Industry: Food Service
Scope of Services and Products: Quick Service Restaurants
Estimated Number of Employees System- Wide: 1.7 million
Year e-Learning Introduced: 2001
Offices and Locations: 30,093 restaurants worldwide; Home Office in Oak Brook, IL, U.S.
2001 Revenues: US$14.8 billion
Web Site: www.mcdonalds.com
Number of e-Learning Courses in Entire Curriculum: Restaurant crew curriculum: 25 courses Restaurant manager curriculum: 4 courses
McDonald’s Corporation is the world’s leading food service retailer with more than30,000 restaurants around the world serving more than 46 million customers each day. McDonald’s vision is to provide the world’s best quick service restaurant experience satisfying more customers, more often, by delivering superior quality, service, cleanliness, and value. McDonald’s employees are key to achieving this vision.
McDonald’s has more than 1.7 million employees around the world. The largest group of employees within the McDonald’s system is crew members in entry-level positions in the restaurants. Crew members are often teenagers or young adults, many of them entering the work force for the first time. It is not uncommon for young employees to take advantage of higher education opportunities or to transition to employment outside of McDonald’s. (U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell is one such example.)
McDonald’s also provides employees with career growth opportunities. Many of the corporation’s senior executives began their McDonald’s career by serving customers at the front counter and the drive-thru window. With so many entry-level employees working in their restaurants, training is a critical link to providing superior customer service. McDonald’s trains approximately three million new employees each year.
In 2001, McDonald’s developed an e-learning strategy to benefit the business and address global training needs. (This strategy won McDonald’s the MASIE Center’s Pioneer in Innovation Award for e-Learning Strategy.) The strategy included conducting a variety of e-learning pilots.
McDonald’s developed an e-learning strategy to:
Provide consistent and convenient training to all employees globally
Provide a cost-efficient method of training
Increase efficiency of training
Track employee training paths
More efficiently update training curricula
To make the greatest business impact, the first e-learning pilot focused on crew members in restaurants in each geographic region of the world. This was followed by a pilot for regional mid-managers and then a pilot with restaurant managers using personal digital assistant (PDA) technology.
This case study focuses on the first pilot deployed in six countries (Canada, Brazil, Taiwan, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) during a six-month period.
From the company’s beginning in 1955, training has been a major emphasis for McDonald’s Corporation. Their first Operations and Training manual was written by McDonald’s founder, Ray Kroc. In 1961, McDonald’s established Hamburger University as its restaurant management training center. Graduating only 12 students that first year, McDonald’s has more than 65,000 graduates today. Training for crew members, however, usually takes place in the restaurant where they work.
McDonald’s Commitment to Our
Employees states that employees will have the resources they need to serve the customer, be provided the tools they need to develop personally and professionally, and be allowed time for training. To achieve this, McDonald’s needed an efficient and cost-effective method to provide a consistent training experience to crew members worldwide. McDonald’s also wanted the ability to track training and performance verification.
To improve quality and service delivered in the restaurants
To quickly update training on products and services
To improve recruitment and retention of employees
To record and monitor training and verify results
To provide an outstanding customer experience with every visit to a McDonald’s restaurant
Traditionally, crew training takes place in the restaurant where the new crew member works. McDonald’s has developed a Crew Development Program for this purpose that includes videos, booklets, and shoulder-to-shoulder training with a crew trainer to learn the tasks associated with each work station. Job aids such as station guides (diagrams located at each station graphically depicting how to perform particular tasks related to that station) are also utilized. When the training for a station is completed, a crew member’s competency for that station is verified by the crew trainer against a set of observable performance criteria detailed in the Station Observation Checklist.
For the initial e-learning pilot, content was converted from the existing Crew Development Program and also from shift management training. Later, next generation e-learning for crew training also included an online animated tutor named “MEL” (an abbreviation for McDonald’s e-learning). MEL assists the employee through a course in a similar manner as a crew trainer in a traditional training session (see Figure 14-7).
Figure 14-7: Course with Online Animated Tutor
The titles of the e-learning courses in the pilot include Hospitality, Cleanliness, Sanitation, and Food Safety, Beginning Service, Advanced Service, and Lot and Lobby. These titles were retained from the traditional Crew Development Program content to provide consistency. Courses vary in length from 20 to 35 minutes and are all self-paced (see Figure 14-8). Proven instructional design principles were applied to all content. Interactive exercises and quizzes are included throughout each course. There is a test at the end of each course, and test scores are automatically recorded in a database that is accessible via a secure reporting application.
Figure 14-8: Example of e-Learning Course
McDonald’s supports training solutions that blend traditional training methods with e-learning programs. Crew members using e-learning courses also receive shoulder-to-shoulder training(although data shows that e-learning reduces the amount of shoulder-to-shoulder training that is needed) and still have their performance at each station verified by a crew trainer against a set of observable performance criteria. A later pilot included an application for scoring this verification directly on a PDA.
e-Learning courses were initially developed in English and then localized for Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish. The Chinese and Portuguese versions were used in Taiwan and Brazil, respectively. A large percentage of McDonald’s U.S. restaurant employees are Spanish-speaking, so both English and Spanish versions were available in the U.S. pilot.
Program development was outsourced to a vendor working under the guidance of the McDonald’s e-learning team. The process is estimated to have taken 3,000 hours to develop four hours of e-learning course material.
