As the owner of a franchise, you’ll have to spend a lot of time supporting your franchisees. While your franchise package should provide many details on brand guidelines, rules and more, you’ll also need to provide advice, particularly when new franchisees are onboarding.
One major issue that many fledgling franchisees might need assistance with is dealing with employee disputes.
Here are some practical ways that franchise owners can help franchisees to deal with employees issues.
Assess the situation
The first step in assisting your franchisee with their employee dispute is to assess the situation. Make sure that your franchisee is abiding by all relevant employment laws and that they have not infringed on their rights at work. If you find that they have done something wrong, then you need to work with them to fix the situation as soon as possible. If the employer is not at fault, then you need to speak to them about how to handle the situation and the options that they have. It might be that the situation is easy to deal with, and the employer has simply not worded their past responses correctly. Alternatively, it could be that they need to make a difficult decision about how to displine the employee and encourage them to behave better in the future.
Offer to sit in on meetings with them
As an experienced business leader managing a franchise, you have the knowledge and skills to step in and support your franchisees with employee disputes. Set up a meeting between the employee and the franchisee and sit in on it. Advise the franchisee before the meeting and offer them some tips, then step in during the meeting if and when you feel it’s appropriate. Only step in when required so that the franchisee can learn and improve their communication skills.
Discuss settlement options
In some extreme cases, you might need to consider legal recourse to deal with the dispute. This might mean working with your lawyer to ensure that the franchise is not violating employment laws in any way. For more serious cases, you might want to consider exploring a settlement agreement. Settlement agreements are legally binding contracts between employers and former employees and help you to avoid a lengthy legal battle. Employment law experts Davenport Solicitors can help you to understand settlements agreements and set them up if required.
Offer advice to improve employee culture in the future
The best way to avoid future employees issues for franchisees is to help them improve their business’s internal culture. Consider offering your future and existing franchisees seminars, advice or digital resources to help them to bolster their cultures. It would help if you also considered monitoring employee satisfaction among your franchises to ensure that employees working under your brand name feel supported and get access to the friendly, supportive culture that you want to promote. After all, a poor corporate culture in one part of your franchise will affect your whole brand, so you need to ensure that you work closely with your franchisees to improve the cultures in their part of your organisation.
Supporting franchisees is a key part of managing a growing franchise. This article should help you to understand how to assist a franchisee who is struggling with an employee dispute and ensure that the situation doesn’t escalate.
