Upskilling | McDonald's L&D lead on training a global workforce

Training is an important tool that helps employees complete their job. Developing a workforce and improving their skills has numerous benefits for a business such as improved quality of work, reduced waste, streamlined processes and more competent staff. And particularly as a company grows in size, the importance of upskilling workers heightens.

According to Serious Facts, McDonald’s golden arches are more globally recognisable to people than the holy cross which demonstrates the extent of its influence. Serving 68million customers around the world each day – and peddling over 75 burgers every second – employees have a fast-moving work environment to contend with which requires quick and efficient working. And in order for them to provide a top-notch service that keeps the customers coming back and the business commercially viable, McDonald’s employees need to be trained on how to complete their job effectively.

Learning and Development (L&D) plays a pivotal role in strengthening employee skills, increasing the efficiency of processes which ultimately results in better employee motivation and engagement. But when it comes to delivering training to circa 375,000 people according to a 2016 McDonald’s filing (1.9million employees if you include franchise employees) dispersed across the globe – with each restaurant operating in different countries and surrounded by different cultures – does McDonald’s have to create learning material that is tailored towards the different regions that the business operates in?

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“We don’t have too much problem with regional differences,” Thomas Bacon, Head of Learning and Development at McDonald’s, told HR Grapevine. “I suppose there has got to be a lowest common denominator to make sure we aren’t doing something which is London-centric or so forth. But with the product being uniform [as well as] the service ambition and customer experience – and we want to be consistent with that – we don’t see it as too much of a challenge.