Chicken Chain Goes on Learning Journey
Executive Summary
An upscale chain of fast casual restaurants offering primarily chicken products and operating in the United States has focused on growth and store expansion over the past thirty years and now has 900+ locations, most of which are owned by franchisees.
The Challenge: Developing and deploying a large training program with a small L&D team
With over 900 stores, the chain wanted to turn their focus to building a culture that will attract the right franchisees and maintain a solid reputation by being a strong servant-led organization. Servant leadership is popular among the chain’s competitors and aligns with their vision and core values. To achieve this, the chain’s Learning and Development team needed help developing a strategy and learning assets, then developing and delivering training to bring the entire company on a learning journey that would lead to the adoption of a servant-led culture with internal and external clients.
The Solution: A customized servant leadership learning journey
Through a series of consulting sessions with servant leadership subject matter experts, Judge’s learning specialists helped the chain determine and prioritize servant leadership behaviors that demonstrated the chain’s desired culture. Next, we created a learning journey that introduced, taught and operationalized servant leadership by allowing the chain’s employees to self-study, practice and apply the aspects of the new culture. Learning tools included motivational and demonstration videos, surveys, eLearning, and virtual instructor-led training.
In a study by the University of Illinois, a national food chain with servant leaders had 6% higher job performance, saw an 8% increase in customer service ratings, and had 50% higher staff retention.
The Result: 1,700 employees trained in servant leadership
With Judge’s learning experts, the chain trained 1700+ employees who each received seven plus hours of training over an eight-week period. Judge provided 91 training sessions for a total of over 373 hours of instructor-led training.
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