How Domino's Pizza Overcame Communication, Operational Challenges
Time is of the essence throughout our organization, from our corporate offices, to our brick and mortar stores, to our courier vehicles. Each and every minute counts. Monitoring the temperature of melting cheese to perfection, ensuring timely deliveries, deploying payroll, and dealing with scheduling issues all require rapid communication among our employees. As global leaders in the pizza delivery industry, Domino's Pizza is constantly looking for new ways to incorporate new, efficient technologies to improve these processes without sacrificing quality customer service.
When our executive team sat down to consider ways in which we could better motivate and connect our dispersed teams through emerging technology, it became clear that mobile workforce digitization was our best path forward. Our high level goal for the mobile workforce initiative was to create a space where employees at all levels within our region could connect with one another, as well as gain quick access to the workflow, operations, and HR tools that keep things running smoothly.
Before partnering with Beekeeper to implement our digital workplace app, DominosTalk, we faced many communications and operations challenges that prevented us from achieving the efficiency and sales numbers every member of our organization knew we were capable of. Prior to adopting Beekeeper, we relied on our HR department to deploy and relay all company announcements through store managers, printed memos, and bulletin boards. Once these announcements were deployed, it was difficult to field any follow-up questions from our dispersed employee base, and it was also tough to even confirm that all team members received the message in the first place. While store managers used WhatsApp to communicate, they had no direct contact to other store associates and couriers. By the time couriers received messages after being on the road, the messages were often not up to date anymore. In an industry where timing can make or break a customer experience, communication gaps like this can take a massive toll on productivity.
Once we decided to virtually unify our stores with DominosTalk, Beekeeper worked closely with us to address each challenge we faced in the realms of messaging and operations. Beekeeper helped us distribute training videos and onboarding tools to store managers, who then shared these materials along with usage and fairplay guidelines to their individual stores.
During this stage, Beekeeper also helped establish usage expectations, teaching employees best practices on how quickly they should be expected to respond to inbound messages, and how to deal with inbound messages off the clock. While the learning curve for digital workplace onboarding was slightly steeper for older employees with less digital experience, our Beekeeper representatives made themselves available to guide our teams to success regardless of technical experience.
As mentioned, one of our primary goals with the Beekeeper initiative was to streamline operations practices so that all Domino’s locations in our region could unify under one digital roof. While our prior payroll system was time consuming and cumbersome, Beekeeper’s operations integrations suite has allowed us to digitize the whole process. Within DominosTalk, payslips are now accessible to employees with a single click.
Our digital workplace hub also allows us to easily distribute contracts, shift schedules, and workflows across our organization, helping frontline employees at our stores stay connected with our corporate office. We are also able to send confirmation campaigns, meaning that we are able to instantly see which employees have read and confirmed comprehension. In addition, payroll, scheduling, and any HR-related requests can all be accessed with a Single Sign-On. In the future, we hope to implement an “Employee Happiness” chatbot, helping us measure workforce satisfaction over time.
Another high level goal with the digital workplace integration was to increase motivation through transparent and positive communication. Connecting our corporate desk employees directly to team members across all locations increased motivation tremendously. Whereas before managers could not congratulate employees directly on strong sales numbers, our leadership teams can now validate crew members with a photo and a positive message. Having instant access to one another, employees can quickly swap sales numbers to keep the momentum going until goals are met.
