qsrmagazine.com : restaurant articles : newsletters : Best Practices : Tying Customer Satisfaction to Employee Satisfaction
About a year ago, FoodBrand, a franchisee of Burger King, Cinnabon, Starbucks, Sbarro, Subway, and Taco Bell, among others, conducted an employee satisfaction 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 big surprise, though, was that wages ranked fifth.
The next step for FoodBrand was deciding how to act on the 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.
But 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 certifications in certain aspects of the business,” Root explains.
One thing FoodBrand did on a systemwide level was enhance its referral program. Effective in 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.
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 and also continue to post the survey results on a website 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.
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