Want some fries with that?
No matter where in the world you go, chances are you’ll run into a McDonald’s. Once just an American icon, McDonald’s is now the largest global franchise in the world. People around the entire globe are enjoying McDonald’s Big Macs and more.
The success of their company doesn’t just happen, it takes a lot of hard work and focus on one very important detail. Even a franchise giant like McDonald’s owes a significant amount of their success to the efficiency of their employees. The employees are the most direct connection from customer to product.
To ensure customer satisfaction with your company, the employees need to be doing a flawless job, considering many represent the company they work for. Although, to get a fresh employee from a “young padawan” to an experienced, consistent, and productive worker, there is always the grueling training process.
Managers are looking to speed up employee onboarding without sacrificing the end result. McDonald’s recognized this and has begun to take advantage of new technologies to improve their employee training and onboarding process.
McDonalds Meets Technology
According to Forbes, McDonalds recently entered into a partnership with Inkling, an enterprise content platform company. Inkling will be helping McDonald’s build a platform to create electronic training and operation manuals for its employees.
With this platform, all content once used on paper can now be transferred to tablets that can be accessed on site. This new transition is improving the learning experience by combining training and kitchen work, as opposed to separating them, speeding up the training process.
Using this technology, employees can multitask, increase their retention via training videos, and can be sent new content immediately as it is created. The investment McDonald’s made with Inkling is a long term profit and an intelligent move.
Having an acceleration of training without loss of content, McDonalds can also increase the efficiency and productivity of their employees, in turn improving customer satisfaction as well. Not to be missed is employee satisfaction, which is increased as employees feel better supported and self-sufficient in their work environment. There is a direct correlation between happy employees and happy customers.
As this technology is implemented, McDonald’s will be able to swiftly add new menus or policies, shorten training time, and improve consistency. Customers can now expect the same service from a McDonald’s across the world compared to the one across the street. McDonald’s will save money on training and maybe even a little on paper, while making everything run smoothly in the process.
Granted, there is always room to improve. The technology itself can be pushed even further. Rather than just transferring their training process from paper to tablet, why not also focus on making sure that system is simple and easy to use?
We don’t know the exact details on how it all looks, but I haven’t seen much emphasis on making sure the tech itself is efficient. Using tech to train employees is not a new concept, so we now have options on how it might be done. It’s incredibly important to make sure this system will be easily absorbed by employees and take them step by step to the end result, or this might just end up in more confusion.
Ultimately it looks like McDonalds understood the challenges of integrating new technology while ensuring that it was easily grasped by their employees.
