If there ever was a case study worth watching, it was the ‘Big Chef takes on Little Chef’ show on Channel 4. For a proper TV review click here. Our interest was the business angle!

Little Chef is at the commodity end of the food chain. Heston Blumenthal is one of the best chefs in the world. His business, the Fat Duck, was awarded, ‘Best Restaurant in the World’. This is niche!

The task of updating one with the values of the other is possibly an impossibility. Little Chef customers don’t dine at the Fat Duck, and visa versa!

However, the interesting outcome of the project was that the Little Chef staff slowly came out of their microwave food server mentality and started to have a passion for food. This demonstrates why deskilling a role is so bad. Staff in any company want to feel valued. If a task is so simple that a monkey with a thinking defect can do it – how does that effect staff member’s self worth?

Sometimes, it pays to keep a role a little special. Tasks which have no skills connected to them, can be done by anyone. If anyone can do the task, why bother making an effort? The end result is the lack of service that used to be called a ‘McJob’.

Mc Donalds recognised this problem a number of years ago, and have developed training programs and set guidelines to keep their staff motivated.

Smaller companies which just keep an eye on the bottom line, might just miss the tell tale signs of employing monkeys. They may be cheap, but they don’t really do much for a long term future!