programming interface). The profitability of each store can then be analyzed easily and broken down by region.

Adapting in Real Time

For tracking schedule changes and employee punch times, the mobile Agendrix app has been a winning solution. According to Jérémy, the app is both intuitive and well adapted to the technological reality of millennials. Since his staff is chiefly made up of millennials, having a state-of-the-art tool is a great addition. Meanwhile, Marie-Pascale now has to spend significantly less time managing the small everyday requests of her employees.

The manager no longer has to contact every single employee individually to find substitutes.

The employees now have the freedom—and the responsibility—to submit their own shift swap and leave requests as well as to keep their periods of availability up to date in Agendrix. It’s a win-win situation: more flexibility for the staff and less work for their manager.

Making Communications Personal Again

Before Agendrix, the various requests and messages were communicated haphazardly. One could easily forget what an employee had told them last week or lose important sticky notes.

For Marie-Pascale, Agendrix’s instant messaging tool instantly became a convenient way of centralizing communications. As a manager, the risk of being contacted 24/7 is par for the course, and finding true work-life balance can be difficult. Employees sometimes send out messages late at night or very early in the morning, which is painstaking to manage without a proper tool. In the words of Marie-Pascale however: “The app lets me check on things at my convenience.”

Bilingualism was always a key factor in Jérémy’s mind. As a pan-Canadian company, BonLook had to find a system that was adapted to every employee. Since Agendrix is available both in French and in English, the employees can access any information they need in the language of their choice.

For BonLook, finding the right management tool adapted to the company’s growing needs was no small task. Creating an HR department was but the first step towards better management. The second was to establish an actual employee management strategy. This is where Agendrix came in.