Dunkin' Donuts and Domino's Pizza share the same requirement for success: Provide a high-quality product at impressive speed. Domino's guarantees a hot, tasty pizza delivered to your doorstep as soon as possible. Dunkin' Donuts promises fresh doughnuts every four hours and fresh coffee every 18 minutes. To meet this requirement, both fast-food companies face the same training challenge:
Train a very young (typically aged 18 to 21) and inexperienced workforce to meet rigorous performance standards. Both companies must train in an industry where turnover averages 300 to 400 percent yearly and where company locations are widely dispersed. Domino's operates 3,800 stores throughout the United States and seven foreign countries; Dunkin' Donuts has 1,400 shops spanning the United States and 12 foreign countries.
The two companies approach this training challenge with a highly decentralized training function. At Domino's Pizza, 85 percent of a nonsupervisory employee's training occurs on the job and is provided by the store manager or franchise owner. Each employee is usually trained to fill most of the shop's five hourly jobs (order taker, pizza maker, oven tender, router, and driver), which helps during rush hours when a crew member doesn't appear for work. Performance standards are demanding; the order taker must answer a call within three rings and take the order within 45 seconds. The pizza maker must make the pizza and place it in the oven within one minute. The oven tender must take one pizza out while putting another one in within five seconds and cut and box the pizza by the count of 15. Domino's encourages dedication to speed by keeping tabs on the fastest service and delivery times reported by its stores and publishing them as "box scores" in The Pepperoni Press, the company newspaper. Although the bulk of training is on the job far away from corporate headquarters, Domino's corporate training staff maintains some control over training by providing a variety of training aids. The staff makes available to shop management 14 videotapes (with instructor's manuals) on such tasks as delivery, dough management, image, and pizza making.
Each shop is equipped with a VCR. The videos are upbeat, fast-moving, and musical (MTV-style) with a heavy dose of comedy geared to its high school and college-aged audience. Young Domino's employees play the roles in the videos.

Questions

1. What are the strengths and shortcomings of a decentralized approach to training managers and hourly employees? Discuss.

2. Develop a plan for determining the training needs of the hourly paid staff of a Domino’s Pizza franchise.

3. In your opinion, why was the turnover rate among management trainees in Dunkin’ Donuts’ centralized program so high?