McDonald's is the leading global food service retailer, with more than 33,000 local restaurants serving more than 64 million people in 118 countries each day. More than 80% of McDonald's restaurants worldwide are owned and operated independently. McDonald’s is categorized as a fast-food restaurant that serves mainly hamburgers, fries, and beverages, with the main focus on product and service quality, speed and accuracy.
McDonald’s uses Cost Leadership Strategy in combination with Operational Excellence Strategy. This company is creating value, based on price, combined with customer service. Cost Leadership Strategy allows McDonald’s to keep production costs and customer prices low; meanwhile, Operational Excellence helps maximize the efficiency of the product development process to minimize costs, but creates a competitive advantage on operational excellence. Employees need to identify and follow efficient processes and engage in improvement practices.
The big advantage of McDonald’s is mainly consistency, fast service, quality, and global coverage. This means that a traveler from the U. S. who wants to purchase a McDonald’s product in Asia, knows exactly what he will get. Consistency is very important for a lot of people who don’t like to experiment and by trying different food; that’s why McDonald’s is so successful. Another big advantage of this company is innovation, and listening to people and their needs, and wants.
McDonalds staffing strategy consists of priorities, policies, and behaviors required to manage the flow of talent information. First of all, the company has to identify their Vision and Mission in order to hire qualified employees. Those two statements are public and it is each employee’s responsibility to research what the company stands for and if the applicant fits into the culture in order to work in harmony.
This case study mentioned that McDonald’s works hard at hiring people who want to excel in delivering outstanding service, but for many teenagers, it is their first job. Here, this student sees a little contradiction, since new applicants were not employed previously, and they probably did not have any experience with customer service; but one of McDonald’s main focuses is to hire employees with great customer service.
On the other hand, McDonald’s big advantage and attractiveness for young people is promotion within the company. As this student discovered on the McDonald’s website, more than 50% of owner-operators started behind the counter, as did 75% of restaurant managers. For young teenagers, McDonald’s is a great opportunity, since HR works hard on making sure that the company is very competitive and offers perks to make employees happy; such as, flexible schedule, competitive wages, management training, investment opportunities, and medical and educational benefits, but these benefits are according to the employment contract between the individual franchisee and the employees.
For all those benefits, high turnover should not be a problem for McDonald’s, since employees do not need to have any specific qualifications, because training will get them through, even though they do not have previous experience. For this reason, the McDonald’s Company would not hire their employees in advance, as other talent-based companies might do.
In order to keep the competitive advantage, this student would suggest expanding the recruitment process to high schools, since most of the employees who work for McDonald’s are teenagers. Another suggestion would be to keep job postings on their Web page, since the Y generation is very computer savvy, and this is how they search for jobs. The HR department should keep working on benefits they offer and compare them with those of their competitors, and especially listen to employees’ needs and wants.