How to Train for Consistency and Quality as Your QSR Grows

Time and again in the Quick Service Restaurant industry, after enough trial and error and - blood, sweat, and tears - a founder finds the perfect recipe for success. But once they take that recipe on the road and start building a franchise, the problems start to stack up, as it gets harder and harder to preserve what made that first restaurant special

Scaling and Quality Control: The Challenge for QSRs

As restaurants pursue growth, lower standards and less consistency become constant struggles as management struggles to maintain a “single source of truth” across all locations.

For management, the increase in the number of units to supervise changes the job entirely. It shifts from being about operations to more strategic issues in the restaurant organization.

One 2009 study found that multi-unit managers often lack consistent training to “translate corporate plans into actions” across locations, with consistency and quality often suffering as a result.

Different Locations, Different Standards

When a founder or long-time manager can no longer have visibility over all operations, this responsibility must be delegated to local management, who must constantly find a way to uphold standards.

This can potentially lead to a decline in consistency of the product, training, and safety and compliance adherence, as the brand becomes further afield and more detached from its original location and founders.

The Telephone Game

Shadowing veteran employees creates a "telephone game" that thwarts consistency. New hires learn guidelines filtered through a peer’s perspective rather than a universal standard. If bad habits are passed down, they scale as fast as your franchise.

The Agility Bottleneck

At a single-location restaurant, same-day strategies cooked up by management can be rolled out in time for the lunch rush. But once a restaurant expands to multiple locations, the front office must communicate and implement updates to all restaurants, even in far-apart locations, with speed and consistency often falling short of expectations.

Harder to Protect the Brand

A food safety incident or a workplace accident can happen at any business. But when you have a single location, it’s easier for management to stay on top of potential hazards and mitigate risks to customers and employees.

Once the business expands, not only does it become more difficult to supervise operations, it also means that many more potential incidents are waiting to happen. And at a restaurant chain, the incident doesn’t need to happen at your branch to wreak havoc. A single incident at a restaurant branch far from the original location can reflect negatively on the entire brand, and it can be much harder for management to pick up the pieces.

What Can You Do?

• Standardized, Digital Onboarding and Training

For many QSRs, turnover rates can easily exceed 120 percent, as new hires look for new job opportunities or better conditions elsewhere.

Digital onboarding that gets employees up to speed quicker and with better learning retention helps tremendously during those crucial first shifts on the restaurant floor and helps ensure that every new hire at every location receives the same universal guidance and training.

In addition, digital solutions replace paper-based training blindspots with a bird’s eye view for management. These solutions allow management to track training in real-time across all locations to ensure that all teams are following the same universal company standards - and not losing track of what made the company special to begin with.

• Close the language gap

You can’t maintain quality and consistency if your team doesn’t understand what's expected of them. But the problem isn’t just comprehension; it’s also about the mental bandwidth of workers.

The Cognitive Load Theory posits that language barriers are an extraneous cognitive load that require the brain to spend energy decoding words rather than understanding the training itself. And this can lead to a dangerous safety gap, especially when things get hectic on the restaurant floor. According to estimates from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), language barriers contribute to 25 percent of job-related accidents.

One 2008 study stated that teaching employees proper techniques alone isn’t sufficient to improve safety. Instead, employees must learn “the why” behind these safety protocols before they can reliably execute them on a consistent basis.

This same concept would apply not only to food safety but to quality assurance procedures. Employees may understand what they need to do, but if they don’t understand why it matters, they’re less likely to be proficient. And if the training isn’t in their native language, they’re much less likely to understand the why of these actions, and how they impact quality and consistency.

• Refresh regularly:

Maintaining quality standards for employee performance is not a one-off proposition. It requires constant follow-up and a concerted effort to ensure that employees are performing their obligations as needed.

A 2017 study from Walden University recommended that casual dining managers implement monthly training and development programs with positive and constructive feedback and reward systems to help keep employees engaged and motivated. The study argued that such efforts can help enhance customer service and reduce operational costs.

But refresher training also just helps ensure that employees know what is expected when it comes to quality and consistency - and how to get it done.

Rootwurks: Tools to Uphold Quality and Safety as You Scale

Scaling up means many more moving parts and an uphill battle for quality control. The Rootwurks LMS provides fast casual restaurants with a suite of digital training and compliance management tools to help navigate the challenges of expansion.

Designed with frontline workers in mind, Rootwurks takes training out of the breakroom and onto the floor. Agile and mobile-optimized, the platform allows management to swiftly create training in more than 25 languages, helping employees truly comprehend their roles. In addition, the platform gives expanding QSRs a bird’s eye view of operations, helping them maintain universal standards at all locations and pivot quickly to implement new menu items or quality control measures.

To learn more, reach out to the Rootwurks team, and we’ll schedule a custom tour of our LMS: