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Domino’s Pizza franchise reduces business costs and employee turnover

M&G Pizza Enterprises is a Domino’s Pizza franchise with headquarters in Central Arkansas. Established in 1991, M&G now has over 650 employees serving over a million customers from 26 stores across Arkansas and Ohio.

After a period of rapid expansion, M&G’s internal communication inefficiencies caught up with them. Gaps in communication led to misspent man hours, inconsistent operations between locations, diluted information from leadership, untrained team members, costly food waste, and struggles with employee retention. To overcome this, the franchisee decided to streamline communication, connect stores, and build a richer company culture with the Jostle platform.

Challenges and goals

M&G experienced ongoing and unnecessary operational challenges due to unconsolidated communications tools. The company didn’t have an effective and standardized way to share important internal updates or build a culture of collaboration across their locations. Communication itself became a costly and time-intensive burden.

“Our phones were ringing and buzzing non-stop—phone calls, texts, emails.”, Caleb Archer, Project Specialist at M&G, told us. “Which one do you need to check first? Even if a message was for recognition or celebration, it was still, at that point, almost a nuisance.”

M&G had four key challenges and goals to overcome.

Challenge #1. Inconsistent and noisy communication was leading to lower performance

As M&G expanded, the leadership team struggled to deliver important updates consistently across all locations and team members. Communication was noisy and scattered across multiple tools—email, texts, and messaging apps. It was impossible to track who responded to which tool, who was in each chat group, and if managers received the messages.

“At times, managers were mistakenly left out of important updates, and information was not consistently communicated across the company. Messages were misinterpreted, diluted, or forgotten,” Caleb said. “Often, the excitement, initiative, and resolve gleaned from company manager meetings and events would quickly lose steam and did not carry over to the rest of our team members.”

This resulted in a weak connection between the leadership and store-level members, so awareness of company updates, goals, and achievements was minimal. Operational improvement was difficult because team members didn't always have the most up-to-date information.

Goal #1: Keep everyone well-informed and excited about company targets and initiatives by bridging the gap in communication between leadership, managers, and part-time team members.

Challenge #2. Poor communication between store managers led to wasted time and money

In an ideal world, the store managers at M&G would be well acquainted with each other and collaborate. If the managers had a sense of community and a standard network of communication, they would reduce unnecessary costs and provide better service. Caleb explained:

“If a store was running short on a product or had a product that they needed to offload, the best thing to do would be to reach out to a neighboring store and spread out those resources so we aren't running out of product or throwing product away due to expiration.

However, often I would find out after the fact while reviewing numbers that food was thrown away, or a store ran out of product. That had nothing to do with the inability to communicate; we were just a very segmented business at that time.”

Managers rarely collaborated or communicated accross locations, and this became a costly problem for M&G. Managers would either not reach out at all, or they would reach out to leadership—thereby making the leadership team the middle-man for communication. This inefficient process took up leadership’s valuable time and made communication a burden.

Goal #2: Save money by reducing waste and improving communication and collaboration by breaking down barriers between managers.

Challenge #3. Unnecessary turnover due to a lack of connectivity and community

Due to the diluted messaging team members in the stores received, they often didn’t see the big picture or feel part of something greater. Team members at each location existed within their in-store bubble, unaware of the impact their work was having on the company’s greater goals.

“The communication gap resulted in misconceptions about our company's cultural values concerning the importance of our team members to the company. This led to low morale and costly (sometimes unnecessary) turnover,” Caleb shared.

“We wanted to be able to easily and almost effortlessly recognize and reward our team members and celebrate achievements. That’s really hard to do through texts and emails, especially if they are not read and the messages are only going to our managers.”

Goal #3: Build a cohesive culture and reduce turnover by making sure employees were aligned on company goals, and recognized for their contributions to help get there.

Challenge #4. Operational resources and best practices were impossible to find quickly

With a mixed bag of communication tools and no central hub for storing documents, M&G wasted too much time trying to find important information, HR and training documents, and reference messages.

“It became increasingly difficult and time-consuming as the company expanded,” Caleb told us. “There wasn’t a centralized resource or designated place to find the tools and information needed.”

M&G needed a go-to place for all of their standard documents and urgent updates. Independent stores needed an easy way to share best practices to benefit other locations.

Goal #4: Enable everyone with efficient access to important documents, and make it possible to listen, learn, and share with one another.

