Lessons From the Trenches – A Follow up conversation with Brewability Labs
Autism Advantage
Brewability Lab has been open for just over a year. Tiffany’s employees have experienced incredible growth since then, thanks in large part to the systems she has set up to facilitate the process. For example, there are braille labels on the bar taps so that a bartender who is blind can function at his best.
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Diversifying Impact – A Follow up conversation with the Chocolate Spectrum
Autism Advantage
Since our last conversation, there has been a huge change in the training side of things. Valerie Herskowitz explains that she has mostly just gone with the flow with the business, following the opportunities that presented themselves, instead of having a huge long-term master plan. She explains in this conversation that it occurred to her that they should see if the coffee industry could possibly be something that would work for individuals with autism.
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Growing Smart – A Follow up conversation with Katie’s Snack Cart
Autism Advantage
Tom D. sits back down with Wendy Kohman, the founder of Katie’s Snack Cart. Wendy talks about how she’s taken what started out as a side business for her daughter Katie, to a business that has grown to employing 6 total staff, across 9 clients.
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Marketing, Marketing, Marketing
Autism Advantage
One important thing we’ve noticed that we’re lacking is continually engaging with our community and customers, and telling our story. We realized that, while many of our customers understand exactly what our company does, there are quite a few who had no idea. This was our fault for not being clear and outgoing enough with communicating our story. We decided to do this through digital marketing instead of opting for standard car wash marketing techniques, such as door hangers or printouts.
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Typical Staffing Needs – Recruiting Training Deploying
Autism Advantage
Now, moving into the second half of the season, we’re ready to talk about the other 20% of our staff -- the employees who don’t have autism. These employees are incredibly important to the overall structure of the organization. They navigate the communication, explain the service, and set expectations. While they’re vital to our organization, it can be challenging to find typical people who want to work at a car wash and see the work as an opportunity to grow and have impact.
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2nd Store Open – Frontlines from 1st week
Autism Advantage
Now that we’ve finished up the first week of operations with both stores running, we’re ready to talk about how things went! Instead of putting all the new employees in the new location, we knew it was vital to have a mix of experience levels. We moved about half of our experienced employees to the new location, so each of the two locations is now staffed by half experienced employees and half new employees.
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Hired! - Integrating Candidates into Live Shifts
Autism Advantage
So far this season, we’ve talked about some of our plans for the second location, our big day full of dozens of interviews, and our pre-training process. In that process, as we discussed in the last episode, candidates needed to successfully complete a specific task three times in a row with a time limit. Those who were successful moved onto the next step: being offered a job!
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Almost Employed - Passing Pre-Training
Autism Advantage
We recently hosted our big day of interviews. We had close to a hundred candidates show up. Twenty of these didn’t have autism, and four were unsuccessful in the interview process for various reasons, but we ended up with over 50 qualified candidates who moved onto the next step, our pre-training process.
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Goal 80% Employees with Autism - Post Interview Results
Autism Advantage
We are preparing for a big event: a day of hosting around a hundred candidates in the search for the perfect people to increase our staff and allow us to open our new location. In this episode, we’ll talk about how that interview process went.
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Doubling in Size – The Pre-Recruiting Plan
Autism Advantage
We run Rising Tide Car Wash, which employs several dozen fantastic people with autism. This isn’t a charity, though; we encourage independence and growth by expecting everyone who applies to be able to pull their weight, and we’ve seen great success already.
info_outlineWelcome to the Autism Advantage podcast! I’m your host, Tom D’Eri, and my co-host for this season is Tom Sena. Throughout season 2, we’ll be chronicling the process of opening a second location of Rising Tide Car Wash, where we employ people with autism.
So far this season, we’ve talked about some of our plans for the second location, our big day full of dozens of interviews, and our pre-training process. In that process, as we discussed in the last episode, candidates needed to successfully complete a specific task three times in a row with a time limit. Those who were successful moved onto the next step: being offered a job!
The next step is live training, which is what we’ll be focusing on today. Our employees, who are paid from this point forward, have the core skills they’ll need at this point but aren’t quite ready to be fully effective in their roles yet. We believe that employees in each role need around nine training shifts over the course of about four weeks.
To start this process, we let our current employees know that this would be happening and that if they were ready for a well-deserved vacation after their months or years of hard work, this would be a perfect time to take it. This helped keep our costs reasonable, and also ensured that we weren’t unfairly taking shifts away from our current employees.
During an employee’s first week, it’s critical to have someone shadowing and coaching them to make sure everything is clear and that the work is done well. This gives us a fantastic opportunity to let some of our more senior employees take on new responsibilities and take a step toward larger roles.
Tune into this episode to hear more about all this, plus to learn the details of how we structure the live training process, how we balanced the needs of new employees with those who have been working with us for a while, how much we pay our new staff members during the training process,
In This Episode:
[00:44] - Tom D. launches into the podcast by describing what their live training process is, and what its goals and purpose are.
[02:23] - Tom S. steps in to point out that one of the great things about Rising Tide Car Wash is that there’s constant feedback, coaching, and training. He then digs deeper into how they mapped out the live training process.
[04:19] - During this process, for the first few shifts, they have one new employee doing the actual production work while an experienced employee shadows them to oversee the work.
[06:37] - We hear more about the extra costs involved in the live training process, and how much new employees are paid.
[07:26] - Tom D. explains that this is the first time they’ve gone through this onboarding system with so many employees at once; they usually do it with a few, and this time, they’re doing it with 45 people.
[09:20] - It’s important to make the live training shifts as realistic as they possibly can be. Tom D. talks about how they balance this consideration with the need for having extra staff on hand to coach new hires.
[10:47] - Another important point in this process is that you have to test and reassign role assignments as necessary.
[12:35] - Tom S. points out that for many of these employees, this is a first job. That means that they may not immediately understand how to be a good employee.
[13:28] - Tom D. talks about the various types of teaching moments they have when there are some kind of issues with an employee’s behavior. He gives a quick example.
[15:37] - We learn about the importance of not making assumptions about people’s motives, or whether they’re a good fit, far too early in the process. Tom D. emphasizes that 90% of the time, the person doesn’t understand what’s being asked of them.
[17:03] - Tom S. brings up a bright spot they’ve seen in the training process: the sheer number of successes so far.
[18:02] - In response to what Tom S. has been saying, Tom D. raves about how well their employees have done. Tom D. then points out how enthusiastic many of the hires are to be working at the car wash.
[19:07] - The next step is actually getting ready to launch the second location, which is now just a few weeks away!
Links and Resources:
University of Miami-Nova Southeastern University Center for Autism & Related Disabilities