A School of Continuous Improvement poster interviews 48 new hires and 6 trainers across nine franchise café outlets about passing an onboarding video's brand-enthusiasm check, finding two networks have since doubled the sign-off rather than retire it.
Forty-eight interviews at nine franchise café outlets find the brand-enthusiasm check answered with a rehearsed take, not the checklist it was built to certify
Forty-eight new hires across nine franchise café outlets describe, in their own words, the same short list of ways to get through an onboarding video’s brand-enthusiasm check without doing what its checklist actually asks, the School of Continuous Improvement reports today. None of the four strategies interviewees named involved performing the check’s prescribed cues as trained.
The School treats a rehearsed take as seriously as the policy it evades, and says the interviews bear that out: recruits across unrelated outlets converged, independently, on the same handful of workarounds.
A check survives exactly as long as somebody can find a way to satisfy it without meaning it, and it took us a while to admit that finding one is not the same as fixing anything.
— Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Indicator Commons
Researchers conducted semi-structured interviews of 20 to 35 minutes with new hires and their trainers, coding transcripts independently until no further strategy emerged. The most common, reported by over a third of hires, was mimicking a specific senior colleague’s on-camera manner rather than performing the checklist’s own cues.
Two of the franchise networks in the sample have since moved to an independent second reviewer’s sign-off on every onboarding video before a hire can be rostered, rather than retiring the check. “What the outlets did next wasn’t in our brief, but it’s exactly the kind of question we’d hoped the interviews would raise,” said Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Lecturer and Convenor of Capability Sprints.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.xujcwk.