By Jeff Salter
Franchising can combine the best of both worlds: it provides franchisees with the opportunity to become business owners, while the franchisor’s proven business model works as a roadmap to help ensure success.
But the fact that a franchise has multiple business owners located in various territories means that franchisors can’t always control the message or the quality of the product or service being delivered, and it can be difficult to disseminate information and maintain a cohesive company culture.
That’s why establishing ongoing education and training for your franchisees and their employees can make it easier for you to preserve brand standards throughout the system. Training is also important in improving franchise owner and employee satisfaction.
For too many companies, training is limited to the onboarding process but isn’t revisited often enough to be effective. In a franchising system, failure to provide ongoing training may lead to inconsistencies in the quality of work and tried and true processes are forgotten. Additionally, a franchisee’s knowledge of their industry can begin plateau.
A franchisor’s failure to provide ongoing training to its franchise owners also sets a poor example. If franchisees aren’t given educational opportunities on a regular basis, chances are they won’t be motivated to provide ongoing training to their own employees.
Enhancing Your Franchise’s Performance
While the failure rate for a franchised business is much lower than the failure rate of an independent small business, the number one reason why franchisees fail is because they aren’t properly managing their business using the franchisor’s established operating techniques.
As a franchisor, one of your most important duties is to provide your franchise owners with the tools they need to succeed, and this includes regular training to help them maintain brand consistency.
Keeping your franchisees up to date on the latest best practices, sales techniques and compliance issues is one of the best ways they can enhance their performance levels.
In addition, it’s imperative that you keep your franchise owners trained on any centralized technologies you may provide to help them improve sales or enhance customer service. Whether you use a companywide customer relationship management (CRM) system or your technical team has developed an application to help manage your employees, if your franchisees aren’t using it effectively, it can result in an inability to thrive.
Ongoing training programs also help you build a stronger partnership with your franchise owners. Hosting regular educational sessions in person or via the internet keeps you in contact with your team and helps you strengthen your relationship through collaboration and consistency.
It also sets a positive example about the benefits of ongoing education and encourages your franchise owners to roll out their own training programs for their employees.
Training Helps Franchisees Value Employees
When asked what issues are important to them in the workplace, most employees regularly say that they want more training and greater advancement opportunities.
Franchisors can help their franchisees train their employees by offering certification programs to both franchise owners and their employees that serve to recognize and celebrate locations that exceed operational standards or business values.
By developing a catalog of tools, training and processes that support your franchise’s operational methodologies, franchisors can encourage franchisee owners and their staff to better understand their roles, improve their leadership abilities and provide a standard of customer service that should be implemented across all franchise locations.
At Caring Senior Service, we have developed our GreatCare® method of delivering care. This methodology addresses the three most important areas of concern: quality caregivers, care solutions and active involvement, and is taught and reinforced through a certification program that is offered to both franchise owners and their employees through separate tracks.
To achieve the GreatCare® Master Certification, participants must complete a progressive program that begins with the certified level, moves to the advanced level and then culminates at the master level. All franchise locations that achieve these milestones are celebrated and recognized.
Ongoing educational programs like the GreatCare® certification program provide franchise owners and their employees an opportunity to improve their knowledge, which gives them the confidence to positively impact their performance and ability to improve their skills.
Employees who don’t perform certain tasks on a regular basis often lose these skills. By offering annual training for your franchise owners, you can help them refresh their employees’ forgotten competencies and give them the professional development they need to feel competent and successful.
Training Improves Employee Retention
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce notes that many of its member companies often state that they are facing unprecedented labor shortages in nearly all sectors. That means that most businesses are struggling to keep the employees they have.
One of the ways employees feel valued is when employers provide educational opportunities. A 2022 survey of more than 1,200 employees conducted by The Conference Board showed that 58% of employees said they would leave their company if it failed to provide them with training opportunities.
If a franchisor wants its franchise locations to remain successful, helping them develop ongoing training programs and opportunities for career advancement will help them retain their top talent.
Franchisors should consider holistic employee retention programs which their franchise owners can implement that include a variety of benefits, but training should be an essential part of any retention package.
Training is a critical part of any franchisor-franchisee relationship because it helps the franchise owners run their business successfully. But it also serves as encouragement to franchise owners to provide training programs of their own for their location employees.
Franchisors can go a step further and help their franchisees provide companywide training programs that prove to workers they are valued and translates into improved employee skillsets and retention rates.
Caring Senior Service founder & CEO Jeff Salter began his career in senior care in 1991 working for a home health care agency in Odessa, Texas. Four months later, he started his own senior care service to provide seniors with the non-medical care they need to stay at home. In 2003, Caring Senior Service began offering franchises and today has locations in more than 50 markets nationwide. For more information on Caring Senior Service, please visit https://www.caringseniorservice.com/.