Case D-Application:

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

Dunkin’ Donuts and Domino’s Pizza share the same requirement forsuccess: Provide a high-quality product at impressive speed.Domino’s guarantees a hot, tasty pizza delivered to your doorstepas soon as possible. Dunkin’ Donuts promises fresh doughnuts everyfour hours and fresh coffee every 18 minutes. To meet thisrequirement, both fast-food companies face the same trainingchallenge: Train a very young (typically aged 18 to 21) andinexperienced workforce to meet rigorous performance standards.Both companies must train in an industry where turnover averages300 to 400 percent yearly and where company locations are widelydispersed. Domino’s operates 3,800 stores throughout the UnitedStates and seven foreign countries; Dunkin’ Donuts has 1,400 shopsspanning the United States and 12 foreign countries. The twocompanies approach this training challenge with a highlydecentralized training function. At Domino’s Pizza, 85 percent of anonsupervisory employee’s training occurs on the job and isprovided by the store manager or franchise owner. Each employee isusually trained to fill most of the shop’s five hourly jobs (ordertaker, pizza maker, oven tender, router, and driver), which helpsduring rush hours when a crew member doesn’t appear for work.Performance standards are demanding; the order taker must answer acall within three rings and take the order within 45 seconds. Thepizza maker must make the pizza and place it in the oven within oneminute. The oven tender must take one pizza out while puttinganother one in within five seconds and cut and box the pizza by thecount of 15. Domino’s encourages dedication to speed by keepingtabs on the fastest service and delivery times reported by itsstores and publishing them as “box scores” in The Pepperoni Press,the company newspaper. Although the bulk of training is on the jobfar away from corporate headquarters, Domino’s corporate trainingstaff maintains some control over training by providing a varietyof training aids. The staff makes available to shop management 14videos (with instructor’s manuals) on such tasks as delivery, doughmanagement, image, and pizza making. Each shop is equipped with aVCR. The videos are upbeat, fast-moving, and musical (MTV-style)with a heavy dose of comedy geared to its high school andcollege-aged audience. Young Domino’s employees play the roles inthe videos. Each shop also displays corporate-produced trainingposters with job hints and reminders throughout the work area.Above the production line, for example, are large color pictures ofhow a pizza should look at each step of the production process. Twopopular posters are a glossy color picture of “The PerfectPepperoni” pizza and a picture of a pizza cursed with the 10 commonflaws (for example, scorched vegetables, air bubbles). The trainingmaterials communicate many key points with Domino’s-styled lingo,“Dominese.” Store managers (aged 21–25) are trained by asix-course, typically six-month MIT program that includescoursework in pizza dough management, people management, costmanagement, and how to conduct on-the-job training of hourlyemployees. Manager trainees progress through five levels oftraining with higher performance requirements and moreresponsibilities added at each level. On-the-job training is animportant part of the training program. Many franchise owners (andall company-owned stores) send management trainees to the regionaltraining center for classes taught by corporate trainers; however,management training often is decentralized, with franchise ownersconducting the MIT courses themselves. Franchise owners must becertified 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; andthen co-teach the series with a regional trainer, who must approvethe franchisee’s performance. The quality of training provided byfranchise owners is enhanced by the owners’ substantial in-storemanagement experience. Only Domino’s store managers may apply forfranchise ownership. Domino’s corporate training staff is alsoinvolved in developing franchise owners by means of a rigoroustraining program for all prospective owners. The training includesa series of courses on contracts, site selection, storeconstruction, and marketing, with an early, heavy emphasis on thenitty-gritty aspects of ownership to discourage those who are lessthan totally committed. Like Domino’s Pizza, Dunkin’ Donuts’corporate training staff conducts a demanding training program forits franchise owners. Prospective franchisees undergo six weeks oftraining at Dunkin’ Donuts University in Braintree, Massachusetts.There, they spend four weeks in production training, learning howto make doughnuts, coffee, soup, and other products, and how tooperate and maintain the production equipment. Performancestandards are rigorous; the final production test requires that atrainee make 140 doughnuts per hour (enough to fill a shop’sdoughnut case). Each batch of doughnuts is weighed and measured forlength and height. If a batch of six cake doughnuts is one ouncetoo light or too heavy, for example, the batch fails the test.Franchisees spend the last two weeks focusing on financial aspectsof the business and on developing employee management skills (forexample, supervising, performance appraisal, and interpersonalcommunication). The 12-member training staff conducting the programare all former store managers or district sales managers with about10 years’ experience with the company. Training of hourly employeesis totally decentralized. Franchise owners serve as trainers andreceive how-to instruction for this task. Like Domino’s Pizza,Dunkin’ Donuts’ corporate training staff also provides trainingvideocassettes for owners to use. Quarterly clinics on qualitycontrol are also conducted by the company’s district managers andtechnical advisers. Dunkin’ Donuts uses a different anddecentralized approach to training its store managers who are notfranchise owners. Rather than have franchise owners conduct thetraining, the company selects experienced store managers and trainsthem as store manager trainers. Their trainers train new managersusing a program and materials developed by the corporate staff.This decentralized approach is relatively new for Dunkin’ Donutsand was adopted after the company dropped its 12-week trainingprogram conducted totally at corporate headquarters. With thecentralized approach, turnover among new managers was 50 percentduring training. Under the new decentralized, on-site approach,turnover during training is about 0.5 percent, and annual trainingcosts have decreased from $418,000 to $172,000. People-relatedmanagement skills are emphasized in training both franchise ownersand store managers. Dunkin’ Donuts credits this emphasis as a majorreason why its annual turnover rate for hourly workers (80 percent)is considerably less than the industry average.

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