McDonald Case

Objective

1. Reason behind the McDonald’s training initiatives are aligned with business strategy & importance of establish business strategy-training linkage
2. MacDonald’s Strategic commitment to training
3. Ray Kroc’s Training Philosophy & MacDonald’s Gaining

Objective-1

What do you think McDonald’s training initiatives are aligned with business strategy? Explain the reasons for it. Why is it important to establish business strategy-training linkage?

Business strategy and training both are belong from different sector but they both are aligned in one chain. So, before discussing that how MacDonald’s aligned both theses thing, we want to discuss what they are.

Business Strategy: Business Strategy is simply the plan that brings together organizational goals, processes, and initiatives. Business strategy requires effective preparation of physical, financial capital resources and human resources to fulfill the organizational goal.

Training: Training is basically learning. It is organizational planned effort to help employee to acquire job related skill knowledge, ability and behavior with the goal of applying theses on the job.

HR functions have always served as a supporting tool to the strategic levels. The design and implementation of the strategic option chosen by the company depends fundamentally on the human factor.

As we said that human resources are consider as organizational resources and strategy is plan to fulfill the goal of an organization. So a company who wants to fulfill the organizational goal effectively and efficiently they must be taking initiative of training. Training is not only for new employees but it also has given to existing employee to increase their productivity. It helps organization people to understand their capability, increase self-consciousness and aware them about their responsibility. So when an employee understands all of these his/her moral values will increase and forces them to achieve organizational goal which will help to execute organizational business strategy.

So, Companies who provide training programs to support their business strategy can establish a competitive advantage that increases profitability. Training affect a company's business strategy by promoting the specific skills development needs to expand into new areas of business or fend off rivals looking to encroach into its business areas.

Reason Behind the McDonald’s training initiatives are aligned with business strategy

Macdonald’s is a one of the top global fast food provider who has the greatest brand value in world. So how they achieve it. They don’t achieve it by spreading the business to country to county. This is one kind of step to their strategy. They become successful because they have strong business strategy behind them. To executing a successful business strategy, they require human capital and not just human capital, they need to groom them by providing high class of training.

Macdonald’s has one simple business agenda to succeed and that is providing 100 percent customer satisfaction to their customer. To achieve this agenda McDonald’s has one long lasting strategy which Q, S, C and V which stands for quality, service, cleanliness and value.

We know that McDonald’s is related with the services sector that means they need to provide their customer best quality service. So, theses four commitment quality, service, cleanliness and value can be fulfilling when an employee get proper training. So yes, MacDonald’s is training initiatives aligned with their Business Strategy.

The Importance of Business Strategy-Training Linkage

The strategic vision and mission down to training and development goals, employees are able to see them operationalized. They become real, they become tangible, and they become meaningful in relation to their own jobs and tasks.  Because when training programs are designed and developed toward business strategy, employees are able to better understand how they personally contribute to the achievement of business objectives.

The Importance of training is a lot but link with that training with company’s strategy has much more importance than only just training Because at the end the purpose of training to maximize the human capital ability to achieve business objective and executing the strategy.

 There are so many importance to establish a strategy and link with the employees’ training. They are:

1. Achieve Sustainable Competitive Advantages: One of the competitive advantage of MacDonald’s is The value, they provide to their customer. To hold these as competitive advantage MacDonald’s, provide their employee very effective training program so that they can serve the actual value which MacDonald’s wants to offer their customer.
2. Increase Effectiveness and Efficiency: MacDonald’s has very good reputation in the market. This reputation they achieve because of their employee’s effectiveness and efficiency. MacDonald’s provide training to their each and every employee so that they can effective and efficient in their job which helps them to provide quick and error free service to their customer.
3. Differentiate Themselves in the Marketplace: When Business strategy and training link with each other company able to create and different picture about them in the market place. The training helps to execute the business strategy successfully which helps any company to differentiate themselves in marketplace. MacDonald’s is greatest example of that. Their effective training helps employee’s morality and increase self-conscious inside of them which helps them become one of the top fast-food chain in USA.
4. Prepare and Find for New Opportunities and Threats: Training helps to identify new opportunity and threats for organization. When a company provide training to their employee the basically train according to their business strategy. So when employee trained from the organization he/she will understand the strategy and find out the business opportunity and threats for the business. Training also prepare the employees to tackling with new threat and opportunities.
5. Increase Financial Gains: As we know that, Business is not a charity. The main objective is to earning profit that’s why business develop strategy to earn money from what they are doing.  By training company injecting their corporate value and strategy into the employee mind so that they always think about financial gain of the organization. If we look at the Macdonald’s brand value worldwide it has $1.2 billion dollar all over the world and one of the reason of achieving is their training to their employee which link with their business strategy.

Objective:2

Discuss how McDonald’s strategic commitment to training has contributed to its position as a ‘leading global foodservice retailer’.

Training is an integral part of human resource development programme in almost all organizations. In fact, is the cornerstone of effective management because it makes employees more efficient and productive. Training commitment must be related with strategic management of the company.