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Are QSR companies overdue for some common sense?

Organizations that lose cultural common sense also lose touch with both their employees and their customers. That's why one cultural transformation expert advocates QSRs and other business purposely work to inject common sense back into their cultural backbone, with nothing less than the business itself at stake.

Are the inner workings of your organization really adding up to business success? (Photo: iStock)

April 2, 2021 by S.A. Whitehead — Food Editor, Net World Media Group

It's human nature to panic in times of intense pressure and the last year has certainly put that kind of pressure on the restaurant industry. But as a QSR leader, you know pressure well, so ask yourself, what's one of the first things to go out the window when the heat is on, metaphorically?

If you said common sense, you are not only a veteran of the calamitous occasion, but might also be very interested in a recently released book on business culture and leadership, "The Ministry of Common Sense: How to Eliminate Bureaucratic Red Tape, Bad Excuses, and Corporate BS."

It's the product of global branding expert, Martin Lindstrom, who founded and heads the business cultural transformation agency, Lindstrom Company. Over the years, he has worked with more than a few QSRs as well as megabrands like Pepsi and Microsoft. He has also penned more than a half-dozen other tomes on subjects like branding (Brandwashing, 2011) and business data use (Small Data, 2016).

In short, he has some definite street cred in the subject of business and marketing success, as his latest work attests. But what we at QSRweb were most interested in was how some of the assertions and suggestions in his book relate to QSRs. In other words, if common sense is lacking in a lot of business culture today, is that also true in the QSR category where there are often two very different cultures at the store and corporate levels? We also wanted to learn exactly what Lindstrom defines as common sense in business culture and why he believes it is even necessary in the quick-service segment.

"Empathy is all about seeing and feeling the world through the eyes of another person, a customer or a colleague. As companies grow, they increasingly forget about the views of their customers and come to neglect internal conflicts caused by lack of common sense."

-Martin Lindstrom

After all, those aforementioned panic-inducing situations are what QSR leaders eat for breakfast most days, so it would seem these executives and their organizations might be especially good places for common sense to regularly jump ship. So, we turned to Lindstrom to tell us what form that might take organizationally in QSRs, and, more importantly, how it can damage a business and what to do about it, as you'll learn in the following recent conversation with Lindstrom.

Q: Tell us about your previous work with QSR brands and whether you believe anything sets these types of restaurant companies apart from those of other sectors as far as corporate structure and operations go?

Martin Lindstrom (Photo provided).

A:I've worked with several fast food brands, including McDonald's Corporation, Burger King, and KFC. I witnessed Burger King prior to its acquisition by 3G (in October 2010, followed by Burger King's combination with the Tim Hortons brand in 2014 to form the current Restaurant Brands International that Popeyes is also now a part of) and observed how it completely changed to become a nimble and highly efficient organization.

What really stood out was how the multi-layered organization suddenly turned flat. Their isolated offices, featuring large couches and large reception areas, were replaced by one large table with the entire management team sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, easily accessible, all hands on deck. In my opinion, that new attitude helped cut red tape and remove the bureaucracy that had been holding the organization back from change. It helped Burger King regain its shine.

Q: As you know, the restaurant industry has been gutted during the pandemic, providing good reason for the kind of panic that tends to send common sense out the window. Have you seen that happening among C-level QSR executives?
A:Tim Lowe, the president of Lowes Foods, is a good friend of mine, as well as a client. Tim told me that those people who haven't changed during the pandemic just aren't getting the message.

I don't think there's any such thing as "going back to work." I call it "going forward to work," by which I mean: Don't just cut costs, revisit your business model. Many restaurant operators have used the pandemic as a universal blanket excuse to cut costs and service. Many QSR's have reduced their menus and added operating rules that, on paper, seem to be all about safety.

In reality, some of these rules are the farthest thing from enhancing safety. The other day a major QSR operator installed one of these "snake lines," only to watch guests pass close by each other every minute while moving up the line to the counter.

All research indicates that now is not the time to save money by scrimping on culture-building. Instead, reshuffle the way you build culture, ensuring you retain your staff and justifying your bricks-and-mortar operation. A client of ours — a major food distribution company — decided to dial up its presence in local markets. The rural population loved them for it and repaid them with business and loyalty.

Without doubt, COVID-19 has reshuffled our priorities. Those outlets that demonstrate their willingness to act and be local have turned out to be winners.

