Our Core Values

 Offering Guests a clean and safe environment is so vital to caring.  

Providing safe, high-quality, craveable food to Guests is a key fundamental in Guest care within the Winning Hearts Every Day strategy. Meeting quality requirements and serving food that is safe to eat all day, every day develops trust with Guests and shows them we care.  

Delivering accurate Guest orders quickly is another Guest care fundamental of the strategy. By executing this fundamental with excellence, we let Guests know we value their time and their business—and fast and accurate service is one reason why Guests keep coming back, specifically in the drive-thru.  

Serving from the heart; treating all Guests with honor, dignity and respect; anticipating their needs; and resolving their problems are just some of the ways to execute on the fourth Customer care focus area.  

Only providing a certain number of these will not lead us to success. For example, providing guests with fast service but the food was not great will not win the hearts of our guests. We will only be successful by completing each and every one of these for our guests. Consistency is key. 

These three fundamentals listed below all support the Winning Hearts Everyday Model. Following the fundamentals will let us provide a Clean and Save Environment, Great Food, Fast and Accurate Service, and Genuine Hospitality. 

Pursuing Mastery means you make a personal choice to learn, grow, and improve daily. You do this by doing the right thing the right way every single time. 

Three Ways to Pursue Mastery:

1. Embrace the goal

You cannot pursue mastery if you do not set goals for yourself or as a team. Setting goals help drive performance. More importantly, it changes the views of team members on certain things. In ways that get them to want to pursue mastery. A huge aspect of embracing the goal is allowing and helping your team get involved around goals. 

2. Train for Success

Training is never a one-and-done task. Training raises the bar to mastery. You can't run a marathon by doing it all at once. You need to take it piece by piece. This is the same thing for training. Taking it slow helps Team Members process what is going on and build on the skills they have already learned. Constantly pushing toward the next thing causes team members to not be able to master certain things due to quickly moving on to the next thing. Let team members master certain things before moving on to other roles. This better prepares them for the next bigger task and helps us produce more strong team members. Narrow team member focuses, provide accountability for them, and provide great resources are all key things that need to be in a successful training program. Using things like pathways and all the resources Chick-fil-A gives us will help our team members pursue mastery as well. 

3. Coach for Life

Coaching is the key to helping team members win. Coaches have the student's best interests always in mind. This is true for life and work. We have to constantly look for new ways to develop and grow our programs and team members. There is no route to pursuing mastery without doing this. We aren't here to hoard talent, we are here to launch leaders. Listen well and let team members think out loud with you. Invest in learning about each team member as well. We want to make it clear to our team members that we are here to help them pursue their own life goals. Finding ways to integrate what we do here with their goals is key to the success of them and our team. 

Notes on Pursuing Mastery:

Practice Makes Perfect. Pursuing Mastery creates better results. Always be intentional with everything that you do.  Creating consistency allows us to give remarkable experiences Consistency is key. 

Owning the numbers means you are able to understand how you and your team are performing over time. Owning the numbers helps you be able to continuously improve. As well as being able to understand how you affect those numbers on a daily basis. Owning the numbers helps our team take ownership into great execution in the business. 

There is an art and a science side of Chick-fil-A for being able to own the numbers. 

Art: 

Being able to look for ways to improve the process and systems that are in place. 

Science:

Being able to follow operational requirements that are given to us. 

Owning the numbers is divided into three different categories: Focus on the Process, Measure what Matters, and Attack the Gaps.

Focus on the Process:

The process is how we create consistency. The process is everywhere and it helps every team member understand how the process helps us own the numbers. Processes lead us to mastery. Create processes to help you and your team understand the numbers better. This helps us identify trends. Simplified processes help our team members so much, especially in getting them engaged in what we are talking about. If you are not focusing on being in the moment and only worrying about what the numbers are going to look like, the numbers will not look great. The only way to be able to provide a clean and safe environment, great food, fast and accurate service, and genuine hospitality you need to be able to stay in the moment and focus on the current processes. Innovating those processes will only make it easier to own the numbers in the end. 

Measure what Matters:

You always want to be able to measure what matters because there are way too many things that can be measured. You can measure just about anything, and having so much will only make it stressful for everyone. Simplifying it and only showing what matters helps team members understand our metrics and what they mean. Simplifying will get the team members to focus on the numbers that make the most impact as well. Everyone needs a scorecard or some way to be able to see how they did that week. For example, in my restaurant, I want to have CEM scores (Customer Experience Model) posted. I want last month's, last week's, and this week's scores to be posted. All in one area that is able to be accessed by our team members. Being able to have this simply shown to our team members will get them more engaged and able to have an idea of what we can improve on. Shown below I also have a spreadsheet that I want to implement that helps us see what we missed, what time, and what area of the restaurant it was in. This will help us identify trends and this is also easily able to be understood by our team members. Making it simple and easily showing what matters to my team will be the key to being able to own the numbers. 

Attack the Gaps:

The goal is to not have any gaps in our processes. We want to be able to do it the right way and everytime. The goal is to be excellent 100% of the time. Obviously we are all human and that is not going to always happen but that is our goal. We use these gaps in our processes as ways to engage our team members. We drive for consistency in our processes and when gaps become out of the normal consistency, it is easy for our team members to identify. We want to create rituals to help close those gaps. As well as be able to help our team members see the root cause of these gaps and how we are able to fix it. A good way to find the root cause to anything in the restaurant is to ask yourself why five times.

Ex: Theres a dessert gap in the food cost in your restaurant. Why is that?

Well looking at inventory we are missing 5 cases of Ice Dream Mix. Why is that?

Well it looks like team members are over portioning ice dream cones. Why is that?

Some team members done know what the portioning size for cones are. Why is that?

Issue: We don't have enough sidekicks or ways to inform team members of portion sizes.

Solution: Add more sidekicks as well as weigh the cones for practice. 

This method can be used thought the entire restaurant in anything. I you keep asking why and dig a little deeper into what is going on, you will eventually hit the root cause like you can see in the example above. 

It is not about doing more, it is about getting as much out of what you are already doing. Being able to innovate and get more out of our current systems is what will make us excellent as well as become the most caring company in our community. 

Ex: How do we get more from the Winning Hearts Everyday Strategy?