| | | | CLIENT LOGIN |
 | |
|
| |
 Previous
|
Next 
|
|
Featured Articles:
A Tale of Two Brothers:
This growing Winnipeg research firm builds strong client relationships thanks to two supportive siblings.
Spotlight on Business:
Beyond Comment Cards
Stories of Success:
Celebrating Leadership in the Prairies
|
When Employees Are Happy
8/25/2005
QSR Magazine
FoodBrand finds out money isn’t everything.
FoodBrand, a franchisee of Burger King, Cinnabon, Starbucks, Sbarro, Subway, and Taco Bell, among others, recently conducted an employee satisfaction survey. Ninety-two percent of employees answered the 60-question survey.
It wasn’t the first time FoodBrand asked its employees what made them happy, but this time the results were surprising. Employees indicated the most important driver for their job satisfaction was “being proud to say you work at FoodBrand.” Coworker relationships also ranked highly, as did job enjoyment.
The surprise: Wages ranked fifth. “You always think that money is the main driver as to why people make a decision to work or stay at a company,” says Carlos Bernal, president of FoodBrand. “We’re finding employees are not driven by an extra 25 cents per hour. That’s encouraging for us because we always felt we were competitive with pay rate anyway.”
The next step for FoodBrand was deciding how to act on the good news. “To gather information, rally your staff, ask them for their opinion, and not change is almost worse than not doing a survey in the first place—even if the results are positive,” says Tyler Gompf, president of Winnipeg, Manitoba-based Tell Us About Us, which developed the survey for FoodBrand.
In fact, Gompf suggests building an action plan for any scenario a survey might uncover. “Plan A is you have happy employees. Plan B is they’re not as happy but they’re pointing in this direction. Plan C is, ‘Whoa, we’re not hitting at all,’” he says. Such pre-planning allows a company to decide what programs to implement and what further surveys to undertake.
FoodBrand wasn’t just trying to measure whether its 1,300 employees were happy. The November 2004 survey was the start of what will be a series of surveys designed to correlate employee satisfaction with customer satisfaction. That’s why the company outsourced the survey to Tell Us About Us, which also handles FoodBrand’s customer complaint hotline and the customer survey cards. The goal of the Tell Us About Us surveys, says Tina Root, vice president of human resources for FoodBrand, is to overlie the employee satisfaction levels with customer satisfaction levels.
In the end, FoodBrand decided to take a decentralized approach to creating human resource programs based on the survey findings. Each unit’s general manager is responsible for coming up with a program based on that unit’s individual scores. “That could be, for example, mandatory pre-shift meetings, suggestion boxes so employees feel they have more say, or further training and certification in certain aspects of the business,” Root explains.
One thing FoodBrand did on a systemwide level was enhance its referral program. Effective May of this year, employees can earn up to $2,000 for referring friends and family members to FoodBrand. Root acknowledges that the reward seems to go against the survey finding that money is not the most important driver, but she notes that the referral program does tie into the coworker relationship driver. Employees could have more say in choosing their coworkers.
“We made up posters that read, ‘Do you want to work with people that you like?’” Root says. “Hopefully they say, ‘I love FoodBrand. I want my friends to work with me.’”
David Sirota, author of The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want, calls these programs “rah-rah programs” and says they can be effective if they are part of the corporate culture and not just gimmicks. “Those aren’t bad as icing on the cake, but there has to be cake,” says Sirota, who is also chairman emeritus of Sirota Survey Intelligence, a Purchase, New York-based consulting firm.
According to Sirota’s research, employees have three basic needs: pay, a sense of achievement, and camaraderie. “I don’t adhere to the notion that you don’t have to pay people as much as long as you give them these psychological benefits,” Sirota says. “These are not substitutable. Pay does not make up for someone saying thank you for doing a good job, and saying thank you does not substitute for pay.” The key, he says, is filling these needs for a long time, not just during the honeymoon months of the new employee’s job. “At the beginning of employment, morale is very high,” Sirota says. “People come motivated. The real issue is how do you keep managers from destroying that motivation.”
Gompf, from Tell Us About Us, points out that a company’s culture affects how—or even whether—programs like FoodBrand’s will be implemented after a survey. A culture that wants to know customers’ and employees’ opinions and is open to change is more likely to spend money on new programs after the survey. “[FoodBrand] invests in different concepts but then operates them the FoodBrand way. Employees understand they might be working at Burger King, but they’re working for FoodBrand. They provide service that ties back to that culture.”
Root says it’s too early to say what new programs FoodBrand will launch in addition to its revamped referral program. The company will follow up in the fall with a shorter survey. “We will do 10 questions instead of 60 to see if we moved the needle on employee satisfaction,” she says. They will also continue to post the survey results on a web site for managers, so they can view their unit results. By next year, Bernal says, FoodBrand should be able to correlate unit profitability with employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. “We know the profitability of individual restaurants today, and hopefully we will be able to say, ‘Is the driver really at the unit level, the customer, the associate, or other external factors.”
www.qsrmagazine.com
QSR AUGUST 2005
|
|
|
View Full News Archive
|
|
|
|