Keeping consistency across multiple locations

The more you expand your business and the more locations you open, the harder it is to ensure consistency. Without consistency across all of your locations, your brand can be damaged and customer experience can suffer. So how can you ensure that your business and your brand is the same across all of your locations? Let’s find out.

Maintain clear policies and procedures

Your policies and procedures govern the way the business operates and the way each staff member works every day. They let your team know what is expected of them and ensure that all operations are running the way you want them to be. For example, your policies and procedures might inform your team of how to greet a customer, what their work uniform should be or what systems they are required to use and how to use them. When every team member is aware of and understands their responsibilities when working for your business, you are more likely to achieve operational consistency across your network. 

Smarter ways of notifying of changes 

When you make any changes to operations or your brand that may affect the way your team and your locations are to operate, it’s really important that your team is aware of the changes. Too often, the way we notify our team about crucial changes is via email, a simple intranet post and through sheer hope they will know about the changes. That might be okay for minor changes, but it sure isn’t good for business critical changes! There are smarter ways to notify your team of operational changes. With Op Central, you can tack ‘required reading’ onto your news articles so you never have to worry about manually notifying your team about changes again. And for those more business critical changes such as rebranding or urgent safety changes, you can update those changes in a policy and set extra verification options such as a simple “I have read and understood” or even a quick quiz. Both notification options give you the piece of mind that all of your locations are operating in sync and are all up-to-date with any changes when they occur. 

Audit locations using self-auditing functions

After outlining your policies and procedures and notifying everyone of the changes, the next step is to audit your locations. Over recent years, the idea of physically going out to each and every location has become less and less feasible. An excellent alternative to this is self-auditing. Self-audits give your managers/franchisees the opportunity to perform audits of their own locations. While this alternative might be a scary thought and seem like it could be a breeding ground for non-compliance, with Op Central’s auditing tools, you can always be sure you are getting accurate submissions. With authentication tools such as restricting file upload to camera and time and geo stamping, there is no room for inaccurate submissions. You can also add weighting to your questions to ensure the more important items are being treated as such. With these smart auditing functions, you can have confidence that each of your locations is operating as it should.

Report on outcomes

Finally, you will need to take a look at reporting. It’s all good and well to mark your policies as required reading and to create audits for your team to complete, but if you aren’t actually reporting on those things, all of that data goes to waste and you can’t be assured that consistency is being maintained. With real-time reporting and custom reports, you can easily see how compliant your team and your locations are with any operational changes that you have made. After gathering and analysing the data, you can make more informed decisions and take immediate action if necessary.

Gain assurance over operational consistency with Op Central’s versatile operations management system. Schedule a live demo with an expert on keeping things consistent, today.