Murali Krishnan One of RapL’s core tenets when we start engagement with a retail customer is the cornerstone of all successful retail operations – how do we help them deliver a consistent customer experience across the length and breadth of the country? Let’s look at McDonald’s, a shining North Star for all things customer experience. For McDonald’s, the consistency pyramid’s base is to weave their thousands of franchises in the same value + culture fabric globally. In an interview, Len Jillard, Chief People Officer for McDonald’s Canada, revealed quite a few approaches to their ways of working. This helped generate predictable consistency, with a 6 sigma result. Here are some excerpts from the interview “We don’t view the franchisee candidate as an investor, but as an owner/operator that has an important hands-on role.” “Our training for new operators is very rigorous. They go through all the same training and courses that our crew do in the restaurants, and then perform all the courses that our managers go through. They have to complete all that, all the way up to Hamburger University, before they’re an operator.”   “We choose who’s going to be part of the team. We take that seriously in the same way we choose our staff, be it corporate or in the restaurant as well.”   “We had a manager’s convention last week in Montréal and one of the things that I said in my presentation is that each manager creates the environment in their restaurant. I’m saying you create the culture within your restaurant. You are creating that culture that aligns with McDonald’s culture overall, or you’re defining a culture that isn’t in-line with McDonald’s overall. Sooner or later any sort of misalignment will catch up with you. You’re not going to enjoy the same kind of sales, guest count increase, or profitability at the end of the day. Restaurants that are enjoying the best results really do reflect the whole culture of who we are and what we’re about” Employee to operator: Key philosophical differences Before diving into how RapL turns employees into operators, it’s prudent to spend some time deliberating on the philosophical differences between an employee and an operator. Employees want to be rewarded for effort, operators want to be rewarded for results   Operators understand that if they don’t deliver topline AND bottom-line growth, the board will disregard all their effort, regardless of how sincere they were. Employees ignore this ultimate truth and want to be recognized for the effort that went into the results. Operators create stability, employees demand stability Operators think principles first, and dissect the deepest WHYs behind success. Employees tend to superficially absorb concepts and axioms, so they are barely able to fit into the performance bell curve.  By thinking along first principles, operators build new business playbooks or exponentially optimize the efficiency of existing operations. Operators can communicate and scale best practices; employees can barely explain what-works-and-why Since operators spend copious amounts of their mindshare dissecting core business processes for better efficiency, they can articulate exactly what makes a process click (or fail). Conversely, employees can only communicate in piecemeal, unsystematic ways. Their knowledge may not lead to higher order insights for the business. To put it simply, their communication is not transformational, neither for individuals nor for the business. Consistent customer experience happens when employees transform into operators The road to transform employees into owners implies defeating Pareto (for the uninitiated, Pareto’s law states only 20% resources drive 80% output). Traditional approaches to solve this problem (establishing a strategic capability development org) have honest intentions, but most interventions fail.  The 2 dominant reasons of failure are Learning at the wrong time: Today’s employees often learn uniform topics, on L&D’s schedule, and at a time when it bears limited immediate relevance to their role — and as a result, their learning suffers. Quickly forgetting the learning: Like first year college students who forget 60% of what they learned in high school, studying merely to get the CPE (Continuing Professional Education) credit suggests employees tend to quickly forget what they learn too. German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus pioneered experimental studies of memory in the late 19th Century, culminating with his discovery of “The Forgetting Curve.” He found that if new information isn’t applied, about 75% of it will be forgotten just after six days. Curve of Forgetting Employees to operators, the RapL way At RapL, we think about these problem statements differently. While ‘different’ is a broad, sweeping descriptor, we have a clearly earmarked approach to being different in our offering. Draw into empirical research and identify patterns in how humans successfully apply new learnings in their personal and professional lives. In our 3+ years of deployment at some of India’s largest retail companies, we have identified how employees turn into operators. 1. Consistency – New employees learn best practices to become operators Before you swamp a new employee into a drudgery of classroom training and unsystematic documents, ask yourself this – do we have a set of laws / best practices that we can drip feed to our new employees every day for the next 30 days? Here is the overarching principle – without any context and experience, a new employee needs to understand the laws of playing the game. One by one. Everyday.  By shoving them into classroom training, they will be overwhelmed by multiple disconnected concepts that they may not be able to thread together. This could lead to knowledge leakage, because they do not have a threaded foundation to work with. Instead, serve them the best business practices. Best practices and policies are those that worked for other new employees, who turned operators. Without these anchors, new employees are lost in a sea of new information. Mantra: best practices first, classroom training next. Here is how one of our customers delivers these “rules of work” to new employees during their onboarding process. At the end of this exercise, the customer has ensured that every new