Macromedia Flash
HTML and DHTML
Java
Java Script
In McDonald’s global system, approximately 80 percent of the restaurants are owned and operated by independent franchisees. The remaining 20 percent are owned and operated by McDonald’s Corporation. The pilot program was conducted in both franchisee-and corporate- owned restaurants. The pilot involved36 restaurants and 845 employees in six countries. Crew members accessed the courses via the Internet on a computer, usually located in the crew training or break room. Most of the pilot restaurants had broadband Internet connectivity, but a number with a dial-up connection were included so that data could be compared between different connection speeds.(Survey data clearly indicates a higher level of satisfaction with Internet connectivity among those who had broadband connections versus those with a dial-up connection.) Although the pilot ended in March 2002, access to the content remains available to crew members in several of the pilot restaurants. Other restaurants are already using enhanced, next generation e-learning content developed after the pilot.
Executives in each pilot market communicated their endorsement of e-learning to restaurant employees.
Some restaurants used rewards as incentives for employees.
e-Learning leadership traveled to the pilot markets to be involved in the kick-off and initial orientation.
Employees were made aware that they were involved in a cutting edge training initiative.
During the pilot, McDonalds used the development vendor’s reporting system. This enabled McDonald’s to generate a variety of reports, such as usage, test scores, and completion percentages.
Pre- and post-pilot surveys were conducted with crew members and managers in the pilot markets. Data collected from those surveys includes such information as:
85 percent reported e-learning improved the overall training experience
8percent reported e-learning will improve employee recruitment and retention
8percent reported e-learning did not negatively impact other restaurant operations
82 percent reported e-learning integrated well with existing training programs
Managers in all pilot markets mostly agreed that new crew members using e-learning had better skill development than crews using traditional training only. For example:
80 percent reported that the crew displayed more confidence
81 percent reported crew more quickly and successfully completed the verification requirements of the Station Observation Checklists
76 percent reported that crew required less shoulder-to-shoulder training
8percent reported that crew displayed improved interactions with customers
Results from the pilot program have shown that better trained crew members are more confident about their skills, allowing them to perform better, which in turn improves customer satisfaction.
Reduced employee turnover results in a significant savings in training costs, as even a two percent reduction in turnover has the potential of saving tens of millions of dollars given the size of the McDonald’s workforce.
e-Learning has also proven to be very beneficial when new restaurants open, particularly in remote areas where there is limited access to experienced trainers. Reports from newly opened restaurants that used e-learning prior to the opening indicate that those restaurants develop a core of well-trained and confident employees more quickly than would traditionally be the case. As a result, new restaurants reach full operational potential sooner. In these scenarios, the lack of an existing core of experienced crew members to transfer knowledge to incoming employees is largely nullified because e-learning usage transfers that knowledge to the new crew.
With the success of the pilot programs, a new expectation has been set throughout the McDonald’s system to develop other training initiatives to be delivered by e-learning.
86 percent stated that they learned a lot from the courses
85 percent stated the computer location provided convenient access
90 percent stated that McDonald’s should continue to develop e-learning
Purpose: The crew pilot content introduces entry-level training skills to new crew and basic management skills to more experienced crew on the following topics:
Hospitality: Teaches proper interaction with customers
Cleanliness, Sanitation, and Food Safety: Teaches safe food handling basics and other sanitary practices
Beginning Service: Teaches basic responsibilities when serving customers
Advanced Service: Teaches advanced responsibilities when serving customers
Lot and Lobby: Teaches how to care for the inside and outside of the restaurant
Managing People, Equipment, and Products: Teaches about organizing employees during a shift, correct operation of equipment, and proper handling of products
Basic Management Skills: Teaches introductory techniques to potential managers
Program Structure:
20 to 35 minute self-paced courses with interactive exercises and quizzes and a test at the conclusion of each course
Number of Program Hours per Employee: Approximately 4 hours
Total Number of Hours per Program: Approximately 4 hours
Number of Pilot Program Participants: 845
Completion Requirements: Crew members complete a test at the end of each course and then their performance of learned tasks is observed and verified by a crew trainer against a set of observable performance criteria.
Media Used: The program includes these media types:
Macromedia Flash
HTML and DHTML
Java
JavaScript
Deployment Mechanism:
e-Learning courses were Web-based and delivered over the Internet
Build alliances with internal information technology groups. e-Learning is a learning initiative and should be managed by learning professionals. However, as a technology-enabled learning solution, e-learning also requires the involvement of technical resources to be successful.
Involve the target country in the localization process. The target market will not utilize courseware that is not well localized, so it is important to have strong local involvement throughout process.
Use off-the-shelf development tools and software that are readily available rather than proprietary resources. Training content in a global corporation requires localization and modifications to make it appropriate for different countries. Using off-the-shelf tools to create programs allows representatives in other countries to more efficiently modify the original content than if proprietary tools are used.
Maintain close control of your project if it is outsourced to a vendor. Clearly communicate your objectives and expectations to ensure that the vendor knows the expected deliverables.
Conduct a thorough quality review of all materials before deploying (and do not assume vendors identified all quality issues in their review). In a corporation as large as McDonald’s, sending out erroneous information has the potential to reach more than a million people.
Use incentives to motivate and encourage e-learning participation. Restaurants in the
McDonald’s pilot that offered inexpensive prizes or promoted restaurant-to-restaurant competitions achieved higher participation rates than restaurants that did not.
Obtain executive management support and have senior executives communicate and demonstrate approval of the e-learning strategy.