Case D-Application:

Develop a plan for determining the training needs of the hourly paid staff of a Domino’s pizza franchise.

Dunkin’ Donuts and Domino’s Pizza share the same requirement for success: Provide a high-quality product at impressive speed. Domino’s guarantees a hot, tasty pizza delivered to your doorstep as soon as possible. Dunkin’ Donuts promises fresh doughnuts every four hours and fresh coffee every 18 minutes. To meet this requirement, both fast-food companies face the same training challenge: Train a very young (typically aged 18 to 21) and inexperienced workforce to meet rigorous performance standards. Both companies must train in an industry where turnover averages 300 to 400 percent yearly and where company locations are widely dispersed. Domino’s operates 3,800 stores throughout the United States and seven foreign countries; Dunkin’ Donuts has 1,400 shops spanning the United States and 12 foreign countries. The two companies approach this training challenge with a highly decentralized training function. At Domino’s Pizza, 85 percent of a nonsupervisory employee’s training occurs on the job and is provided by the store manager or franchise owner. Each employee is usually trained to fill most of the shop’s five hourly jobs (order taker, pizza maker, oven tender, router, and driver), which helps during rush hours when a crew member doesn’t appear for work. Performance standards are demanding; the order taker must answer a call within three rings and take the order within 45 seconds. The pizza maker must make the pizza and place it in the oven within one minute. The oven tender must take one pizza out while putting another one in within five seconds and cut and box the pizza by the count of 15. Domino’s encourages dedication to speed by keeping tabs on the fastest service and delivery times reported by its stores and publishing them as “box scores” in The Pepperoni Press, the company newspaper. Although the bulk of training is on the job far away from corporate headquarters, Domino’s corporate training staff maintains some control over training by providing a variety of training aids. The staff makes available to shop management 14 videos (with instructor’s manuals) on such tasks as delivery, dough management, image, and pizza making. Each shop is equipped with a VCR. The videos are upbeat, fast-moving, and musical (MTV-style) with a heavy dose of comedy geared to its high school and college-aged audience. Young Domino’s employees play the roles in the videos. Each shop also displays corporate-produced training posters with job hints and reminders throughout the work area. Above the production line, for example, are large color pictures of how a pizza should look at each step of the production process. Two popular posters are a glossy color picture of “The Perfect Pepperoni” pizza and a picture of a pizza cursed with the 10 common flaws (for example, scorched vegetables, air bubbles). The training materials communicate many key points with Domino’s-styled lingo, “Dominese.” Store managers (aged 21–25) are trained by a six-course, typically six-month MIT program that includes coursework in pizza dough management, people management, cost management, and how to conduct on-the-job training of hourly employees. Manager trainees progress through five levels of training with higher performance requirements and more responsibilities added at each level. On-the-job training is an important part of the training program. Many franchise owners (and all company-owned stores) send management trainees to the regional training center for classes taught by corporate trainers; however, management training often is decentralized, with franchise owners conducting the MIT courses themselves. Franchise owners must be certified to conduct the formal courses for their manager trainees. The certification process requires that the owner complete a “Training Dynamics” course on how to teach manager trainees; observe certified teachers training the MIT series of courses; and then co-teach the series with a regional trainer, who must approve the franchisee’s performance. The quality of training provided by franchise owners is enhanced by the owners’ substantial in-store management experience. Only Domino’s store managers may apply for franchise ownership. Domino’s corporate training staff is also involved in developing franchise owners by means of a rigorous training program for all prospective owners. The training includes a series of courses on contracts, site selection, store construction, and marketing, with an early, heavy emphasis on the nitty-gritty aspects of ownership to discourage those who are less than totally committed. Like Domino’s Pizza, Dunkin’ Donuts’ corporate training staff conducts a demanding training program for its franchise owners. Prospective franchisees undergo six weeks of training at Dunkin’ Donuts University in Braintree, Massachusetts. There, they spend four weeks in production training, learning how to make doughnuts, coffee, soup, and other products, and how to operate and maintain the production equipment. Performance standards are rigorous; the final production test requires that a trainee make 140 doughnuts per hour (enough to fill a shop’s doughnut case). Each batch of doughnuts is weighed and measured for length and height. If a batch of six cake doughnuts is one ounce too light or too heavy, for example, the batch fails the test. Franchisees spend the last two weeks focusing on financial aspects of the business and on developing employee management skills (for example, supervising, performance appraisal, and interpersonal communication). The 12-member training staff conducting the program are all former store managers or district sales managers with about 10 years’ experience with the company. Training of hourly employees is totally decentralized. Franchise owners serve as trainers and receive how-to instruction for this task. Like Domino’s Pizza, Dunkin’ Donuts’ corporate training staff also provides training videocassettes for owners to use. Quarterly clinics on quality control are also conducted by the company’s district managers and technical advisers. Dunkin’ Donuts uses a different and decentralized approach to training its store managers who are not franchise owners. Rather than have franchise owners conduct the training, the company selects experienced store managers and trains them as store manager trainers. Their trainers train new managers using a program and materials developed by the corporate staff. This decentralized approach is relatively new for Dunkin’ Donuts and was adopted after the company dropped its 12-week training program conducted totally at corporate headquarters. With the centralized approach, turnover among new managers was 50 percent during training. Under the new decentralized, on-site approach, turnover during training is about 0.5 percent, and annual training costs have decreased from $418,000 to $172,000. People-related management skills are emphasized in training both franchise owners and store managers. Dunkin’ Donuts credits this emphasis as a major reason why its annual turnover rate for hourly workers (80 percent) is considerably less than the industry average.