Workday and KFC

How KFC Drives Restaurant Performance by Elevating the Employee Voice

What KFC Needed

The number one thing KFC wanted to do was give its team members a voice. The organisation’s transformation couldn’t be driven by a top-down approach. It needed to be the voices of team members telling the organisation what was working and what needed to change. KFC was looking for a way to make its people strategy much more agile, which is why it chose Workday Peakon Employee Voice.

Why Workday Peakon Employee Voice

• Ease of use. Simple user interface for employees and managers to log in, answer questions and comments, and navigate around the dashboard.
• Analytics. Overview, benchmarks, priorities and actions. No need to analyse the data because the system does it automatically based on employee participation and answers.
• Forward-looking. KFC is already planning projects for this year and next based on insights that the organisation wouldn’t have if it wasn’t using Workday Peakon Employee Voice.

How Workday Peakon Employee Voice Helped

• Connected feedback to action. Employees can see that Workday Peakon Employee Voice is driving action, creating more motivation to provide regular feedback.
• Shaped management best practices. Workday Peakon Employee Voice helps to identify excellence based on team engagement, and share those lessons with the rest of the business.
• Articulated engagement ROI. KFC has established a correlation between engagement, guest experience and sales performance within all UK and Ireland restaurants.
• Dispelled myths about what’s working. “We thought onboarding was one of our biggest opportunities, but Workday Peakon Employee Voice showed us we actually need to focus on employees at the 1- to 2-year mark.”

Growth and Impact

• 12% increase in engagement across the organisation since 2019.
• 85% completion rate across 960 restaurants.
• 1.1 increase (0–10 scale) in restaurant manager engagement across 1,000+ locations after only 10 months of launching a training program based on Workday Peakon Employee Voice insights.

How KFC uses Workday Peakon Employee Voice on a day-to-day basis.

How do restaurant employees access Workday Peakon Employee Voice?

Engagement surveys coincide with periodic company communications, providing an opportunity to talk directly with team members. Teams are encouraged to fill out their surveys on their phone or learning zone laptops.

How do managers make use of the insights from Workday Peakon Employee Voice?

Each manager does it differently, but what’s most important is that everyone makes time for it – and it’s working. Managers decide on the best approach for how their team completes the survey, which has led to a completion rate of 88%. Excellence is out there if you give managers the freedom to find it – and then share that story when it works well.

How does Workday Peakon Employee Voice help the director of People & Culture?

Workday Peakon Employee Voice allows the management team to include feedback from team members when planning new projects. In the past, planning was based on outdated annual feedback, gut feel or individual opinion. Now, transformation is driven by insights that come directly from team members across KFC.

What does the future for KFC look like with Workday Peakon Employee Voice?

Workday Peakon Employee Voice allows KFC to drive much faster transformation. In the past, strategies were planned a year in advance; now it's possible to go into the year without having all of the answers, because the company can adapt the strategy based on feedback from team members across the organisation.

What advice would KFC give to other hospitality companies?

If companies think about how much they value customer insights, that is how they will feel about the employee voice once Workday Peakon Employee Voice is implemented. If organisations have any ambition of transforming the guest experience, it starts with their teams, and Workday Peakon Employee Voice is the platform for providing that transformation.