Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen franchisee National Restaurant Development Group has found the return on investment in its employee incentive program. Every six months, the franchisee rewards it top general manager with a new car for meeting certain criteria.
In January, NRD awarded its first car to general manager Sheila Battle for leading her store in reaching the highest score in the Atlanta DMA for various metrics including, sales, speed of service, hospitality and cost controls.
Aziz Hashim, president and CEO of NRD's Popeyes franchisee group, said the car may have been a one-time reward, but the long-term ROI continues. The purpose of the program is for the behaviors and skills that helped stores and managers achieve their goals become permanent skill sets.
"Our incentives are all about those activities that would help us improve our operations and our profitability long after the incentive program was over," he said.
For example, rather than rewarding the store with the fewest complaints, NRD chose to recognize the store with the most compliments. Hashim said that by zeroing in on increasing the number of compliments, the crew develop new strategies and behaviors that continue to demonstrate more effective results.
"The strategies the restaurant management would have to put in place in order to drive the metric won't shut off because the car's been given away," he said. "That's a culture that they had to instill at the restaurant level for months during the contest. And it won't go away."
NRD's incentive program uses Popeyes' metrics-moving scorecard system, which the company uses for its own incentive program to reward its top franchisees. NRD has used similar incentive programs for the other brands it operates, including Checkers/Rally's, Subway and fast casual Moe's Southwest Grill. The company has 50 units in its portfolio, including nine Popeyes which it purchased last June as part of the company's refranchising efforts.
NRD is in its second round of its incentive program and is still seeing results from the first one.
"The performance continues," Hashim said. "Sales are up, traffic is up, customer compliments are up."
The program also propelled NRD to become one of Popeyes' top three franchisees in just six months.
And its nine stores continue to perform at that level in the second round, he said.
The incentive program rewards various top performers, including performance bonuses for market managers and NRD executives. Other managers and crew members at the top-performing store also are rewarded. For example, two other managers at Battle's 2627 Clairmont Rd. location received $200 Macy's gift cards, and the crew received $20 gift cards. The entire team also celebrated Battle's win with a pizza party.
Hashim said such programs work because strong performance needs to be recognized. "Our belief is incentive should be reward for performance," he said.
But incentives alone aren't enough. Hashim said it's essential to start with good employees that fit the job from the beginning.
"You hire right, and then you reward performance," he said.
Read also, Popeyes: Improving the experience.
