Setting a new standard
Carley’s plan to lead his company from good to great began
with installing innovative benchmarks and ensuring his
employees hit them.
“Start focusing your team on benchmarks that reflect the
best-in-class performance, not benchmarks that reflect 5 percent better than last year, where you’re just challenging yourself against yourself,” he says.
One way to do that is to look for people both inside and outside the organization — or even the industry — who reflect the
absolute highest level of performance. Then you can track
your performance against theirs, instead of comparing to your
scores from last year.
Carley says this holds your employees to a higher standard,
and it has helped El Pollo Loco reach new highs in guest service and satisfaction, food quality, and safety on the job. For
example, workers’ compensation incidents have dropped from
250 per year in 2002 to less than 50 in 2007.
Striving for best-in-class quality in each facet of the company’s operations is a long, difficult process. But once that mind-set is ingrained into your management team’s thought process,
you can’t let it slip away.
So once you’ve created straightforward metrics that establish
the standard for success, from both a customer and employee
standpoint, what’s the trick to making sure your employees are
hitting those benchmarks?
“You need to take operating information and convert it into
information that you can’t ignore,” Carley says. “So you create a set of metrics based on what you are trying to accomplish, so that it’s clear to the casual observer who is achieving or overachieving and who is not — and in a way that they
can’t ignore it.”
At El Pollo Loco, that information conversion is so simple
that if you understand how a traffic light works, you’ll know
if a particular store is a top performer.
Restaurants that are hitting the benchmarks get to hoist a
green flag in their stores with pride. Restaurants that are just a
bit below their target metrics post a yellow flag, and the stores
with significant work to do operate under a red flag.
The relevant information is dissected on a monthly basis,
ranked for that month, and then publicly reviewed by management.
“The key is getting the metrics and benchmarks right and
then tracking them closely and publish their performance
under a harsh spotlight for everybody to see,” Carley says.
“Your best employees will respond to that and step up, and
your marginal ones will either improve or leave.”