Organizational+Analysis

Boston Pizza is a successful North American corporation, operating as a casual dining restaurant and sports bar in one. This concept attracts a large number of customers with varying demographics: from families to teenagers to young and older adults. In 1964, Gus Agioritis opened the very first Boston Pizza location in Edmonton, Alberta. With continued success, the Greek immigrant quickly expanded his business. In 1983 Treliving and Melville bought 44 locations and created more franchises. (Boston Pizza Inc., 2009). Today, there are over 300 franchise locations in Canada, and about 60 locations in the United States. (Wikipedia, 2009). As a publicly traded company, Boston Pizza’s stock price as of February 13, 2009 is $8.63 CAD. (ADVFN, 2009). “It took 12 years for the Boston Pizza chain to grow from $25 million in annual system sales to $100 million in 1995. Five years later the chain had reached $200 million in annual system sales and in 2007 it surpassed $755 million in annual system sales. Growth has been accelerating, and management believes that the necessary conditions exist to continue the level of growth achieved over recent years as the strength of the Boston Pizza brand continues to grow.” (Boston Pizza Inc., 2009). By reading the distinguished slogan, “You’re among friends at Boston Pizza”, it is clear that maintaining a relaxed, comfortable, team-based atmosphere and achieving high customer satisfaction is very important for this large successful restaurant chain. Boston Pizza’s corporate mission statement highlights their values: “To be a world class franchisor through selecting and training people to profitably manage an outstanding foodservice business. To achieve this goal we are innovative and responsive in our approach in business. We work as a team providing attention to detail but never losing sight of the larger picture. We recognize the need to provide leadership in all areas of operations, marketing and restaurant development.” (Boston Pizza Inc., 2009) Boston Pizza’s third pillar of strategies to success expresses their “commitment to continually improve the Guest experience.” (Boston Pizza Inc., 2009). Without positive customer feedback in the service industry, there is no way the company could continue being profitable. In the absence of the third pillar, the first two pillars to success would not be achievable; these two pillars are the “commitment to continually enhance the Boston Pizza brand and commitment to Franchisee profitability” (Boston Pizza Inc., 2009). The company further credits its success to serving food with exceptional quality at a great value, its ability to work effectively with partners, and it’s ability to recognize that to gratify the customer’s expectations, workers need to think like them. It is very important for such a large company to practice ethical standards and to avoid discriminating against individuals based on culture, age, gender, sexual orientation, racial and ethnic background and mental and physical disability. Photos on Boston Pizza’s website reflect on Canada’s cultural mosaic, where workers and customers from different backgrounds are pictured happily interacting. Adhering to legislation, recognizing diversity and being an equal opportunity employer is important for Boston Pizza’s family/team environment approach. “Canada is no longer a two-language nation; millions of Canadians have neither English nor French as their language of origin. Today, almost five million Canadians are referred to as allophones, which literally means “other speaking”.” (Schwind, 2007, p.22) Having teams comprised of employees from various backgrounds with different perspectives allows Boston Pizza to be at an advantage, allowing them to build stronger relationships with their diverse customers. Establishing customer relationships and maintaining customer loyalty through excellent service is crucial to the success of a business in the service industry. The general consensus of the public’s perception on Boston Pizza’s organizational practices is quite positive. Overall, Boston Pizza’s continued profitability hint at its exceptional practices and organizational effectiveness.

The organization analysis is only the first step in the whole training needs analysis (TNA) process, which includes three levels of analysis in total: (1) job analysis (2) operational analysis - which in most cases corresponds to the job analysis process and (3) personal – which is focused on individual employees analysis. A TNA is important and could have a crucial role when a performance gap significantly affects the health of the organization. It ultimately helps organizations understand the root cause of the gap and eventually to formulate the most suitable training to eliminate the gap. A TNA also assists in correcting performance problems and in determining those employees who require the training, as training should be provided only to those who require it as a correction in job performance. Thus, a TNA will help an organization appropriately invest resources in training to those who will truly receive benefits from it, allowing the Company to be both effective and efficient. Despite its importance, a TNA is not always necessary. There will be cases in which – given the specific needs and problems of the organization - a TNA would not necessarily be beneficial for the organization. The organizational analysis should include information about the Company’s mission and goals; it should examine the Company’s internal environment (such as policies), corporate structures and in general all the factors that could potentially improve or inhibit an employee’s ability to meet job performance expectations. The organizational analysis for Boston Pizza will commence with an examination of its mission, goals and strategy. As previously mentioned, Boston Pizza International is a large franchise-driven restaurant company based across Canada. The Company is trying to expand the business in other cities within North America in order to capture a greater market share. The mission of the company clearly focuses on reaching a classy and outstanding level in the foodservice businesses worldwide, by selecting and training the best people. Management believes that selecting the best people will facilitate the aforementioned goal. For example, the Company’s mission statement states: “To be a classy world franchisor through selecting and training people to profitably manage an outstanding foodservice business. To achieve this goal we are innovative and responsive in our approach in business. We work as a stream providing attention to detail but never losing sight of the larger picture. We recognize the need to provide leadership in all areas of operations, marketing and restaurant development”. Boston Pizza’s mission reveals management’s belief that the key to success is the people in the company. Thus, management pays a significant amount of attention to the selection and training of employees, ensuring that the best personnel are working for the Company, and therefore providing an excellent service to customers. The Boston Pizza strategy focuses on three main pillars: (1) Commitment to enhance the Boston Pizza brand (2) Commitment to franchise profitability and (3) Commitment to improve the Guest experience. In order to achieve this three pillar strategy, Boston Pizza believes that selecting high skilled personnel with passion and motivation in their jobs is the key. A discrepancy in the food serving process by some of the employees, is an alert warning that maybe some members of the staff lack basic KSAs in order to succeed and perform at the expected level. The majority of the complaints from customers are related to the slow table serving, implying the low quality of the service itself and the fact that food gets cold when it finally reaches customers’ tables most of the times. The growth plan of the Company gives us an idea of the number of human resources involved in the Boston Pizza business. For example, the plan mentions that 38 million customers are served all over the Country and the goal of opening 30-35 new restaurants across Canada with 16,000 employees hired between all the locations. An through examination of the human resources of the Company - which refers to the level of the KSAs employees working for Boston Pizza - has to be conducted to understand what kind of training employees require and whether they actually need it. In addition, the examination will determine if the performance gap in serving food is correctable through training. If it is not correctable, the Company must choose between a range of other solutions, like changing the job, job aiding, transfer employees and in the worst cases termination of the personnel. An analysis related to the policies of the Company and reward system should be made to managers, supervisors and incumbents in order to understand if this eventually affects employees in their job performance. Questions should be asked if incumbents are aware of what level of job performance is expected of them, and if they receive appropriate feedback in order to determine if their job performance is acceptable and how it can be improved. Boston Pizza’s mission and objectives can be summed up as “commitment to improve the Guest experience”. Customer satisfaction is crucial in giving the right feedback to the management level, and as a result of many complaints, an investigation between customers, employees and managers has to be done, by using specific surveys and interviews focused on understanding the nature of the gap.