How a Total Compensation Text Reduced Turnover by 50% at Five Guys

Most hourly employees do not log into payroll systems often enough to understand their real earnings. They see the shift, maybe the paycheck, but not the full picture — bonuses, consistency, tips, shop pay, and how performance changes their income over time.

That gap creates a surprisingly expensive operational problem. Research suggests that most hourly workers rarely log in to review their detailed pay information, which means they often underestimate what they are actually earning. When that happens, perception becomes reality: people feel underpaid, morale drops, and they become easier to lose to a competitor promising only slightly higher headline wages.

At Five Guys, that gap translated into three recurring problems:

• employees believed they were earning less than they really were
• managers had to repeatedly explain how compensation worked
• turnover stayed higher than it needed to be because people were evaluating their jobs with incomplete information

The simple intervention

Instead of asking employees to log into another app, we delivered compensation updates over the channel they already use every day: SMS.

Conversey introduced a Total Compensation Text Message that automatically sends each employee a personalized summary after a pay cycle. The message is intentionally plain and direct. It shows the numbers that matter in a format people will actually read.

The structure is simple:

• what they earned
• how tips, bonuses, shops, or incentives changed the total
• what their effective hourly rate really was
• what actions could improve that number next period

It did not try to be clever. It tried to be clear.

A real perception shift in one message

The power of the message is not just in the data — it is in the translation.

One employee example made the effect obvious. Instead of thinking of pay only in terms of a base rate of $23.32/hour, the employee could immediately see that the actual fully loaded rate was nearly $34/hour once tips and bonuses were included.

That is a roughly 45% increase in perceived pay value from a single clear compensation message.

Nothing about the pay itself changed in that moment. What changed was visibility. And visibility changed how the job felt.

Why it worked

The biggest shift was not technical. It was emotional and behavioral.

Once employees could see their total compensation in a straightforward way, the pay system stopped feeling vague or unfair. Workers felt more recognized. Managers spent less time defending compensation. And employees had a more accurate basis for comparing their current job to outside alternatives.

That created three important effects:

1. trust improved
2. managers spent less time translating pay structures
3. employees had a clearer reason to stay and improve

The measurable impact

By making compensation visible, operators saw more than better understanding — they saw better outcomes.

The strongest result was a near-50% reduction in turnover within six months. When people could see the true value of what they were earning, fewer left for jobs that only seemed better on the surface.

The business effects compound quickly:

• stronger employee engagement because compensation feels more transparent and earned
• lower recruiting and onboarding costs because fewer people churn out
• higher productivity because retained employees do not have to be replaced and re-ramped as often
• more stable teams with less absenteeism and fewer last-minute call-outs

For a mid-sized operator with 1,000 frontline employees, cutting turnover in half can translate into roughly $900,000 in annual savings if replacement cost averages around $1,800 per frontline employee.

The operational lesson

In restaurant operations, visibility is often more valuable than novelty. The winning feature was not “AI” or “analytics.” It was translating compensation into a format people would actually read and trust.

Conversey’s Total Compensation Text Message changes employee perception of pay by showing the real hourly rate — not just the base wage. That turns one of the most common causes of turnover, feeling underpaid, into a solvable communication problem.

That is the pattern we keep seeing: when software respects frontline behavior, adoption follows naturally.