Measure It and They Will Perform

High standards and operational report cards are making a comeback at the top of the fast-food industry. Earlier this week, the business section of my newspaper contained a story about the biggest burger-and-fries place of them all. It seems that over the last few years the place that has sold trillions of hamburgers slipped to the middle of the pack in customer satisfaction. That, apparently was unsatisfactory.

To reverse a downward trend in customer satisfaction, the company that doesn't fool around when it markets to children Ð just ask their red-headed clown Ð decided to change the way they measure the performance of their stores. Instead of grading the stores on just a few factors and giving out vague letter grades, management decided to give the stores numerical grades on a few dozen operating factors (bathroom cleanliness, temperature of the fry oil, elapsed time to make a shake, for example). And, according to the newspaper, it's making a difference. Customers are reporting much higher levels of satisfaction. Funny how it works that way.

Eight years ago I helped two different automotive aftermarket companies establish grading systems for their field managers to use in supervising the quality of store operations. To begin, we looked at several state-of-the art systems used to measure operations. And, of course, the best system of them all was used by the place that sold the most burgers. So we adapted features from several different systems and put them to work. And they worked. Oh, they worked!

Lessons we learned that you can use

We learned several lessons in developing those supervisory systems, lessons that I think will help your business if you operate more than one location. In fact, if you operate more than one store or more than one shop, you're taking a big risk if you don't follow these lessons. Here's why. Standardizing your operation is the only way to ensure that all your customers have the same, satisfying experience at every location. And satisfied customers buy more and buy more often. Need I say more?

So here are the lessons we learned. Pay attention to these: they'll help you get it right.

1. Writing your standards down, and deciding to stick by them, may be the hardest thing you ever do in your business. But the work you do in making these decisions will pay off every day in customer satisfaction and employee performance.

2. Keep the list of standards short enough to fit on two sides of a single sheet of paper. You'll need a balance between having enough standards to cover all aspects of the business and a short enough list that using it is a manageable management task.

3. Find a way to include financial measures in your list of standards without dominating the final grade.

4. Don't even think of measuring your locations before every employee is trained in how to meet every standard on your list.

5. Calibrate the grading decisions of every manager who will be grading operations Ð make sure that every manager gives the same grade to the same level of performance.

6. If at all possible, have each location graded by a manager who does not work with that location very often. If you can't do this, have at least two people doing the grading, and have them switch off each time you have your locations graded.

7. Keep it up. You'll see some big improvements in the early going and then things will flatten out. This does not mean that every store has reached its peak potential. It's just a plateau and if you keep pushing, their performance will eventually start rising again.

8. Reward, celebrate, and publicize every location that scores in the top few percent of your rankings. If you're lucky, every store will eventually score near the top of the possible scale.

9. When every store scores near the top, get the managers together and decide on higher standards.

A few final thoughts on setting standards and grading your operations:

• Your employees believe that the only reason you measure something is because it's important to the business.

• The flip side of that belief is that if you don't measure something, it must not be important.

• Publicizing the results of your grading is fine and probably useful. It may inspire some competition between locations to see which can be the best operation.

• Competition is fine; just make sure that there can be multiple winners if there are multiple locations that truly have outstanding operations.

• It's very important that every employee knows why each standard is in place. Otherwise, they lose faith in the measuring system and will eventually stop trying to meet the standards.

• In the end, having written standards that get measured periodically is the best possible way of ensuring that each location is run as if you were there every day.

Oh, and one final lesson: when you get your measuring system working well, don't tinker with it just for the sake of change. Or eight years later you may find yourself going back to start all over again.

return to top