Case Study: Carl Karcher Enterprises
Restaurant-level Employee Training
Company Profile:
Carl Karcher Enterprises(CKE), through its subsidiaries, franchisees and licensees, operates some of the most popular U.S. regional brands in quick-service and fast-casual dining, including the Carl’s Jr.®, Hardee’s®, Green Burrito® and Red Burrito® restaurant brands. The CKE system includes more than 3,000 locations in 43 states and in 13 countries. CKE is headquartered in Carpinteria, California.
Business Challenge:
CKE needed to train a workforce of thousands in restaurant operations for their nationwide quick-service restaurants. Training was needed for all restaurant-level employees including upper management levels. The goal of the new training program is to deliver training that is just in time, consistent, and efficient in terms of time spent on training. Although extensive training materials already existed for each brand, the consistency between brands was lacking. Because a trainer delivered much of the training one-on-one with a new employee, hours per employee spent on training had become an unnecessary burden on labor costs. However, due to the training culture at CKE, the desire to keep much of the hands-on training supervised by a crew trainer or manager meant that any solution would have to be a blended one if it was going to be successful.
Solution:
As an ID, my initial response to CKE’s business challenge was to meet with the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) of all four brands to conduct a requirements gathering session and a needs analysis. One challenge that arose early on in the needs analysis was the need to deliver consistent training across brands without changing the individual procedures and processes that now exist for each brand. I was able to overcome this challenge by creating two courses that present similar information with slight changes to content when necessary. An example of this is in the following figures (Figure 1 and Figure 2) You will notice that the screens look similar, but the content on them is different. By utilizing this treatment, employees are trained consistently across the brands, but the training they receive is specific to their restaurant. At the end of phase one, I continued to work with the SMEs to complete a task analysis for all levels of restaurant employees. In addition, I created a comprehensive curriculum plan document that included course, lesson, and topic titles, objectives, activity descriptions (including scenario-based simulations), sources of content, and suggestions for blending the training with current on-the-job practice. This comprehensive plan was reviewed by the stakeholders and with some final collaboration was turned into a final plan that met all of the project requirements. As an additional step, I conducted a competitive analysis in which training methods of several competitors were accessed. This analysis validated the curriculum plan that was designed for CKE.