Taking a challenger approach to drive deep organisational culture change

Client: KFC (UK & Ireland)

Challenge

Although KFC was a much-loved brand, there appeared to be a growing disconnect between the brand experience at marketing communications level and the experience in its restaurants. KFC approached us with the challenge of transforming the 27,000 team members who work in its restaurants into powerful brand ambassadors. The fast-food chain wanted to ensure staff were happy and feeling good each day, confident that happier, more engaged teams would lead to a better restaurant experience and happier, more loyal customers.

Solution

Our work with KFC helped to define what truly motivates people to perform and to galvanise the business to build a culture that would spill over the restaurant counter, a culture that team members and guests would enjoy together. The project also enabled the Marketing and People teams to hunt as a pack and to deliver a vision for a distinctively KFC brand experience together.

We immersed ourselves in KFC’s existing team member experience with two days of in-restaurant training at a local branch and by attending KFC’s RGM fest — their staff annual conference. We then held stakeholder interviews with thirteen of the senior leadership to really understand and get clarity on the cultural challenge facing KFC.

We then worked with a cross-functional team from KFC including its franchisees to create a new vision for the restaurants that team members could adopt and rally around. This centred on the belief that ‘the right way isn’t always easy, but it’s always better’ — a line inspired by a quote from KFC’s founder, Colonel Sanders.

We ran a series of workshops to generate ideas for a revamped team member experience and drew stimulus and inspiration from categories including theme park resorts and luxury hotels to reimagine KFC’s customer service experience.

A key insight was to think about the brand being in service of the team and customer, rather than the other way around. This provided an important lens for the team to frame questions and filter the ideas generated in the workshops.

Results

We’ve given KFC the tools to build and foster a strong challenger culture across the organisation. ‘We Care Hard’ — a new people manifesto to help galvanise teams in-store and across the business. A compelling new training platform has brought teams and the training experience closer to the KFC brand world and an innovative team member app to build and enhance relationships one-to-one with individual team members is in development. We’ve helped KFC start the journey of creating a happier place for team members and restaurant managers to work, which means happier customers, and the opportunities for a healthier bottom line.