Q: In "The Ministry of Common Sense," you connect the use of common sense with empathetic leadership, but why?
A:While researching The Ministry of Common Sense, it became evident to me that there's a direct correlation between common sense and empathy. Empathy is all about seeing and feeling the world through the eyes of another person, a customer or a colleague. As companies grow, they increasingly forget about the views of their customers and come to neglect internal conflicts caused by lack of common sense.

By placing yourself in the shoes of a colleague or customer, you'll find yourself adopting a completely different point-of-view. You'll be enabled to notice friction points, nonsense and issues that never made sense in the first place.

That's why I've spent thousands of hours with senior executives from QSR operators in the homes of their customers, seeking to understand their point-of-view: ordering food from home, driving to the restaurant, waiting in line, going to the bathroom, using the drive-thru. Once you see and feel the friction points through the eyes of your guests, you'll begin to detect common sense issues like these:

• One large QSR operator noticed how it was nearly impossible for kids to spot the kids' meal on the drive-thru menu board from the car.
• Another QSR operator hadn't masked the smell of the toilet. The entire ordering area smelled like a bathroom, resulting in a very low ticket per customer.
• Many restaurants kept the air-conditioning system pumping at maximum capacity to discourage homeless people from sleeping in the restaurant, but it also drove customers away.

In all these cases, empathy had vanished.

Q: You also extol the virtues of common sense as keeping a leader's mind in sync with her or his customer, so what in the corporate structure works against that whole idea of keeping the leader's feet inside the customers' shoes, so to speak?
A: Processes, rules and guidelines. There's a fine balance between scaling an operation and keeping common sense intact. Often a rule may not make sense or have not been clarified, detaching the staff's "thinking" from their "acting."

For instance, one QSR operator connected the restaurant air-conditioning system with the kitchen air-conditioning system. It's hot in the kitchen, so they would set the air-conditioning on max in the kitchen — and, as a bonus, throughout the seating area. It was perfect for the kitchen, but penguins took up residence in the restaurant.

Another QSR operator dealt with some crime issues in the neighborhood by moving their waste oil and garbage containers 6 feet from the building — right next to the drive-thru. The smell drove customers away from the drive-thru. You might say that the operation succeeded, but the patient died.

"All research indicates that now is not the time to save money by scrimping on culture-building."

Q: Still corporations tend to gravitate toward things like complex personnel policies and lots of forms and the like, so why and what can a leader do about it?
A: Recent studies show that the more you trust people upfront, the more the staff pay you back by respecting that trust. However, the complete opposite tends to be the case today.

When you launch a new staff member's first day with 100 rules, it's like shouting, "We don't trust you!" As a consequence, employees tend to go in the opposite direction, seeking loopholes that provide (them) with a breath of fresh air.

As the staff stretch the rules, the company tends to introduce even more rules. Rarely, however, are any rules ever removed for being outdated or for suggesting a lack of trust.

The issue is that the lowest common denominator rules the game. One person goes too far, so we punish the 100 honest people. In the end, staff morale suffers, culture collapses and we end up with an environment dominated by pointless red tape.

Q: A lot of what you are promoting in this book is listening to the little guy, whether that be the customer, the lower-level and/or frontline employee, or really anyone in the organization who doesn't label the C-suite their home. Why is that hard for big fast food chains to do?
A: Frankly speaking, a lot of the C-suite folks I've met over the years are completely detached from reality. Sure, they're sitting with live data-updated spreadsheets showing every aspect of their operation in full motion, but numbers often won't empower you to assess the root cause of a problem. All it will do is let you know that something is wrong.

If you were to ask a consumer if they prefer to eat healthy food, they'd mostly say, "Yes." Yet the reality in the restaurant is probably quite a bit different. It's only when you design a system around the customer's reality that you'll ever understand the disconnection between what the customer says and what he or she does.

For a large QRS operator in the Middle East, I spent a tremendous amount of time driving on highways with its customers to understand why sales weren't as expected. What I discovered was that the restaurant operation had "blinded" the windows in what is called in the Middle East, the "family section."

The blinded windows screamed to the world: "We're closed!" (even though they were open for business). When we removed the blinds, sales rose by 39%. From behind a spreadsheet, it would never have been possible to spot this issue. Common sense is not always that common.

About S.A. Whitehead

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Pizza Marketplace and QSRweb editor Shelly Whitehead is a former newspaper and TV reporter with an affinity for telling stories about the people and innovative thinking behind great brands.