Using posters for action-oriented communication at KFC

KFC uses a cascade process whereby the senior team communicates to area managers who communicate in turn to their restaurant managers. These restaurant managers complete the process by communicating to their team members.
“As an operations team, we’d always had quite a strong communication process to get our messages from the top to the bottom in a reasonably short period of time,” says Russell. “However, we knew that while messages got down to the restaurant managers reasonably well, they didn’t always get down to the team members.”

Carrying out a communication audit
“We knew that sometimes, if there was a lot of information to be communicated, people would pick out the things that they were particularly interested in as opposed to communicating everything.” In a busy restaurant environment, managers are often time constrained – so some messages had to go.
In order to address this, about two years ago Russell commissioned a series of focus groups and interviews to examine managerial communication. During this phase, interviews were conducted with members of the senior management team along with focus groups for restaurant general managers, area coaches and restaurant team members.
The aim of this audit was to establish how KFC was communicating to restaurant general managers and restaurant staff. First of all, Russell wanted to find the answers to several questions:

1. What did people want to know?
2. What didn’t people want to know?
3. How did people want to be communicated to?

Evaluating the communication cycle
“We spend quite a lot of money on communication, including for instance a company magazine. But the feedback we were getting was that people either didn’t see it or they had no interest in it,” says Russell. “We found there wasn’t as much knowledge about how the business was doing or what promotions we were running as we’d wanted.
“We knew ourselves that if you put something through the communication cycle it was hit and miss as to how far down that cycle it got. Some areas and some regions were better than others and we wanted it to be more consistent.”
In addition, Russell knew KFC might not be meeting the needs of its very diverse staff mix – employee age, style, ethnicity, literacy levels, understanding of the English language and time with the company all vary enormously. “We weren’t really sure we were ticking all the boxes in our communication style,” Russell says. “We have full timers and part timers and lots of new staff starting at different times, so we have to constantly communicate in simple language.”

 

Action-oriented communication
Russell explains the results of the survey. “There was a lot of background work and we found out some surprising things,” she says. “It’s a very action-oriented business and people wanted their communication to be very action-orientated too. Typically people said, ‘I want to be told what to do’ and ‘I want to be told what you expect of me.’ They didn’t necessarily want the flowery stuff.”
The business was communicating a fair amount of information, but not always in a way that suited its audience. Information was high volume and was often very wordy, which didn’t work well for the frontline restaurant audience – employees that often only worked a few hours a week, had very little time for communication and had English as a second language.

 

Information overload at the front line
“We have an e-mail system here and we found that managers were being bombarded with too much e-mail from the office,” says Russell. “Then managers weren’t able to decide what was important, what wasn’t important, and how to prioritize what each of the different departments wanted. So there were all sorts of mixed messages going through.”
Russell says that conducting the communication audit and talking to the restaurant teams gave the senior managers a better understanding of what front-line staff did and didn’t want to know. “It helped to talk to restaurant managers and ask, ‘How we can help you with your communication?’ and ‘How can we make your life easier?’” she says.
“It’s really busy running a restaurant and managers don’t have enormous amounts of time – we have a tendency to over communicate to them sometimes.” Russell recognizes that many senior managers feel the need to be quite wordy in their communication. “You have to ask, ‘Who is this piece of communication for?’ It’s a case of constantly reminding people about their audience.”
Russell believes that the audit has helped to convince her senior colleagues of the need for change. “You can always go back to that piece of work and say, ‘This is what our team members told us, and these were the objectives that we agreed at the very beginning’,” she says.

Communication cycle
Once they had seen the survey results, the senior team decided to keep the communication process but to tighten it up a lot more. “We run our communication process on a four-weekly basis,” explains Russell. “It ends up with an A3 poster that’s delivered to each restaurant with the team-member messages printed on it – five action-oriented messages for them.”
Russell has found a way to limit managers on their word count when communicating with frontline restaurant staff. “We have a set of PowerPoint type presentations,” she explains. “When people want to put a message into the communication cycle, they all use the same structured presentation format. As it goes down, staff understand the format of the presentation and know what they’re going to get.” Staff in the restaurants don’t actually see the PowerPoint slides, they’re used as a way to help managers keep the information brief and to structure the final presentation.
The communication cycle begins with a senior communication meeting. This is followed by a regional meeting with area coaches. These area coaches hold an area meeting with their restaurant managers, who finally hold a restaurant meeting with their team members. This happens on what KFC calls a “period”, which is once every four weeks. “So we work a finance cycle of every four weeks as opposed to every calendar month,” explains Russell.

