About McDonald's Restaurants Ltd

Skills development is crucial to McDonald’s and most promotion takes place from within. The company’s training and development programmes reflect McDonald’s commitment to up-skilling their employees. The company invests over £40 million in training each year and also offers free nationally accredited training to employees. They have had over 70,000 qualifications gained across the business and are one of the largest educational establishments in the UK. From the structured “Curriculum Roadmaps” to their comprehensive Crew Development Programme, McDonalds support a building-block approach to developing the knowledge and skills required for individuals to do their job. The company are currently redesigning their apprenticeship programme with the goal of providing a range of qualifications to make the business stronger. With regards to the future McDonalds plan to offer a new degree apprenticeship to attract future management talent by offering an alternative option for school leavers wanting to gain a degree and build a management career whilst remaining free of student debt. The programme will also be open to existing McDonald’s managers and will begin being advertised in January 2017. To support both professional and personal development employees also have access to the 70:20 learning portal, which enables people to explore and share learning tools and resources such as books, free e-learning, webcasts and articles on a wide range of topics.

The Wellbeing programme offers McDonalds employees a variety of support and helpful information to enhance their wellbeing both at work and at home. A dedicated Wellbeing Hub on ourlounge contains handy articles and information about what employees can do to maintain a healthy and balanced lifestyle. It has advice and support on topics like staying active, eating well, work/life balance and mental health. As part of the Wellbeing Programme, the team research and feature apps of the month, which have included apps like HeadSpace. Every employee receives a ‘How’s it Going Chat’ with their direct reporting Manager on a regular basis. This provides an ideal opportunity for the employee to have an open and frank discussion with their direct reporting Manager. Employees have the opportunity to discuss any issues that could be causing workplace stress and discuss what support or changes are needed. In recent Senior Leadership Engagement Drop In sessions, workload and workplace stress were some of the discussion topics to enable employees to openly discuss concerns and solutions with Senior Leadership.

McDonald’s are aware that no single factor is more important to their success than the dedication and efforts of their employees. As a result of this the company operate the “Employee of the Month” (EoM) award in all restaurants. Every year 12 employees per restaurant have the chance to win this accolade and a gift box to go with it. Every employee of the month receives a range of prizes ranging from an Employee of the Month gold name badge and a personalised congratulations card to a specially designed ‘Make It Special’ USB stick, an engraved black Congress pen in a presentation case and an engraved black A6 mole notepad to name but a few. Four times a year each restaurant will select an employee from the EoM winners to be their Employee of the Quarter and winners from all restaurants are then entered into a competition to find the “Employee of the Quarter” for each Operations Manager group. The winners of this quarterly competition are then considered for the Director of Operations “Employee of the Year”. Finally, each person selected as the Director of Operations overall winner will go forward to compete to become McDonald’s Employee of the Year final, which takes place at McDonald’s Head Office with the COO and Senior Vice President. As finalists they receive £250 worth of Love to Shop vouchers and the overall winner will also receive £2,500 worth of Travel Vouchers. All also receive recognition trophies.