Discuss About The Strategic Marketing Planning Theory Practice

Employee Engagement at McDonald’s

Discuss About The Strategic Marketing Planning Theory Practice.

Employee engagement can be defined as the relationship of the employees and an organization.  Individuals who are fully absorbed and enthusiastic about their work are known as an engaged employee. It can be further explained as the commitment and management that employees carry along with their work is a main evidence of their involvement and dedication towards the organization (Gambetti and Graffigna, 2010).

McDonald, an American fast food company was founded in the year 1940 and it is owned by Richard and Maurice McDonald’s. It is located in San Bernardino, California, United States. It is one of the world’s largest restaurant chains in India. It serves over 69 million customers on day to day basis in over 100 countries. It has more than 37000 outlets. It is known to be the second biggest employer within the private company sector after Wal-Mart. McDonald’s mission is to make McDonald’s the favorite place and way to eat for the customers (McDonald’s, 2018).

McDonald’s prefer to recruit suitable clients which ever post it may be crew member or a Trainee business manager. The company has always been providing exceptional support to the employees. It also provides progression opportunities to the employees which further help to enhance the personal and professional skills of the employees (Boxall and Purcell, 2011).

The strategy called training is the key to improve the performance of the employees. So McDonald’s also has been using this strategy to improve and enhance the skills of the employees at both personal and professional level. As McDonald’s aims at making their restaurants a favorite place to eat for their customers. So to achieve this objective well trained crew members and business managers are highly needed. At least 55000 employees are trained by McDonald’s every year (McDonald, 2016).

McDonald’s evaluates the performance of its employees on a regular basis which further helps to improve the performance of the employees.

McDonald’s offers excellent range of rewards and potential benefits to the employees. Thisfurther motivates the employees to perform well in their jobs. When the employees’ efforts are valued by the organization, the employees get motivated and this further helps in increasing productivity and satisfaction (Madani, et al., 2015)

McDonald’s tries to retain their employees by providing them the best working environment, offering flexible working schedules, paying them right and giving a career map.

McDonald’s Background and Mission

Training & development is a very important part for the employees. McDonald’s comprehends the value of training and development for its employees. The company provides in-house training to employees with the help of its own corporate university. There are different levels of training such as member training of crew, training for managers and a few others (Cascio, 2018). The motive behind the training is to make sure that the employees comprehend the prescription of Ray Kroc which includes V-quality services, Q, C, S, cleanliness. During the training of Mc Donald’s, it teaches its employees the technique of serving burgers weather it is one serving or thousands.

Best results can be expected when there is sharing of profit with huge employee engagement and provide workers about the company information. At McDonald’s, two types of incentives are given: one is cash based and the other one is non-cash based.

Incentives that are cash based include allowance for attendance, allowance that is given annually and medical allowance. McDonald’s also includes incentives such as Hard Soft Furnishing and Leave Fair Assistance. Under hard soft furnishing, all the employees can equip their houses with new carpets, curtains etc. on company expenses. Non Cash based incentives includes recognition status such as team of the year, team of the month and incentives like free food, access to gift certificates and other (Sparrow, Balain and Fairhurst, 2010).

McDonald’s employees can take leave for maximum two months for any reason. The mangers working in the restaurants get eligible for the company car after working three years. The company also offers educational assistance for the employees working in the company.

The Company McDonald’s consist of many safety programs for work place for making sure of the high safety standards and processes of the company are properly communicated and toughened regularly. For McDonald’s, the health, safety and security of the employees is very important (Sorenson, 2013). McDonald’s has always been concerned about the safety of the employees. Special precautions such as use of gloves, apron and hand cleansing gel and fire prevention program and others

As employees are the greatest ambassadors of the company so employee engagement has been always the highest priority for McDonald’s. Implementing a province-wide competition such as The Challenge generates an opportunity to cooperatively engage, recognize and rejoice the employees, whereas showcase the skills and talents of the employees. The business transformation of McDonald’s was eased by focusing on 5 principles for employee motivation, known as ‘five vital ingredients to great customer experience’, to which its recognition strategy is aligned (Chhabra and Sharma, 2014).

McDonald’s HR Strategies

Neal Blackshire (the reward manager at McD’s ) stated that McDonald has announced these 5 values in the year 2014 to make sure that they fix their hospitality culture in company’s restaurants after knowing that the older ’10 commandments’ were out of date. Road to Rio initiative in 2014 was one of the project that shows measure improvements for the company. From February to April 2014, this initiative has incentivized the top 5% of restaurants which was based purely on customer ratings. The employees from these restaurants were asked to enter themselves in a prize draw for winning the trip to the Word Cup in Brazil (HR Editorial, 2011).

