Naba Ahmed
February 20, 2024
At the heart of restaurant group Din Tai Fung‘s success lies a commitment to innovation. This ethos extends beyond their culinary expertise to every aspect of their operation, including employee training. Under the guidance of Ernie Zavaleta, Head of HR at Din Tai Fung, the company sought to improve its training approach with Prezi. What began as a rediscovery of Prezi quickly evolved into upgrading training modules and presentations across the organization.
Articulating ideas better with Prezi
Ernie recently rediscovered Prezi and decided to use it to create a welcome Din Tai Fung training module competency series. That’s where he received an overwhelmingly positive response. Afterward, he urged the company to invest in the software because “Prezi helps him to articulate ideas”. This would provide the solution for what they were looking for.
The Din Tai team was looking for a tool to:
1) support their creation and retention of training modules;
2) create presentations for upper management and department meetings;
3) elevate aesthetics on how they present to their restaurant managers, operation leaders, and prospective and new hires.
Ultimately, Prezi was the answer to their question and offered the features and functionalities needed to easily create impactful presentations. “Especially with training, it’s helpful to start with the Prezi presentation overview to organize my thoughts and then break them down into topics and subtopics. It helps to organize content and present it in a straightforward fashion,” Ernie said
Empowering presentation excellence
The company has taken to Prezi quickly, so much so that Justine Eulloqui, Training Coordinator, and Lauren Ramirez, Risk Administrator, have become the unofficial Prezi experts. They both are responsible for creating training materials and presentations in Prezi.
Justine shares they opted to move toward Prezi because “One, Prezi doesn’t require a huge learning curve while still looking very presentable and consistent across the board. And two, consistency was something that we desperately needed in our training department. It’s really nice we were able to introduce Prezi and use this from the ground to the corporate level.”
How Prezi improved Din Tai’s training process
What was once a time-consuming process packed with extensive PDF documents and PowerPoint and Google Slides limiting presentations has now evolved into a dynamic, interactive experience that enhances engagement and understanding.
Ernie simply expresses the unanimous sentiment among the team: “At this point, everyone’s pretty sold on Prezi.” Now, they’re using Prezi to create training presentations for onboarding, employee work injuries, and restaurant positions.
Previously, their training materials were made up of documents that were overloaded with information or created on slide-based presentation tools that were limiting for collaboration and weren’t very intuitive, Lauren says. Now, she’s using Prezi to create and launch restaurant, manager, and team training on how to approach work injuries.
On Justine’s end, she’s working on converting 150 pieces of training to Prezi for different restaurant positions to make them “more engaging and visually appealing.” Once these pieces of training are reviewed and finalized, they’re going to roll it out to their 200+ global locations.
Currently, she averages transitioning four presentations per week and says that it’s been easy to “learn on the fly without any prior training.”
Here’s how Justine approaches converting the current training material to a Prezi:
- Justine sifts through the PDF document to determine how she can break it down into topics.
- From there, she starts laying it out in Prezi to see how she visually wants to present it.
- She adds the rest of her content.
- Final touches, updating text sizes, and adding intentional zooms.
Prezi’s impact on the Din Tai Fung team
For their first inaugural Din Tai Fung conference, which brought together all general managers, executive kitchen managers, the operations team, and the corporate office, the executive team presented their vision for the future. With Prezi as their canvas, they painted a vivid picture of their purpose and mission, delivering a message that resonated deeply with every attendee.
“We’ve had very, very positive responses in terms of the reception from people in the audience,” Ernie said. “Great presentations, great content, great visuals – resounding consensus from the crowd.”
At the conference, they were able to leverage some of their new restaurant renderings as the backgrounds in Prezi which elevated the wow factor and made it even more impactful, Ernie says.
Building on this success, Justine expanded the reach of her training initiatives by delivering captivating Prezi presentations on the takeout process to a broader audience of employees. The response was resoundingly positive, with many expressing admiration for the visually appealing and easily digestible content. “The reaction from most people was ‘Wow, that looks really nice, it’s really easy to read.’ I think the overall impact of it has been pretty positive,” noted Ernie.
From Lauren’s end, she has observed a significant improvement in collaboration and engagement since integrating Prezi presentations into meetings. Specifically, the use of topics makes it easy to pause and address any relevant questions.
“In those transitions, it offers up natural places for conversations to be had which have really increased our engagement with presentations.”
Additionally, Lauren emphasized the versatility of Prezi in catering to diverse learning styles. “The visual aspect of it allows our audience to literally follow us down different thought processes. For this same reason, it has been really fun to collaborate with different managers on these presentations – it gives greater insight into what their thoughts look like.”
Prezi’s Team license benefits
The L&D department has been using Prezi the most, but also the recruitment team has been using it to develop some content to appeal to candidates and prospective hires. It’s making its way throughout the company, especially because they signed up for a Team license.
A Teams license with Prezi allows their team to have access to:
- Powerful collaboration tools
- Cloud-based access and convenience
- Conversational presentations you can adapt on the fly
- Real-time analytics to optimize your efforts
- Account manager
- Personalized training + 24-hour support
- Brand kit + branded templates
| Top Prezi features for Din Tai Fung: |
| → Collaboration feature – In Prezi Present, you can share and edit presentations together online, taking out the extra steps of emailing files back and forth for feedback. Also, you can easily collaborate by adding comments to any presentation.“That piece of being able to collaborate on presentations has been super easy,” Ernie highlighted. → Brand Kit: “I like that we can set the brand kit. So in terms of making sure all of our colors align is really nice so that we don’t have to really work too hard to make sure like, okay, this color in this font and all the things we might have to do on other software,” Justine shares. → Setting paths to tell a story: They can easily guide their audience through their presentation by selecting a path between topics and subtopics, where they can incorporate intentional zooms. “It’s very intuitive. The ability to work with zooming and motion makes it more advanced than a lot of other programs I’ve used. It’s been a great experience,” Lauren expresses. → Easy-to-navigate dashboard: They can easily access shared presentations or copy templates from their dashboard. “Well, it’s great that we have a shared library where we can copy an existing presentation and use that,” Lauren says. |
Empowering engagement and efficiency: Prezi’s impact at Din Tai Fung
Prezi has not only empowered Din Tai Fung to deliver presentations more effectively and efficiently but has also facilitated its widespread adoption across multiple departments, including Compliance, Learning & Development, Risk, People Development, and segments of Marketing. With topics and subtopics, Prezi offers audiences a structured outline of presentations, fostering greater interactivity and engagement.
“I prefer Prezi because you can give your audience a preview of what’s coming by seeing the layout,” Ernie said. “The visuals allow you to connect the dots without having to say it.”
With the added advantage of a Prezi Teams license, Din Tai Fung is well-equipped to elevate its organizational practices. Whether it’s for training sessions, weekly meetings, or presentations, creating and sharing content is easy and efficient. In fact, the team’s commitment to excellence is evident. The team has already created 50+ trainings and they’ve asked employees to rate the new trainings. Of the responses they’ve received, 80% have rated it a 5 out of 5.
“Overall, Prezi has really enhanced our quality of work and level of engagement,” Lauren concluded.
