Inbox Pause made managers more productive and improved operations at Hungry Lion

Summary

• Hungry Lion discovered that managers at their restaurants were too focused on email throughout the workday. This was harming restaurant operations, observed through data like decreased customer satisfaction.
• A pilot program was launched at five Hungry Lion locations to limit managers’ email delivery to three batches per day using Boomerang’s Inbox Pause feature.
• Within weeks, the results were clear: in locations that used Inbox Pause, PC usage decreased. Customer satisfaction, overall productivity, and store wellbeing went back up.
• Hungry Lion implemented Boomerang at hundreds of locations following the successful Inbox Pause pilot.

Growing businesses experience growing pains, and Hungry Lion was no exception.

Founded in 1997, their workforce of 6,500 employees operates hundreds of quick service restaurants across six countries. As they’ve grown, they’ve been keen practitioners of the science of management, identifying bottlenecks and applying remedies. But in 2022, the solution to one problem simply led to another.

The initial challenge Hungry Lion was trying to solve was a barrier to centralized communication. Corporate headquarters was struggling to communicate with far-flung franchises increasingly distributed across thousands of miles and several timezones. Specifically, they needed a reliable way to reach the manager of each store as their business scaled up. So they installed computers at every restaurant that would make it possible for the managers to send and receive email. This IT initiative worked well—too well.

The Problem: Email became a distraction

“Our managers became too focused on their inboxes and not focused on running the store,” said Shalendra Singh, Head of IT for Hungry Lion. “We solved the problem we were having with communication, but we started seeing a lack of productivity in store when managers are in their inbox all day.”

The computers were installed as part of Hungry Lion’s Store Simplification Project, a strategic corporate program to make their managers’ jobs easier. Another component of this project was collecting and analyzing data about the managers’ activities and the performance of their stores.

The cause and effect revealed by the data was clear: as computers were installed, “we found that [managers] spent a lot of time in front of the computer and mostly on email,” said Singh. At the same time, problems with the restaurant’s operations—like food quality, wait time, and overall customer satisfaction—were more prevalent at locations where the manager was using the computer. “We’d rather have [managers] in the front of house where they’re more valuable versus sitting there on the computer every day.”

Removing computers from restaurants where they had been installed was not an option; the company had in fact eliminated issues with communication by giving managers access to email. So to fix the new problem they had caused, Hungry Lion turned to a technological solution: Inbox Pause.

Initial Boomerang pilot

By the end of 2022, Hungry Lion began a pilot program with Boomerang for managers at their restaurants. They used Inbox Pause to limit email delivery to just three batches each day.

Inbox Pause works by moving messages around behind the scenes of an email account according to a user’s preferred settings. New email messages that arrived in the managers’ accounts would be diverted to a hidden label instead of the normal inbox. Then, at 8:30 am, 1:00 pm, and 4:00 pm local time, Boomerang would automatically move messages from the hidden label and deliver them as normal in the Inbox. This way, the managers would be less tempted to monitor their computer throughout the day—and it worked.

“We saw really good improvements in customer service and just general well being of the store accompanied by a decrease in PC usage,” explained Singh. “We did quite a bit of analysis on that to see whether it would be worthwhile, and we do believe that this change is going to be positive for our stores.”

Implementing Inbox Pause for hundreds of managers

Hungry Lion was ready to deploy their productivity solution to the rest of their locations, but they made a few important tweaks before doing so.

First, they adjusted the Inbox Pause schedule to reduce the number of email deliveries from three batches to one per day. As Singh said, “we saw the increase in productivity, so we’re actually delivering their emails once a day, which is surprising, at 7:00am. They spend an hour working through their emails and then effectively they don’t need to check the inbox after that. And just from a store point of view, it’s really helping them focus on operations.”

At Hungry Lion, the communications their managers receive from corporate headquarters may be important, but they’re not urgent. Through the Boomerang pilot, executives learned that less frequent email meant more productivity on their employees’ core responsibility of managing the restaurant. So when it was time to roll out the solution to the rest of their locations, they doubled down on the same principle. Even less email would mean even more productivity, and it paid off.

Second, Hungry Lion observed that implementing Inbox Pause was most effective when it was deployed to entire regions of managers all at once. This way, the managers did not feel left out of important region-wide email notices and go hunting for their hidden new emails before the next batch delivery. The Head of IT told us “normally [managers] get instructions per province to do something. So because we paused all of their email together, no one felt left out or felt behind in their work or anything like that.” This rollout plan ensured consistent adoption and maximized productivity gains.

Fewer distractions, smoother operations

Hungry Lion’s quantitative results track with the experience of countless Inbox Pause users. They are another example that validates the design principles we had in mind when building this feature.

New email messages can be a distraction that pull us away from better uses of our time. Those demands on our attention come at a steep, but often unacknowledged, cost. Scientific research has found that it can take up to 30 minutes to recover focus after a notification disrupts a worker’s focus, a phenomenon known as “resumption lag”. Even when the time spent responding to an email is as brief as a minute or two, the interruption away from other tasks reverberates throughout the workday.

Shalendra Singh summed it up like this: “Our IT team is more familiar with helping our employees access their accounts, like when they get locked out. It was counterintuitive that the best thing we could do for the company is make it more difficult for them to access email for most of the day. But we’ve looked at the data, and it doesn’t lie: Inbox Pause makes our restaurant operations smoother and makes our stores more profitable.”