 

Variety of channels used
Posters
The posters, (see Figure One, below, for an example) with their five action-oriented team messages, are used by the restaurant managers at their team meeting. If the restaurant manager is a good communicator, they have a good team meeting and probably don’t need the poster. But if the restaurant manager is not so effective at communicating, or it isn’t perhaps their first priority, then the poster helps get the messages across to the team members.
A further benefit of using posters to convey action-oriented messages is that if a team member misses the meeting, they can still see the poster the next time they’re in the restaurant.
“These posters tick a lot of boxes,” says Russell. “They’re colorful and interesting. There are lots of pictures on them and not a lot of words.” She explains that the rest of the communication cycle is very similar, “But again we’ve just managed to get a lot more structure into it.”
“Each week there’s a smaller poster that goes out to every store. This is an A4 printed poster called ‘One Week’ that has three messages for team members. This poster is usually a follow up to the ‘period’ communication.” Typical examples of team member messages include the date that a specific process is changing, or information that a particular promotion is happening. “Again this is very punchy, and acts as a reminder for restaurant staff,” says Russell.

E-mail
“There’s also an e-mail called ‘One Week’ for restaurant managers,” she says, “which replaces previous mass e-mail. There’s now no mass e-mail unless there’s an emergency or a product problem, because office staff can no longer send an e-mail to ‘all restaurants’.”
Instead, Russell has implemented a central e-mail box. If a department, or individual, wants to send an e-mail to all restaurants they send it first to the central inbox. Here, a gatekeeper decides and prioritizes the communication into an e-mail for the restaurant managers that tells them, “This is everything you need to know from the various departments this week”. “It’s a much more managed process and we can help to prioritize the communication for them,” says Russell. “If there are too many messages then something is prioritized out till the next week.”

Notice boards
“We’ve provided the restaurants with two structured notice boards one for business communication (see Figure Two, right) and one for communication and recognition,” says Russell. This gives restaurant managers a specific area in which to display their communication materials – but not just the regular posters. She continues, “They can also display information like business results – things that we want the restaurant staff to have access to.” The notice boards form part of the new structured process and restaurant managers are provided with a planogram of what to display in their restaurant.
KFC has been using the posters for about a year. “We’re just really getting the notice boards out there now,” says Russell. “We’ve been having some internal branding done and have been waiting for that before putting the notice boards in because they’re quite a big capital investment. You can change things like the look of a poster from one month to the next, but once you have put a notice board up you’re stuck with it for a little while. It’s harder to change, so we took a bit longer – to get the look and feel of those correct.”

A local focus
Initially, Russell met with some resistance from senior colleagues to reducing the amount of information they conveyed to frontline restaurant staff. She gives an example: “When we put the notice boards in, we decided that a lot of the information we’d put on them would only be about that person’s region as opposed to the whole company,” she says. “We had some push-back because managers kept saying that staff needed to know about the whole company.” She had to remind them that the notice boards were for team members, and not aimed at the restaurant manager – and that the communication audit had revealed how team members only want to know what’s happening locally.

A strict structure
Russell told her colleagues, “If we want to communicate a message to our restaurant managers, let’s find a

 

 

3. Communicators should use their preferred style
Communicators have different styles which can result in mixed messages. At AstraZeneca communicators came from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines and had different styles themselves. Several communicators had been scientists themselves, and moved over to specialize in communication. Others came from journalism and some from PR.

Communicators were helped to understand their preferred style and think through how to get the most out of it. They also had the chance to assess the preferred styles of the leaders they supported and how they could use this information to provide them with an even more effective service.

 

4. Being collaborative is not enough
R&D leadership teams focused on collaboration. Many of the teams were successful because their leaders were skilled in building strong teams, bringing together functional and technical experts, and fostering co-operation. Their natural style was to be considerate and collaborative.

In many ways, this style is useful during times of change – people expect greater empathy from their leaders, and to be reassured that they understand the pressures they’re under and the pain they’re feeling. On the other hand, the collaborative approach can also bring problems during change. Leaders have to provide a strong sense of direction, and to be able to engage and motivate their people around the context for change, the compelling reasons for it and the need to summon up another burst of energy for the new challenges ahead. Doing this means a shift to being more direct and upbeat.

 

5. Consider the best approach
Scientists like fact and process. Many appeared to be uncomfortable with emotion and story. The more introverted audiences such as many of the scientists do not like “arguing from analogy” – they don’t want images and metaphors of how one thing is like another. They believe that a thing should rest on its own merits and be tested for itself. Scientists may also want time to reflect on information, to process through its implications and to have a later opportunity for challenge and discussion. They’re used to informed argument, to establishing hypotheses and then gathering data to test them.