In the conjunction, a competition ran with Fifa World Cup, McDonald’s has used the advantage of its sponsorship of the competition by sending eleven employees from the workforce to Brazil. More significantly, it facilitated to increase the speed of their services at the same time providing great customer experience (Rocca, 2017).Neal Blackshire has stated that “The mechanic was simple”. After ending of the 3 month project, there was appreciation in two hundred and thirteen restaurants. This implies, McDonald’s has served extra 24k customers on daily basis. This further was marked as an improvement factor as it helped in creating buzz in reality at the workplace.

Employee engagement has been always the highest priority for McDonald’s. The structure plan of initiatives which supports employee engagement in the organization is mentioned below

McDonald’s has understands the power of employee’s knowledge as employees are the greatest ambassadors of the company. Employees comprehend the brand of the company more than owners. Implementing a province-wide competition such as The Challenge generates an opportunity to cooperatively engage, recognize and rejoice the employees (Kompaso and Sridevi, 2010).

The Company McDonald’s has increased the friendly competition. The challenge given to the employees make the employees invested in each other’s successes by participating in the competition. Consequently bring the employees together and nurtured strong team comradeship. The employees get motivated by knowing the chances of getting recognition in the restaurant (Schneider and Bowen, 2010).

The manager should encourage the employees to chat about their jobs online as it will further create the opportunities to share positive brand messaging and have implausible ROI. McDonald’s being a national brand should involve the employees as part of its external voice (Leberman and McDonald, 2016).

McDonald’s has also taken the steps towards keeping the employees safe and sound. Through an online wellbeing kit, McDonald’s has invested in the wellbeing of its employees. It invested almost £35 million in providing the training and enhancing the skills of the employees. It has also launched various reward initiatives, involving hundred free holidays and plusses for mystery shopper awards.

Road to Rio initiative in 2014 was one of the project that shows measure improvements for the company. The purpose behind this initiative is to meet corporate goals and employee engagement. It has been found from the report that 84.5% of employees feel appreciated, 83.8% feel honored in working at a restaurant like McDonalds, and 83.5% are motivated (Mone and London, 2018).

Conclusion

Thus from the above report it can be conclude that the HR strategies McDonald’s are very effective. It works efficiently and effectively for achieving the overall goals of the organization. The report also includes the functions of human resource department. In addition to this structure plan of initiatives to increase the employee engagement has also been included. Further, this report includes the initiatives taken by McDonald’s to increase the employee engagement in the company

References

Boxall, P. and Purcell, J. (2011)Strategy and human resource management. Palgrave Macmillan. London.

Cascio, W. (2018) Managing human resources. McGraw-Hill Education.

Gambetti, R.C. and Graffigna, G. (2010) The concept of engagement. International Journal of Market Research, 52(6), pp.801-826.

HR Editorial. (2011) HR Excellence Awards 2011 – Outstanding Employee Engagement Strategy: McDonald’s. [Online] Available from https://www.hrmagazine.co.uk/article-details/hr-excellence-awards-2011-outstanding-employee-engagement-strategy-mcdonalds [Accessed on 09/04/18].

Kompaso, S.M. and Sridevi, M.S. (2010) Employee engagement: The key to improving performance. International journal of business and management, 5(12), p.89.

Leberman, S. and McDonald, L. (2016) The transfer of learning: Participants’ perspectives of adult education and training. Routledge.

Chhabra, L.N. and Sharma, S. (2014) Employer branding: strategy for improving employer attractiveness. International Journal of Organizational Analysis, 22(1), pp.48-60.

Madani, V.et al. (2015) Distribution automation strategies challenges and opportunities in a changing landscape. IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, 6(4), pp.2157-2165.

McDonald, M. (2016) Strategic marketing planning: theory and practice. In The marketing book (pp. 108-142). Routledge.

McDonald’s. (2018) About Us. [Online] Available from https://corporate.mcdonalds.com/corpmcd.html[Accessed on 09/04/18].

Mone, E.M. and London, M. (2018) Employee engagement through effective performance management: A practical guide for managers. Routledge.

Rocca, V. (2017) McDonald’s secret sauce for employee engagement. [Online] The Globe and Mail. Available from https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/leadership-lab/mcdonalds-secret-sauce-for-employee-engagement/article28851243/ [Accessed on 09/04/18].

Schneider, B. and Bowen, D.E. (2010)Winning the service game. In Handbook of service science (pp. 31-59). Springer, Boston, MA.

Sorenson, S. (2013) How employee engagement drives growth. Gallup business journal, 1, pp.1-4.

Sparrow, P., Balain, S. and Fairhurst, D. (2010)McDonald’s UK: From Corporate Reputation to Trust-Based HR. In Leading HR (pp. 209-230). Palgrave Macmillan, London.