If you have a Franchise dream, training is your Stairway to Heaven. Simple, but profound. And yet, it requires a well-thought-out strategy.
So, you’ve grown from 1 store (always the number when you start) to 20. You want to scale your franchise business here onwards. More power to you, but here’s a note of caution: Scaling more requires a different mindset and approach. And different systems. Yes, we’re talking about technologies here — smarter way of training your workforce through new age learning technologies – like mobile training platforms.
Why is Frontline Training Important for a Brand with multiple Franchises?
Learning and development is a major growth driver for a retail business with multiple franchises. Moreover, we cannot turn a blind eye to the truth that the retail industry faces a high frontline turnover. If the frontline workforce does not experience growth within the company, they quickly search for options.
McKinsey & Company found out that the annual turnover among frontline retail workers has been at least 60% for a long time.
Amidst the war for talent, a retail multi-franchise business can’t afford to lose talented professionals and go through the entire hiring, onboarding, and training process from scratch.
Therefore, it is paramount to give frontline employees growth opportunities within the company.
Creating a frontline training culture can help a multi-franchise business in:
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Laying a solid foundation that all the frontline employees can follow
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Unlocking the full potential of the frontline employees
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Maintaining information uniformity throughout the organization
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Ensuring customer satisfaction at all branches
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Maintaining a performance-based culture across the franchises
Top Challenges Faced by Franchises and How to Overcome Them
Imagine yourself at the top of the franchise business globe. How did you get there? What were the most important challenges? How did you attack the root of the problem in the first place?
Iterations after iterations, you’ll arrive at common points. The basic challenges in growing a franchise remain the same:
1) Standardization of customer experiences
You have one coffee store at Vegas, one at Los Angeles, another at New York’s Times Square and one in the seemingly unspoiled countryside of Charlottesville. How do you ensure the Espresso that is served in Times Square outlet matches exactly the taste, flavor and aroma of the one served in Charlottesville?
Starting from the ingredients to the add-ons (be it the Vanilla Extract or the sprinkling of cinnamon and nutmeg on your coffee beans before roasting), every bit of the experience should be consistent with the principal brand message.
Your coffee at Franchise store X should exactly be the same as your coffee at Franchise store Y.
2) Training for Standardization
The question is, how can you standardize customer experiences across franchisees? The answer lies in training.
Let us reiterate. If the franchise is your heart, training is the pulse that keeps it beating.
But you have a distributed workforce after all. It’s incredibly difficult and challenging to simultaneously train this geographically dispersed frontline, isn’t it?
This calls for some out-of-the-box solution. Some smart technological solutions.
3) The ever surmounting attrition rate
Alright, you are working towards a solution for the training problem we just discussed. But who are you training? Your employees, your staff. They keep coming, they keep leaving (no philosophizing, it’s a big problem).
In fact, this is the single biggest issue we need to address. You invested a lot of time, effort, and money in training them — and then they switch jobs to join your neighborhood pizza outlet.
According to Gallup, only 13% of the frontline workforce in a blue collar organization feel engaged. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics also finds that the annual voluntary turnover rate in U.S. is somewhere around 23.4%.
What does this imply? Well, there is the cost to the company, but how hard that hits? So it’s generally estimated that replacing an employee costs a business anything from one-half to five times their annual salary.
Say, if 25% of your workforce quits and their average income is $35,000, get ready to bear the brunt somewhere between $438,000 and $4 million a year (assuming a 100-strong workforce).
And don’t think the effects of employee attrition end there. You would be surprised to know, or probably knew but never thought about it, but the outgoing employees have their own negative impact on stayers who feel “overworked and under-compensated and may have a desire to leave, themselves,” according to FurstPerson.
There is a huge backlog that gets piled up (and the stayers have to work on it without any extra compensation, mind you). You could work it around in professional sectors, but when it comes to frontline and franchise, where a hundred percent attrition is not uncommon, loyalty does not come force-fed.
4) Continuous upskilling & simultaneous Training
We are living at an age where market requirements change like never before. With a franchise model, that change becomes incredibly difficult to replicate across stores.
Say if you add a certain flavor of cardamom to your coffee at store A, the same degree and proportion of mixture should be maintained at store B.
Simultaneously training and upskilling a geographically distributed workforce is a task that can certainly not be achieved with traditional instructor-led training sessions.
The Role of Structured Learning and Development in Franchising
Employees are the most important factor in the success of a franchise. They are not just a cog in the wheel, they will decide your fate.
The difference between a successful franchise and the one that bites the dust is an actively engaged workforce that is job-ready. According to Dale Carnegie, companies with engaged employees outperform those without by 202%.
It’s true money can’t buy love, or loyalty. But, your employees deserve better technologies and systems to stay updated and engaged. Your franchise workforce is right there at the front, facing customers all the time. Don’t you think they should be equipped with the best hard & soft skills to deliver the best customer experiences? They are the first face of your brand, much before you, remember.
They will stick to you if you provide them with the right technology and show them the necessary learning & development roadmap.
You can not train franchise employees how to make pizza near a 100-degree hot furnace!
Attrition is a market reality. More so in the frontline. But have we ever harped on why the blue-collar staff quit jobs so frequently in franchise businesses?
Lack of empathy is one of the reasons.
