McDonald's

Challenge

The new generation of digital natives set quite different demands compared to what McDonald’s previously had experienced. One of the challenges were a new target group that had other expectations when it came to the employee experience. 

Another challenge was that it took too much time to train the employees. This was the big headline when the restaurant managers were asked about their biggest challenges with recruitment. The faster the managers could guarantee that their new employees would get the knowledge needed, the better it would be.  

“If you look at McDonald’s from the outside, you could think that it’s not difficult to work for them,” says Katrine Schelbli and continues: ”But there is actually a lot you can learn, both food safety, the proper hygiene, specific procedures, etc. just in order to make a round of French fries.”  

An additional challenge was that a lot of McDonald’s’ restaurants have long opening hours or are open 24/7 and they can’t shut down to practice making French fries. “We must train when the restaurants are open, so the more preliminary work and knowledge that we can give to the new employees before, the better. For it must not affect the guests in the restaurants,” says Katrine Schelbli. 

Solution

McDonald’s needed a place in which they could have all of their training materials, and it had to be easily accessible. This was exactly what Learningbank offered.

But they also had another important factor.  They wanted their systems to “communicate with one another”, both the recruitment system, timetabling system, and the new training platform. 
And this was luckily something Learningbank could help with by building integrations.  
 
This way the restaurant managers got less administrative work and only needed to set up new employees in one system.  Now, if an employee is added to one system, they will automatically be in all.  

As soon as the integrations between the different systems were set up, the development of McDonald’s’ McWelcome universe began in collaboration with Learningbank. 

 ”We chose to develop our preboarding-universe McWelcome together with Learningbank. In that way, we can engage and give new knowledge to the employees already before their first day. We didn’t have that option before if we had to send the employees physical materials,” says Katrine Schelbli. 

The primary goal with McWelcome is to give the employees better experiences from the beginning, together with it being easier for the restaurant managers to administrate and handle.  

“Generally, you create good employee experiences if your focus is on developing the employees. The more you can engage them, the happier they will be for their job, and the more you will get them to grow, the more you will get back.” 

Results

Almost 80% of the employees rated the learning platform as good or very good. Furthermore, nearly 80% also said they were satisfied or very satisfied with the switch from the former system to the new learning platform.  

Because of the success in the Danish McDonald’s restaurants, the solution has also been adopted in Norway and Sweden.