MIKI SAXON: Franchises and Corporate Culture
(FranchisePick) We’re pleased to be able to share this guest post from my b5 colleague Miki Saxon, CEO of RampUp Solutions and the b5 blogger of Leadership Turn.
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Franchises and corporate culture - Miki Saxon, CEO, RampedUp Solutions
These days you’re bombarded by articles about corporate culture. Culture as the corporate savior; culture as the company’s downfall; culture as a retention tool, culture as an almost silver bullet.
That said, why is it that articles about changing culture in major corporations employing mostly skilled, well-paid workers, e.g., Ford, are met with serious discussion, but changing it in major corporations, with mostly minimum wage earners, e.g., McDonalds, is marked down as hype?
Why is a cultural change at Ford seen as key to the company’s survival, but instilling pride in the workers at McDonalds, Taco Bell and KFC is viewed as hype, “Raising spirits is cheaper than raising salaries.”
Personally I get really sick of this attitude.
“David A. Brandon, CEO of Domino’s Pizza says, ’You can’t overcome a bad culture by paying people a few bucks more.’ He believes the way to attack turnover is by focusing on store managers—hiring more selectively, coaching them on how to create better workplaces and motivating them with the promise of stock options and promotions.” (Wall Street Journal, 2.17.05)
Hooray for David!
Think about it
- Why do we expect young people to take pride in their first “real” job, or care about the customer, when they were laughed at for the same attitudes/actions in their minimum wage job?
- Why does our society denigrate those who work low-paying jobs, when they’re honest, hardworking, pay taxes and even manage to raise families?
In the same vein, why is the four-year grad, with a degree paid for by mom and dad, considered a better candidate than the one who took longer working “non-professional” jobs to pay for the same degree from the same school?
Maybe companies need to wake up. I haven’t seen the same high sense of entitlement in kids who spent their summers working in minimum wage jobs as I have in the ones who worked frequently overpaid jobs for their parents or didn’t work at all.
And I, for one, am thrilled that companies such as YUM! Brands, Domino’s and McDonalds are finally building their people up and, hopefully, offsetting the normal teardown that goes with these jobs.
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Miki Saxon, CEO, 25 years as a successful recruiter gave Miki Saxon an in-depth understanding of the bottom-line impact of employees who are turned on—and off. With input from cofounder and retired executive Al Negrin, she developed the MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy)™ framework which she uses to help startup executives build attractive and strong yet flexible cultures, strengthen communications, reduce burnout and improve retention.
In 1993, she wrote The Swamp and the Alligators: a (slightly irreverent) guide to career planning and the search process and was named Author-in-Residence at San Francisco State University Career Center
Miki now writes Leadership Turn for b5Media and MAPping Company Success for RampUp, as well as numerous articles on management and culture.
For more information, see Miki’s LinkedIn profile.
Tags: franchise, franchising, McDonald's, Miki Saxon, Rampup Solutions, recruitment, training, YUM BrandsRelated Stories
POSTED IN: McDonald's, x General
4 opinions for MIKI SAXON: Franchises and Corporate Culture
sean
Jul 13, 2008 at 6:22 pm
Miki:
Thanks for an excellent article and guest post.
Franchises are great fun to bash and make an easy target. You are addressing an issue that’s been debated via the term “McJob.”
Few - if any - give credit to these companies that maintain truly excellent training programs and teach positive work, leadership and life values to thousands upon thousands of young people.
In many areas, McDonald’s trainers and managers are the only ones teaching young people to speak clearly, maintain good posture, make eye contact, say please & thank you and exercise basic courtesy and manners.
In some places (not everywhere), they are doing a much better job than parents, churches, schools and vocational training programs.
Carol Cross
Jul 14, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Yes, franchising does provide good jobs for kids and others who have to work for low wages, and is good training. Unfortunately, in our culture, some kids have to learn on the job what they are not taught at home or by the teacher with the most influence, the media. Society, of course, is grateful to the fast-food industry who provides MW jobs for their kids and the poor and disadvantaged who have to work wherever they can find a job.
But, these people who push franchising are often the same people who want to obscure the true risk of franchising to the prospective franchisees, and who use the job numbers produced by franchising to prevent effective regulation of the industry by the government.
Franchising doesn’t always produce a good job for the owner or any job benefits. The jobs that are produced for the workers in franchises are not good jobs with benefits and a future, and yet franchising is growing as a producer of jobs in our economy. Are these the good jobs promised by government?
Isn’t this dangerous long term? I am not against franchising if the true risk of the purchase, in terms of disclosing unit performance statistics, is disclosed to new buyers of franchises. Such disclosure, of course, would disclose churning and encroachment and would result in the competition among franchisors of the same or similar concepts to compete for the cheap labor and the cheap “venture” capital of prospective franchise buyers who can then only survive with cheap part-time labor, generally.
The world vision of a World in which we can travel from one great capital to another and eat at McDonald’s or Burger King or Wendy’s, etc… is being realized,
But, at what price?
R U what you own?
Jul 15, 2008 at 3:31 am
[...] wrote a guest post for Sean over at FranchisePick in which I said, “Why does our society denigrate those who work low-paying jobs, when [...]
Carol Cross
Jul 15, 2008 at 11:13 am
When American society denigrates those low paying jobs in society, they are at the same time indicating that they are happy they don’t have to work at a low-paying franchise job.
They are assuming, falsely, perhaps, that there will always be good jobs with benefits and a future for those who prepare and educate themselves for the good jobs that offer a future and benefits and good wages that will permit them to enjoy the American Dream. But, where are these jobs in our economy, today?
The point I am trying to make is that franchising has produced an abundance of low-paying jobs with no benefits and that franchising is INCREASING in the economy of the US and in world economies because it is a system of maximizing corporate profits while reducing corporate risk, and transfering the social costs of low paying jobs to the taxpayers.
Franchise jobs that offer no benefits, etc.. put a burden on the States to provide health care, etc… that cannot be provided by the individual owner franchisee who may be lucky to be operating at breakeven with PT help and will not be provided by the franchisor. The franchisor maximizes HIS profits and provides benefits for HIS employees because he avoids all of the expense and risks of the employer, the franchisee, who operates the physical units that wear the corporate brand names and that produce the corporate system sales.
These franchise statistics permit governments to skew the real job numbers and not to face the reality of where their constituents are going to work in the future. How much is franchising going to cost local and state governments in the long run?
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