I’ve felt that if you dwell too much on your errors, you’re dealing in the negativity of things.  I don’t like that.  I’d rather work on the positive reinforcement, the things I did well.”    Hale Irwin

Do Your Tools Reinforce your Culture?

Most good people managers will tell you that they get more out of their people when they make a point of rewarding achievement and selling the “why” when assigning projects and work.  Including people in the vision, lining them up with work that plays into their strengths and acknowledging benchmarks and achievements will more often than not get you desired results.  Using fear, negativity and punishment to admonish employees will burn out the ones most capable of finding other jobs (your best people) and create a sad culture where people point fingers and make excuses for fear of accounting for a mistake.  As Action Card prepares to go live in New Orleans at the end of this month, this dynamic weighs heavily on our minds.  We wanted to create an application that helped franchisors collaborate with their owners, communicate more effectively with them and draw them into the process of running more effective businesses.  We wanted to make an app that helped identify candidates that deserved recognition at your annual convention or consideration for your Franchise Committee.  Taking the subjectivity out of your franchise evaluation process was paramount.

Audit Vs. Review

Language matters.  Would you rather be audited or reviewed?  IRS agents audit people and those audits are  universally accepted as negative events.  Do they ever find that you are owed money by the government?  Reviews are more collaborative and that is what Action Card was built to do.  In order to differentiate Action Card from punitive audit tools, we wanted to ensure that the person being reviewed had the opportunity to log-in to the platform, respond and reconcile criteria that requires action and by streamlining the paper-review process, spend more time interacting with their franchise field support person to discuss revenue-driving activities and building relationships.  How does this relate to the power of recognition and positive reinforcement?  If your franchise brand standards review process is done on paper, entered in excel, e-mailed to someone and stored on a shared drive somewhere, chances are you are not doing much with the information collected on-site with your owner, whether it’s acting on areas that need improvement or documentation of achievement and performance.  Action Card solves this problem by allowing franchise owners instant access to their reviews on-line.  They can see where you’ve found areas they excel in that will fortify your recognition programs.   Areas where something needs to be taken care of can be easily accessed, reconciled and notifications are sent to anyone that needs to see that.

How am I Doing?

Recognition and achievement are typically framed in terms of how a person is doing compared to their peers.  One of the tools built into Action Card is a robust reporting mechanism that allows administrators the ability to compare the average scores of locations, regions and even analyze specific review criteria.  This analysis can help franchsiors determine where their training programs need bolstering and what areas of instruction and compliance need more attention.  It also helps quickly identify at-risk owners as well as ones who should be getting awards at your annual franchise convention.  People will handle constructive criticism well if it’s based on objective criteria and presented with solutions.  After all, your brand standards should directly tie into revenue generation and that should not be a tough sell to your owners.  Providing your people the ability to more efficiently conduct your franchise site reviews on a tablet frees them up more to interact with your owners.  Empowering them with the ability to store photos and content will also free up your franchisee liaisons to coach more and administrate less and that is what leadership is all about..