Red Robin talks about the Colo. shootings

Here at People Report Best Practices Conference, Red Robin's Bill Streitberger is talking about the culture of the resurging casual dining chain. The vice president of HR offered up the illustration of how the chain responded to the shootings at the Batman screening in Aurora, at a movie theater in the same shopping mall that houses a Red Robin.

"We had 17, 18 [crew members] who went to that premier," Streitberger exlained. "We had seven of our team members who were hit, who were shot. Sully, the one who had the birthday, didn’t make it out."

Streitberger said he got a call at 4 a.m. that morning about the shooting. One of the victims was a British woman, Christine, and he tried to track down her family in the U.K. to let them know she was alive.

In the days afterward, he continued, the rest of the system rallied around the crew members from the unit. "The team members wanted to be at the hospitals, checking on their friends. So we had bartenders coming in from other restaurants...They were able to raise a little over three hundred grand to help those individuals with their bills."

Afterward, "we had a first-responder night to thank all the EMTs, firefighters, the police, the people who were at the scene. And all the kids [who'd been shot and survived] were there to say thank you. Christine was there to give a rose to the guy who carried her out. He saved her life.

"It’s a tragic story, but it also has its silver lining on how everyone pulled together," Streitberger observes.