Franchisees face a number of unique challenges, including the difficulty of developing a strategic partnership with their franchisees, and ensuring standardization of their banner's recipe across the network. One of the means many franchisors use is to call their franchisees to quarterly or annual meetings. Whether this is a mutual obligation or a voluntary initiative on the part of the franchisor, it is difficult to stimulate the willingness of franchisees to attend and, above all, to optimize their added value for all. Neuroscience has inspired some easy-to-implement strategies for doing just that.
All in good time!
Many franchisors are used to structuring the content of their meetings with an eye to how they will appear to their franchisees, and with the aim of covering as many topics as possible. Franchisees' time is precious, and these meetings are costly. They therefore give priority to communicating their successes, the evolution of the banner, comparative results and so on. Yet neuroscience tells us that the more new and complex information is for our brains, the more energy it requires to process it, since it requires the creation of new circuits in our brains. Informative and habitual content requires little energy, since we can find similar experiences or data in our memory to which we can relate. It should therefore be scheduled at times when the brain is more tired. Complex content, such as network challenges and the search for solutions, training content, forthcoming major changes, etc., should be planned so as to be presented when the brain is perfectly rested.
The myth of themes
Many franchisors give a theme to each of their meetings, around which they build all their content. For example, there's franchisee autonomy, standardization of services, evolution of the business model, and so on. This approach involves a number of elements that do not optimize the real impact on the network: retention and use of content presented in this way fade over time. For our brains to retain as much content as possible, it's important that they encode it in such a way that it's easily accessible afterwards. Yet statistics do not prove the effectiveness of current learning transfer methods: only 47% of people feel they apply their learning in the workplace immediately after training. The figure is 12% after six months and 9% a year later[1]. To boost the return on investment (ROI) of franchisor/franchisee meetings, here are some tactics inspired by neuroscience, and more specifically by the AGES model(Attention, Generation, Emotion, Spacing).
Attention
Attention is needed to stimulate learning. It's hard to keep people's attention for more than 20 minutes, and in such a technological world, many stimuli disturb franchisees right into the meeting rooms. Since quarterly meetings normally last one day, while on an annual basis they stretch from 2 to 3 days[2], it's important to find ways of stimulating interest throughout the convention. It's most effective to officially ask everyone to turn off their cell phones, while offering periods for taking e-mails during the day. Otherwise, many will think they're being more effective by sorting out a few things by e-mail while listening to the content being transmitted. Despite the fashion for multitasking, studies show a huge loss of performance the moment a person's attention is divided between two or more tasks. Another tactic is to vary content transmission strategies so as to involve participants as much as possible: insert co-development or networking periods, avoid long speeches, divide the transmission of content between several people, including experts, encourage experience sharing and interactivity by interspersing theoretical content with, for example, presentations of franchisee success stories, and get franchisees to come up with ideas for problems in the form of experiential activities - by immersing them, in a playful way, in a world of healthy competition (competition generates attention).
Generation
Our memory is made up of multiple microconnections that enable us to refer to our memories. In fact, many items are filed away in such a way as to make it easy to find the relevant information when the time comes. Any new information we find relevant will be added to this web of data for future use. The more value franchisees place on content, the more they'll be able to link it to the data currently embedded in their brains. So think of content in terms of what would be of maximum use to franchisees, not just in terms of what you find important to you.
Emotion
There's a strong correlation between the vividness of memory and the emotions generated by an event[3 ]. Many franchisors use fear to generate this emotion by, for example, giving statistics relating to the most alarming elements in the market, the competition or the network's performance. While this does indeed work as a tactic, generating a positive emotion would be far more effective, since at root we feel more committed when we perceive recognition and are directly rewarded. Make your meetings fun and enjoyable by turning the more negative information into opportunities for workshops to generate ideas and get franchisees to make connections between the content and what they experience in their daily lives. You can also bring in an inspirational speaker to mobilize franchisees and get them to roll up their sleeves, which may well leave a better-quality emotional trail.
Spacing
For greater effectiveness, studies show that spacing out the periods during which content is transmitted, rather than concentrating it in a single meeting, has a significant impact on retention. Separating the main topics of your convention into blocks dealing with different content over the course of the day, or over the 3 days of the convention, would therefore be far more effective than dealing with the subject on a single occasion. There are no studies to say exactly what the ideal time between each moment when the subject is discussed would be, but overall, any spacing of content is more beneficial than none at all. The brain then has more time to assimilate, generate the connections needed to understand and retain messages. Here are a few suggestions: send content to be read before conventions, break up the content and spread it out over the schedule, plan a follow-up strategy over time with management consultants, and at future communications or meetings, take advantage of the opportunity to provide feedback and thus hammer home the message.
In short, the more your meetings are designed in line with the natural functioning of our brain, the more franchisees will use it in their daily lives over the long term, and the ROI will be optimized as a result.
Sylvie Grégoire, MBA, CHRP
President, Totem performance organisationelle
©2016 All rights reserved
[1]http://www.affairesrh.ca/gestionnaires/solutions-gestion/fiche.aspx?p=433839
[2] http://www.franchising.com/articles/maximizing_the_benefits_of_your_franchisee_convention.html
[3] Dr. Lila Davachi, Dr. Tobias Kiefer, Dr. David Rock and Lisa Rocks, NeuroLeadership Journal, Learning that lasts throught AGES, 2010
Article published on the CQF website on 18/08/2016
