Dr. Rick Franza, Dean of the Hull College of Business, discusses a different, timely business topic each Monday in this column. This week, he talks about the importance of training employees. The interview has been edited for clarity and impact.
ABD: The customer experience of any business that deals with the public, especially restaurants and retail stores, often depends on their interaction with the employees. How important is it to provide good training for your employees?
Rick: It’s critically important, but it’s part of a bigger picture. Make training part of your development portfolio. The poster child for this is Chick-fil-A. When an employer treats their employees well and is invested in their development, it leads to treating the customer well. It’s not just process-oriented, but culture oriented.
The issue for some retail and restaurants, especially fast food, is terrible retention rates. When you invest money in training and they leave soon after, you’ve wasted that money and time. So culture-oriented training increases the likelihood they’ll stay with the company and they’ll treat the customers better.
ABD: The next question, then, is how do you create that culture?
Rick: It starts with the owner. You set the tone, whether you’re honest and courteous or autocratic, and treat employees like replaceable commodities. So if you want employees to treat customers well, you’re going to need to set an example.
Then follow through by hiring the right people who fit that culture. In a small organization, one bad apple can spoil everything. If you hire the right kind of people and leaders, they’ll “police the locker room,” to borrow a sports term. There’s peer pressure to be like others.
ABD: I’m sure the temptation for many businesses, at a time when they have unfilled job openings, is to take the first person who’s standing upright and breathing. Should a company carry on with an unfilled opening rather than hiring just anybody?
Rick: I’m for that. A job search that doesn’t hire a person is not a failed search. The job search that hires the wrong person is a failed search. Every time I’ve made a hire just because I needed someone, I’ve regretted it.
ABD: You’ve mentioned the importance of culture in training but obviously, having an employee be pleasant doesn’t mean much if they consistently get a customer’s order wrong. So where does training to do the actual job fit in?
Rick: There are two pieces to the training – it’s culture driven and it’s the training of execution. It’s important that you understand what your business is competing on. If you’re competing on price, then train your employees on the things that keep costs down; if you’re competing on being the fastest, then train them on things that help them do the job faster.
We talk about two things – order winners and order qualifiers. Order winners are the things that bring customers to you, like being the fastest. Order qualifiers are those things that may not be the reason they come to you, but if you don’t do them well, they’ll leave. Being the fastest may be the order winner, but you also have to be pleasant and get the order right – the order qualifier.
ABD: How important are standard operating procedures and cross-training?
Rick: Both of those are really important. It’s important to have standard operating procedures – train people to do the work and document the procedures. When I was in the military, we had continuity binders to show how to do the job. Today, though, you can’t give people things to read and assume they’ll read them. You may need to have videos or multimedia.
I’m a big proponent of cross-training, from mundane tasks to complex ones, to deal with when someone gets sick or leaves the company. It provides flexibility and the ability to deal with the unexpected. And you can explain to workers that knowing more processes helps their marketability and chance of advancement.
ABD: Any other thoughts on the job training?
Rick: Don’t treat your employees like idiots. Tell them what you expect from them and they’ll take pride in doing that.