Solution

After researching several communications platforms online, in addition to reaching out to others in the industry, M&G chose the Jostle platform. They started learning and configuring Jostle for implementation in June 2016. Since the roll-out, M&G has streamlined communications and effectively reinforced their culture of putting people first. They use the Jostle platform daily to train, enable, engage, motivate, celebrate, reward, and recognize team members at every level of the operation.

Solution #1. Managers are now communicating and sharing

With the use of Jostle’s chat feature–Discussions–managers communicate with each other one-on-one and in group chats. This means the burden of middle-man communication has been removed from leadership, and the stores are running more efficiently while wasting less time and money. Caleb told us:

“The managers are talking to each other about different aspects of the business, and many of those discussions are based on operations.

One will say, ‘Hey, I have a shortage of people or product,’ and instantly every manager in that area is aware and can offer solutions; either ‘Yeah, I've got some of that product. Come by and pick it up,’ or, ‘I'll send someone over to help your store out on Friday night if you don't have enough drivers.’

That collaboration is now there, and that’s huge. It means we’re helping each other avoid costly mistakes, and managers and supervisors aren’t overwhelmed by urgent messages coming from so many different places. They have more time to focus on their team members, customers, and operation.”

Solution #2. Communication is reaching everyone, and it’s easier than ever

M&G makes the most of Jostle’s News view, Activity feed, and Polls to keep everyone updated with company news and get feedback from their teams.

“M&G’s Founder and CEO, Brent Medders, has a video blog in News that he created so he can speak directly to everyone in the organization regularly,” Caleb told us. “We also use News to give updates on promos, share best practices, and for supervisor area weekly updates.

“We know that all of this communication is reaching all the way to our hourly workers because we’ve built a Digital Communication Area in each of our stores. This is a 40” monitor in the back of each store, viewable by all employees, and Jostle’s News and Activity view is displayed on this monitor during all operational hours.

“It’s an additional engagement piece that is critical to connecting our employees to each other and the company as a whole. The interface of the Jostle platform allows us to do this, and that was one of the key reasons we chose it.”

Solution #3. Employees are receiving recognition (and turnover is declining)

Recognition and rewards for everyone light up M&G’s Activity feed. Not only are leaders recognizing managers, but managers are recognizing their part-time team members and outwardly celebrating accomplishments using Jostle. Thanks to the Digital Communication Area in M&G stores, the entire company can be energized by the celebration.

“For instance, on Monday, we had a Shout-Out from a manager who has a picture of a chalkboard that’s in the store. It has different team member names on it with their fastest pizza maker times. Those hourly team members are getting recognized in photos and in Activity posts like that by our managers all the time,” Caleb said.

M&G is also regularly celebrating new team members now. Caleb told us: “We'll post a company-wide News Article or Album that has pictures of our new team members, and it’s a celebration that shows our excitement and welcomes them to our team.”

“All of this recognition and celebration has increased employee engagement and morale, and part-time workers finally feel they are a part of something bigger.”

Solution #4. Important information and knowledge is easy to access and share

M&G is making good use of many features in the Jostle platform to ensure best practices are shared and important documentation is on-hand:

• They’re using News as a central place to share new product information, upcoming promotions, operational goals, HR updates, and training videos. This means updating and training are both efficient and consistent.
• They’re storing essential documents in the easy-to-access Library so team members are no longer wasting frustrating hours hunting for administrative documents or forms from their office and external reps.
• Discussions has become a place for knowledge sharing between the stores. Managers ask each other questions and share best practices or improvements they’ve made at their locations. This means the collaborative knowledge of the company is growing, and operations are improving exponentially, simply by breaking down communication barriers.

“We’ve improved our operational evaluation report (OER) scores by sharing best practices and communicating goals daily,” Caleb told us. “It’s easier than ever to keep everyone up to date with training and urgent updates. One supervisor in particular, who embraced Jostle from the start, currently has one of the highest OER average scores in the entire South Region, as well as the highest OER average score in the history of M&G.”

Results

The improved communication at M&G has revolutionized the way they work. Not only has the richer culture brought people together and given them an understanding of the importance of their place within the company, it’s delivered some hard-hitting results:

• Result #1. Reduced waste by collaborating and providing consistent and efficient training.
• Result #2. Reduced inefficient communication for more time to accommodate 20% PCYA (Percentage Change, versus Year Ago) year-to-date sales increase.
• Result #3. Reinforced people-focused culture to increase employee retention and engagement.
• Result #4. Decreased liability by increasing awareness of safety standards, policies, and procedures.

We’re delighted to see that Jostle is helping M&G improve their business operations and reduce costs. We look forward to seeing and supporting their ongoing progress in the months and years to come.