What We Can Learn from McDonalds Employee Training

3.8/5 - (5 votes)
What can we learn from McDonalds employee training? You would maybe be surprised that you can learn a good deal from McDonalds in this regard. Over the years, the reputation of this company has fallen in and out of favor, regarding their ethics in employee treatment and wages, quality of their product and a number of other equally absurd things. The truth is, most of this has just been the natural tendency of society to attack successful companies, and try to find a hitch in their armor. Society is good at that sort of thing – building something up and then utterly trying to tear it down. None of that matters here. What we want to look at is what we can learn from McDonalds employees training, and like them or love them, they’re quite good at training their staff! McDonalds trains over fifty five thousand employees annually, on average, around the globe. Holy crap, that’s a lot of people to train when you look at the cumulative time they’ve been around (over half a century now). So, if any company has had the time and experience needed to formulate some pretty damn good practices for training, McDonalds is one such company. Class practicing Knowledge management tools #1 – Learning by Doing not by Lecturing! Oh yes, we’ve made no bones about the fact that we’re big fans of hands on learning as one of the most effective and practical ways to train someone in just about any job. McDonalds has made an art out of this. After orientation, which is the only lecture-like component involved in basic staff training, new employees are partnered up with trained senior staff members, shoulder to shoulder, to learn the eleven different work stations in the restaurant. This is a wide variety of skills, including a multitude of food preparation processes and stations, three different customer interaction stations, and several sanitation and maintenance tasks as well. Not only is this learning by doing concept a great way to see how the system works in the real world, while safely under the guidance of professionals, but it also serves to make training have a solid ROI for the company, as trainees learning to work these stations are getting work done in the process, if not as quickly as their teachers. #2 – Grooming Ambition Out of the gate, a new employee mastering all of the primary work stations in the restaurant grooms them for more ambitious positions in the future. To become a management person at McDonalds, one must not only have a knowledge of all McDonalds policies, financial concerns and shift management concerns, but also an undeniably perfect understanding of those workstations. Ergo, not only are basic staff being groomed to be excellent workers at these tasks, but these skills are immediately transferrable as training for management positions should they earn the level of seniority required to enter that program. Everyone in a McDonalds has the opportunity to grow their career, and the basic experience-driven teaching that Knowledge management tools and basic training there provides ensures this universally. So, these are just two basic things anyone can learn from McDonalds employee training. Learning by doing, and the foundations of new inductees becoming the framework for greater things in their future. Motivation and experience. Further information is available on employee training plan template page.
Jason is the former Lead Author & Editor of TrainingStation Blog