Serving close to a billion cups of coffee per year in its 6,000-plus global locations, Dunkin’ Donuts helps the world wake up each day. This well-known brand shares its name with its parent company and quick-service-restaurant conglomerate Dunkin’ Brands, which also operates the popular Baskin Robbins ice cream and Togo’s sandwich chains. Although the fare and clientele might differ drastically among the three outfits’ 12,000 international distribution centers, they can all count on one thing: a wealth of learning and development opportunities for employees.
Workforce education can provide a decisive advantage in the continually changing market Dunkin Brands competes in, said Kevin McNamara, the company’s vice president of franchise training. “Cycle times are becoming more and more critical,” he said. “In order to compete effectively with Starbucks and McDonald’s, we need to ramp up our cycle times on new product and process introductions. Training is a big part of that. We are at the table when new products are being developed, and we have to come up with faster training solutions to roll out products to the marketplace.”
The connection between employee education and achievement is enshrined in his department’s mission statement. “It’s called ‘We train for success,’” he explained. “What we do as a department is contribute to franchise profitability and guest satisfaction by providing high-quality, results-oriented training systems for the franchisees. We’re responsible for everyone, from the kitchen to the front counter to our management staff to our franchisees and all of our field support teams.”
Fortunately, the organization’s leaders are attuned to the business advantages that high-quality, rapidly delivered learning and development programs can bring. Indeed, they place this issue near the top of their agenda year-in and year-out. “We have an annual business review plan with each franchisee in our system that comprises seven different elements of the business,” McNamara said. “Section 1 of the annual business review regards people. The entire relationship starts with this annual business review, and the business review itself starts with an assessment of where they are with people, what they’re going to try to accomplish in the next 12 months, and how we as a company can support them from a training and human resources perspective to help them accelerate their growth and meet their goals.”
He added that support for his department’s efforts was solid up, down and across the enterprise. “In a franchise organization, one of the best measures of success is if franchisees continue to use it. This is not a mandatory program. This is something they can choose to use or not. The fact that they are repeat customers and are using this for all of their training is very compelling.”
To determine what knowledge and capabilities employees need, a people subcommittee, which McNamara co-chairs along with franchisee Danny Costa, meets on a quarterly basis. Then McNamara and Costa go to national brand advisory council meetings and have a dialogue with an even larger group of franchisees and officers. “At that meeting, it’s not unusual to have another three or four C-level officers present,” McNamara said. “It encompasses training, but it also encompasses all human capital aspects. We talk about recruitment, we talk about selection, and we talk about how we measure success and how we contribute to profitability. I really have to give our franchisees a lot of credit. We have some really outstanding franchisees who are committed to this process.”
Yet contact with organizational leaders is hardly limited to the occasional planned conference. “It’s a very open relationship,” McNamara explained. “At Dunkin Brands, we really pride ourselves on our accessibility. I visit the field frequently. I visit with the directors and the regional vice presidents. And whenever I need help here at corporate, the CEO and the chief administrative officer are very willing and able to help. They’re a phone call away.”
Another driving force behind Dunkin’ Brands’ employee education offerings is a genuine desire to see them thrive professionally, McNamara said. This duty is one that has a very personal meaning for McNamara, who started out as a crew member in 1971. “I’ve actually been fortunate to work for some excellent people along the way who arranged for the training and support to help me learn and grow as I advanced through my career,” he said. Thus, he strives to ensure that “every person will have the training, development and support needed to be successful and reach their full potential.”
One of the ways in which McNamara and his staff help Dunkin’ Brands employees succeed is through an online corporate university, which went live in November 2003. With more than 60,000 registered users, the initiative has been very popular with both workers and franchisees. “When we rolled out the online university, we had an overall strategic plan that called for us to reach more and more people through training interventions. We are doing a great job of reaching everybody in our system. We have a great working relationship with our franchisees. They see us as providing state-of-the-art materials to them for training their employees,” McNamara said.
