Speed Demons: Motivating Fast-Food Employees

Management is hard, this is one of the basic fundamentals of management and is a lesson quickly learned by supervisors across the world. There are few places that this is more true than in a high energy, fast moving environment like a fast food restaurant. Employees of these placves are usually young, still in high school or freshly out of it, or older and unskilled lacking any college degree. While a generality, this is very noticeably true at most any chain store. How then, can a manager keep these people operating at optimum levels when at the same time they are unskilled, underpaid, and often not given opportunities for advancement? There are several ways a manager can use his organization's resources to his benefit in motivating employees. One of the most common is an employee of the month program, this coupled with accurate metrics and attainable goials for the employee can lead to a much more motivated individual. Leadership programs for the manager, as well as team building exercises can be used, and are often offered through corporate programs. Opportunities for advancement, while rare, can also be publicized to employees and implemented so that employees are allowed to feel as though they are working towards something. All of these can be utilized by management teams in order to maintain good order and discipline as well as ensure that they , the managers themselves, are making maximum use of their organization's opportunities.

The Burger King Corporation is a huge multinational entity with stores in countries around the world. It has thousands of employees to keep track of and hundreds of managers doing just that. How then, can it maintain all this and still be a success? The answer is a program Burger King has developed called 'BK Our Way'. In their 2009 Fiscal Corporate Responsibility Report, Burger King describes this program as "a series of leadership and team building exercises, both at the corporate level and the restaurant level". In essence, what it is, is a top down strategy to train managers from corporate on down to the individual store and instill the skills necessary to build highly effective teams, that are cohesive and work together to accomplish goals. This is done by instilling corporate values such as dedication, reliance on their co-workers and faith in the product in every Burger King employee. These techniques are not intended only for management, but also for the staffs of the stores from whence the managers came. The employees may not know the name of the program or even that there is a program, but it exists only to motivate and strengthen the Burger King brand by instilling a sense of teamwork and pride in every employee. The truly innovative part of the program is that while BK Our Way is essentially a management program, the skills learned are really meant to be taken back to the individual store and taught to the employees as well. This results in a standard that Burger Kind can and does use to maintain it's global organization.

Most employees will at some point look at their manager and ask "Why?" or "What's in it for me?". These questions can be extremely hard to answer and for many the answers they hear are things like "Because we said so." or "Nothing." This is most unfortunate and simply does not work in a world like the fast-food industry where employees are expected to stand for hours, deal with irate customers, work in hot greasy conditions, and still maintain a courteous attitude towards everyone they interact with. For this reason alone, management has had to find new ways of incorporating employees into the overall culture of an organization. No fast food chain has done this better than McDonald's. Long ridiculed for killing the American family dinner, pushing fatty foods on Americans and spreading it's 'evil' throughout the world in a never ending quest for money. McDonald's though, has really invested in it's employees. Started in 1961 by founder Ray Kroc's grill man, Fred Turner, McDonald's Hamburger University, by it's own account has turned out 80,000 graduates since then. In 1983 they moved to a new building, better allowing them to teach courses that the McDonald's corporation decided would best serve it's needs. Despite being called Hamburger University, the school is really a stepping stone in the McDonald's company. It has regional training centers across America, which are used to train crew to someday become managers, managers to take larger roles in their stores on their way to working at the corporate level, and even management and leadership courses for those already working at the executive level in order to improve their skills. This place is a place where McDonald's employees can go to better themselves. Hamburger University even offers a college credit transfer system where schools will accept credits earned at Hamburger University for the purposes of putting them towards a college degree. McDonald's even partners with these schools to hurry along the process of getting it's employees educated. They have partnerships with schools like University of Phoenix and DeVry University, but also such big name schools as Penn State. McDonald's is really a company trying to bring out the best in it's employees, it's simply up to those employees to do the work and become the people they want to be in life.