So you have taken the franchise route for your pizza business, and you ensure your employees are given the necessary skill training in how to bake the dough. How long they will stay motivated to come to the store and stand near the heated furnace for hours trying to learn the skill from their seniors?
There is a better way to train. That is the point we are making. Leverage technology for better learning.
Can you train your employees with engaging and interactive learning videos that they can access anytime, anywhere in their own format? If you feel you can’t know that there are specialized players out there in the market (which we’ll discuss in subsequent paragraphs).
Next, why can’t you give your franchise workforce the necessary financial assurance for the future? If you offer them health insurance schemes or assure them of taking care of their family, you’ll see the level of attrition will go down significantly.
According to BMG Research, “levels of employee engagement increase by 31% points amongst employees who believe their employer cares about their wellbeing.”
When your employees feel assured that franchise owners are there to protect the interests of their family, they will go out and serve the best tea to their customers who walk into your store. Franchises business soars when employees working at the outlets deliver 1.5x productivity each day. For that to happen, you will have to win their trust — show them empathy, provide them right learning technologies.
You probably needed a mobile “learning and engagement” platform yesterday!
We were talking about changing times. Probably you are still stuck in the LMS age. Move beyond.
LMS was a good generalized learning option. Today, you need a specialized learning solution, which is in sync with the spirit of time.
It’s time (it’s high time) your Franchise training got a mobile makeover. Today, smartphones are everywhere. With all the apps available right on the fingertips, mobile learning & engagement platforms are the need of the hour.
Disprz, the mobile training platform of the year 2016, was therefore a product of the times (that are changing). In franchise stores, when employees are faced with problems on the spot, their immediate access to peers and white-collar senior execs has to be ensured at real-time. This sharing information, sending alerts, and getting real-time answers need a specialized solution these days, that is well thought through. All such real-time communication can only happen best on mobiles.
A first-of-a-kind Franchise Readiness Platform, Disprz promises to grow your business!
Recently, one of the premier used car dealership stores in the South Florida market, Florida Fine Cars, entrusted Disprz with equipping and updating their distributed franchise workforce with the right skills & training to bolster their business growth. Having most of their workforce on the ground, onboarding and engaging them was a challenge. But Disprz’s strategic mobile learning platform and journey-based customized onboarding mechanism for individual employees helped them raise their productivity cutting down on their overall attrition rates by a significant margin.
Before them, a leading company in the global delivery food market approached Disprz for systematically onboarding, training & continuously engaging their franchise workforce, and the collaboration resulted in a 3X engagement of their employees, along with a 20% savings in people development expenses.
They also saw their 30-day attrition remarkably falling by 55%. Effective onboarding and higher engagement naturally lead to reduced attrition, and in turn, increase business output.
So how did Disprz, which is in fact the world’s first strategic franchise readiness platform, help these businesses grow?
How Disprz Identified Key Franchise Challenges Through In-Depth Market Research
When conceptualizing Disprz, the team did an extensive market study of all the challenges and problems faced by franchises on a day-to-day basis.
While the industry came across as cynical, given the alarmingly high attrition rate and an equally worrying 10% turnover, Disprz smelled an opportunity to solve the most fundamental problems that exist in the Franchise world. They developed smart learning technologies to enable the Franchise workforce to stay up-to-the-minute trained, upskilled, and work-ready using an interactive & engaging learning platform.
1) Virtual Onboarding
The changing times called for a strategic departure from the old-school employee handbook approach, and Disprz pioneered a one-of-a-kind digital onboarding mechanism to onboard franchise staff with gamified microlearning modules (containing videos, flashcards, games, polls and assessments).
This saved valuable time and money for franchise owners. Since in the traditional onboarding approach, you had to wait for batches to hire new employees. Today, Disrpz lets you onboard employees every day, keeping them engaged right from day one, saving crucial time to productivity.
2) Live Training
Disprz helps franchises conduct simultaneous training for distributed employees across franchisees through engaging & interactive online sessions (and no, they are not like your boring webinars).
There are polls, assessments and quizzes dispersed in such an engaging two-way activity that employees actually look forward to the next training sessions, showing a marked increase in their store performance overall with the learning they acquire this way.
3) Social learning through ‘Buzz’
Disprz platform provides a unique social feed called Buzz where participants can actually learn in the flow of work.
Buzz can be used for informal knowledge sharing and peer-to-peer communications at real time.
There is also a powerful chat function (both one-on-one as well as group chat) which is very secure and can help resolve all your grievances and problems right on the spot.
4) Powerful Analytics to track store-level performance
With Disprz, managers at every franchise outlet can track and assess the learning solution for every employee (cascading all the way up to the top). This is possible because the platform uses the most advanced AI-based algorithms to continuously monitor real-time activities.
Franchise management can thus identify skill gaps across stores at real time and accordingly take corrective actions based on the analytics data.
Don’t delay. You had a franchise dream — you should be honest with getting the right resources in place. Your Franchise workforce is capable of doing that wonder. Give them the technological solution they need.
When you have a professional enablement & readiness platform that has a proven track record of amplifying employee productivity by 1.5x every day, you must at least consider taking a FREE trial. With Disprz, every staff in your franchise network will sing the song your franchise dream got conceptualized with. Across Franchisees. In chorus.
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