Serving Compassion with Comfort Food

The COVID-19 pandemic had a swift and devastating impact on the U.S. restaurant industry. Nearly 8 million workers lost their jobs when many businesses were forced to shutter their windows in 2020. The Kerbey Lane Cafe restaurant chain was forced to lay off nearly 90% of its staff—750 out of 850 team members—when it temporarily ended its dine-in services.

“It’s important to recognize how drastically the pandemic changed our world and our industry,” says Rose Ann Garza, CHRO of the Austin, Texas-based chain of 10 full-service restaurants.

Garza did everything she could to soften the blow. She formed networks to support and stay in touch with former team members. The company helped them find discounted groceries. And twice a day, the laid-off workers could get a Kerbey Lane meal for just $1.

The result? When Kerbey Lane reopened its restaurants after being closed for about three months, 85% of the 750 people who were laid off rejoined the company. “We took something that could have really hurt us for a very long time and made it into something positive,” Garza says.

Garza continued to find ways to support team members who were still struggling with the pandemic’s lingering effects. When Garza learned that workers needed help putting food on their tables, she implemented a family meal program that provides each team member with a weekly $50 dine-in or to-go voucher to feed their household. “A lot of our workforce are people who are single parents or have multiple jobs,” Garza says. “We make sure they have food on their table at least one day or night a week.”

Empathetic Leadership

Garza’s pandemic-era response reflects her enduring leadership philosophy at an organization where she has worked for 18 years. “The restaurant industry at times can be toxic, stressful, and difficult,” she says. “But our No. 1 focus is treating people as humans. We always make sure this is a safe place where our team members feel welcome and can be themselves.”

Mason Ayer, the company’s co-owner and CEO, says Garza has played a critical role in cultivating the values of his 44-year-old restaurant chain. “So much of our organization’s culture is about giving, empathy, kindness, and generosity, and that stems directly from Rose Ann and who she is as a human being,” he says. “Rose Ann has a huge heart, and she’s incredibly empathic.”

That’s echoed by Kelly Detlefsen, SHRM-CP, who worked with Garza from 2010 to 2020 as Kerbey Lane’s vice president of training. “Rose Ann’s strongest leadership qualities are empathy and integrity,” says Detlefsen, who is now director of client experience for the HR services company Pando PEO in Omaha, Neb.

Garza establishes an empathetic culture for team members from the start. During their training, team members learn not only the knowledge and skills they need, but also the soft skills of “patience, goodwill, and grace,” Garza says. Kerbey Lane imparts those skills through storytelling—providing examples from the restaurant’s history that illustrate how workers can treat customers, even taxing ones, with understanding.

Garza shares one such example. A family of four entered a Kerbey Lane restaurant looking dirty and shabby. Team members asked how they were doing—and learned the family’s house had just burned down. Their server decided to make their meal complimentary. The company budgets 1% of its annual sales to give customers free meals. “There’s no way any of us can know everything that is going on in other people’s lives, and it’s not our job to know,” Garza says. “But it is our job to treat people with kindness and take care of them.”

Another way Garza supports team members is through a financial literacy program that teaches them how to manage their own finances and how to read the company’s profit and loss (P&L) statements, giving them an unfiltered view of the company’s financial picture. “At no point do we want our team members to be surprised by how we’re doing financially,” Garza says. “Our books are open to them.”

As part of the program, team members can participate in the restaurant managers’ weekly meetings to review the financials. They can also track an item on the P&L statements and suggest ways to save money. For example, one team member noticed that the salsa that was served with customers’ queso was rarely eaten, and they suggested asking people if they want the salsa before providing it. As a result, Kerbey Lane now saves $37,000 a year.

Garza also ensures Kerbey Lane is a place where team members want to stay by offering promotion opportunities—and being clear about how to move up the ladder. About a decade ago, Garza and Detlefsen created a leadership development handbook that details the knowledge, skills, and behaviors an employee needs to advance. One sign of the handbook’s success: All 10 of Kerbey Lane’s current restaurant managers and its two area directors started as servers, bussers, or in other entry-level positions. “Creating that amazing workbook, with road maps to develop leaders, is something we’ll all remember probably for the rest of our lives,” Detlefsen says.

Garza’s care for others extends beyond the company. She also spearheaded Kerbey Kindness, the company’s philanthropic and employee volunteer program. Each quarter, Kerbey Lane donates the proceeds from its monthly specialty pancake offering to a nonprofit, such as Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Texas. “We enjoy giving back to the community that’s given so much to us,” Garza notes.

She also donates her own time and labor. Garza has served as a volunteer leader for SHRM since 2003—first in a student chapter and later in its Austin and Texas chapters. Her tenure as state director for Texas SHRM ends this year. “I’ve had numerous mentors and mentees, and I’ve met some of my greatest friends through SHRM,” she says. “It’s one of the greatest roles I could ever have.”

In March 2024, five Kerbey Lane locations partnered with SHRM to kick off SHRM’s Civility at Work Campaign at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin. In support of SHRM’s efforts to enable 1 million civil conversations, Kerbey Lane team members helped facilitate an estimated 16,000 civil conversations during the campaign, Garza says. “Kerbey Lane is a great partner for Civility at Work because civility is not just something we foster, it’s something we teach in our training and daily interactions,” she explains.

Family Lessons

Garza was taught the value of empathy and kindness from childhood. “My oldest sister, Patricia, has Down syndrome, and that helped shape who we are as people,” she says, referring to her family. Garza, who grew up as one of four children on her family’s cotton and grain farm in Rio Hondo, a small South Texas town, says her mother ensured she and her siblings did household chores and volunteered in their community, including at Special Olympics events. “That was our mom’s way of getting us to be part of the solution, not the problem,” Garza says. Meanwhile, she says her father was the hardest-working person she has ever met: “He instilled in us that work ethic.”

Garza traces her passion for human resources to her sister. She recalls how poorly her sister was treated in the 1980s and 1990s because her differences were not favorably viewed by others. “That’s really what led me to HR in the first place,” Garza says. “I wanted to be a voice for other people and protect and help them, so they have a safe place to be.”

Garza was among the first in her family to attend college. In 2004, she earned a bachelor’s degree in communications and public relations from Texas State University. Throughout college, she worked as a server and bartender and then worked in training and development for the hospitality industry. “I loved training and development,” she says, “but I wanted a chance to impact people and policy in a bigger way.”

Putting People First

In 2006, a former boss of Garza asked if she could support the training department at his current employer, Kerbey Lane. She agreed to have lunch with one of the restaurant chain’s owners. At the end of the three-and-a-half-hour meeting, Garza thought to herself, “If I don’t get that job, I’m going to be really disappointed.” She knew she’d found a company that would give her “the freedom to put people first,” she says.

Soon after joining Kerbey Lane, Garza formed partnerships with local schools to help individuals with disabilities work in the company’s restaurants—a program that continues to this day. “That was one of the first things I did with Kerbey Lane, which is for my sister,” she explains.

After working as a training coordinator at the company for several months, Garza became Kerbey Lane’s director of people operations and, in 2018, its CHRO. “Rose Ann built our HR function from the ground up,” Ayer says.

Pondering the future of the HR field, Garza says helping team members to be kind and empathetic—especially amid the current polarization in the U.S.—is crucial.

“My family taught me that as long as you don’t hurt yourself or others, it’s OK to have a different path,” Garza says. “One of the things I try to instill at Kerbey Lane is that no matter how different we are, we love and respect each other. That mutual respect is something our society is missing.”   

Novid Parsi is a freelance writer based in St. Louis.

Photography by Phil Kline