 

6. Leaders may be affected by proximity to info
Leaders can be too close to the information and too far ahead in their thinking. Many of the leaders were so close to the information that they forgot what their people did and didn’t know. This can cause difficulties when communicating change as an unwise word, or unhappy choice of phrase could trigger concerns that had not existed before. Leaders can also become impatient with teams that are grappling with facts and detail they themselves digested some time ago and misinterpret their slow take up as resistance.

 

7. Leaders can project their concerns onto staff
For many leaders, the toughest objections to answer were those with which they privately agreed. Sometimes leaders would raise issues and concerns which their people may not have considered because the leaders didn’t want to be seen as corporate propagandists, or because they had their own concerns about how change has been rolled out, and the degree of detail which was available to them. Often, the end result can be extra confusion and concern.

 

8. Consistency is achievable, despite mixed views
Consistency is possible even when people see things differently. One of the group heads was especially worried about consistency of message. He knew this would be difficult to achieve because his department was spread across three sites, each of which had a distinctive identity and their own strong local leader.
Also, each of the sites were likely to be affected differently, and therefore would need not only different messages, but a different approach. For example, a site that was being severely affected by changes would not welcome an upbeat recounting of the benefits of the change to the organization.

Each of the team clearly had different styles and different mixes of how much telling and discussing they were likely to follow. Therefore, even when the messages and slides handed out to the team were identical and consistent, they would inevitably be used and delivered in different ways, to audiences who were themselves different and distinctive – and who would start selecting different elements of messages that they might remember and pass on to others.
Faced with what looked like an almost inevitable guarantee of inconsistency, lack of control of what people might take out of the sessions, selective memory and decaying recall, the leader was naturally concerned. He was able to reduce his concerns by:

• Preparation – spending time together working through what the members of the leadership group actually thought, believed and felt confident saying.
  Agreeing as a group an elevator speech, key messages and answers to tough questions.
• Rehearsal – in which they could challenge each other, simulate tough situations they were likely to face and develop responses together, rather than coming up with something on their feet when delivering “live”.
• Summaries – rather than leaving their answers in the Q&A sessions dangling, giving summaries of what they believed to be positive aspects of the changes and why they personally felt confident about it.
  

9. Leaders should develop their own Q&As
Rather than having the communication team develop FAQs, leaders responded better when they challenged each other with tough questions, developed their answers and tested out how real, credible and reliable these responses were.
It was also very helpful to challenge leaders to raise the questions they feared they’d be asked. In part this helped them prepare to deal with their fears, and it also helped them investigate what they were concerned about, get to the underlying issue and try and address and resolve it.

 

10. Meeting format matters
The leaders were especially interested in how best to put across their messages. The traditional way of communicating is to run large site events in which 200–300 people get the message at the same time. This minimizes the grapevine, as everyone hears the same message from the same person in the same way.
However, these leaders also needed to ensure high degrees of engagement in order to maintain productivity and keep people focused. Therefore, they believed it was important to have discussion with their people, flush out their issues and increase their sense of confidence about the change.

This meant they couldn’t rely simply on the one off large scale events, since interaction at these would be low, and there would be little time or room for discussion. Indeed, it was more likely at any Q&A session the vocal minority would dominate, even if their views did not represent those of the majority.

Many leaders therefore decided to follow up larger scale events with smaller group discussions in which people could discover what the changes meant for their particular area of the business, raise their concerns and ask questions. They would also be able to challenge how well their leaders had created the vision for change, defended their interests and developed a feasible plan for successful implementation.

 

How did this help AstraZeneca?
“The main achievement,” says Alex Kalombaris, “is that we now have a group of leaders in R&D who are a lot more self-aware, and confident in their own communication style. They have a better idea of how to maximize their strengths and work on their weaknesses. The feedback we have received from the leadership team has been very impressive. Following the training, leaders see communication in a different way, as a discipline that requires time and effort to get it right. Finally, it allowed the communication business partners to work closer with the leaders they were supporting and give the communication team the opportunity to show their value.

 

Summary
In summary, AstraZeneca R&D found that:

• Leaders and communicators must understand their communication style and the styles of others, and in particular, how this influences what they say, the way they say it and how others react to it.
• Leaders should learn to flex their styles to maximize their chances of getting onto other people’s wavelengths quickly.
• Leaders need to think about the message from their audience’s point of view and avoid assuming knowledge they don’t have and projecting onto them issues and concerns they don’t feel.
• Consistency of approach is more likely where a team of leaders gets together to agree the key messages – the elevator speech – and develop and answer their own questions.
• Meeting format is important – large scale gatherings ensure consistency of message but they should be followed up by smaller scale discussions to let people digest what’s been said, challenge and ask questions.