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) 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.

 

Figure One: Example of a KFC poster with action-oriented team messages

 

 

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, below) 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.”

 

Figure 1: A KFC structured notice board for business communication

 

 

 

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 different way of doing it.” She believes that people often want a single vehicle to cover too many types of communication and they really need to bear two questions in mind:

1. Who is this for – who is the audience?
2. What are we communicating?

 

“Maybe the audience is different but the message is the same. In this case you have to communicate it in two or three different ways,” she says.

 

Russell strongly advocates having a structure that people stick to, and bedding that structure into the business. “Being really strict about timings and the process is vital,” she says. “Even if it’s not absolutely perfect, it’s better than having just a mish-mash. Once you’ve got the structure you can at least tweak it to make it better each time.”

 

Results and next steps
“We’re still implementing some of this,” says Russell. “It’s taken us a long time to implement – and for us that was a key learning point. We thought we could snap our fingers and it would happen but to embed the cycle, and get it right, takes a long time. We do a lot more focus groups with our managers now and we do get feedback.”

“One of the things we’ll be working to improve is that we would like to really make it a cycle,” Russell says. “We would like to get as much upward communication from people as we do putting it downwards. While we do get that from restaurant managers a lot more – questions that we answer through the process – we don’t get as much from team members and we’ll be focusing on addressing and improving that.

“We’re reliant on 300 restaurant managers saying, ‘That’s a good question, I’ll feed that back up’. This is a little bit more of a challenge,” she says. “But if you give the restaurant managers the right tools, then they are a lot more likely to use them.”