This system has helped control the company’s training expenses. McNamara and his team actually track how much is saved each time a new online learning module is rolled out by comparing the costs of that program to the expenditure that would have been incurred had traditional delivery methods such as on-site classroom instruction been used instead. “It’s not terribly scientific: One of our courses from our instructor-led format costs $450 to deliver to each person. Online, it’s costing about $180. Since we got this online, we’ve literally saved millions of dollars in delivery. The corporation has realized tremendous return on investment,” McNamara said.
Additionally, Dunkin’ Brands University has tools for gauging the programs’ effectiveness in improving employee productivity and proficiency. Each online module has a complementary brochure that managers can print out and use to assess their workers’ performance after completing a course. “We use the virtual online university to deliver not only the training, but also the follow-up materials that a manager needs to have to make sure performance happens in the most important place: in front of the customers,” McNamara said. “When a manager signs a person on to the online university for learning, at the same time they’ll print out a performance checklist so that after the learning is done, they can go show them on the floor what they’re supposed to know and follow up with the performance checklist.”
Technical modalities such as e-learning, gaming and simulations are a valuable means for instructing the next generation of employees, who have never known a world without computers. Still, learning professionals have to ensure that these programs, no matter how flashy or cutting-edge, meet the needs of the organization or else it’s a waste of time and resources. Accordingly, all of Dunkin’ Brands’ learning initiatives—technology-based or not—must meet the company’s three “e” criteria, McNamara said.
“We have a guiding principle behind all of those strategies: that the training developed has to be effective, efficient and engaging,” McNamara said. “By effective, it means simply that it has to meet the learning objectives without a lot of fluff. We don’t do entertainment for entertainment’s sake. Second, it has to be efficient. We’ve got to reach a large audience with a cost-effective training solution. You wouldn’t normally think of a Dunkin’ Donuts or a Baskin Robbins or Togo sandwich shop as a center of high-tech learning, but they are. We have high-speed access to every one of our stores. They all have very powerful computers, and we run broadband learning to each and every one of them. Finally, the third ‘e’ is that it has to be engaging. We want the trainees to want to learn. For the Gen X and Gen Y group, we’re looking into games and simulations now, and we’re having so much fun finding out who the best people are to help us with that strategy.”
In addition to setting standards, Dunkin’ Brands has attempted to maximize the value of its online university by adding training staff that can show franchisees how to get the most out of the system, McNamara said. “Our organization funded 12 additional training positions in our company. What those trainers are charged with doing is consulting with the franchisees to help them realize the return on investment from training. They’re doing a lot of consulting with our individual franchisees to help turn the training into performance at the store level. The return on investment is very compelling, but it doesn’t come automatically. They really have to be engaged with the system. We are balancing the online and classroom (offerings) with a consultant approach to help franchisees realize their return on investment.”
Along with the online university, Dunkin’ Brands has developed internal certifications that verify competency in specific job roles such as bakers, crew members, shift leaders and store managers, McNamara said. The level of certification at each location actually serves as a valuable metric for that store’s performance and is considered alongside measurements such as sales and profitability in the balanced scorecards the company’s operational leaders use. “It’s a very specific program,” he said. “It’s been wonderful. We have is a mystery-shop program. As the certifications have increased, so have the mystery-shop scores. Our stores are operating better, and we know that has a direct impact on profitability.”
McNamara said he’s enthusiastic about his department’s future plans, which include formalizing and ramping up training for particular jobs in the organization. “It’s a very exciting time to be at Dunkin’ Brands because of the investment the corporation is making in learning and development and the investment that the franchisees are making. It’s a very collaborative effort, and the relationships are very strong.”
“The open and honest relationship franchisees have enjoyed with Kevin McNamara and the Dunkin’ Brands training department has allowed input from franchisees to be heard and has influenced enhancements to the system, which is a significant win for our brands,” Costa said. “As we move forward, I think it will be imperative for us to challenge ourselves to continually improve—be rigorous about creative alternatives to learning and ongoing innovation to help develop and train our teams.”
–Brian Summerfield, brians@clomedia.com
