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June 13th, 2007 How McDonald's tracks front-line engagement

At Melcrum’s Employee Engagement conference in London last month, keynote speaker Mark Blundell, head of HR Operations at McDonald's, was quizzed about how the company is tracking a series of new engagement initiatives.

The answer is a three-pronged measurement approach, described in an article in the latest issue of Strategic Communication Management.

Here's a summary of the approach for those of you looking to design or improve your own engagement-tracking program:

Employee surveys
McDonald’s “Your Viewpoint” survey is a long-term tracking study of employee opinion. It’s been conducted on a global scale for many years with an independent assessment of the results in every country in which McDonald's operates.

The data is analyzed and cut to mirror the structure of the organization in terms of job “families” (e.g., hourly-paid restaurant staff, restaurant management, office staff, etc.) and geographically, from national level right down to the level of the individual restaurant.

The survey consists of 50 statements which cover five recognized drivers of commitment. Employees respond to these statements with a simple “agree”, “neutral” or “disagree”.

Third-party review
The company also regularly open its doors to those who would like to undertake a serious, objective study of the business and in recent years has welcomed Investors in People, the Work Foundation and the Great Places to Work Institute among others.

Operational outcomes
Blundell points out that: "If we’re succeeding in engaging our employees we should be seeing a measurable impact in our mystery-shopper surveys. These assess quality, service and cleanliness in our restaurants – results of which are fed into a “People Scorecard”, which details annual performance data for the last five years, alongside quarterly data and targets for the current year.

In addition, the scorecard presents snapshot data of staff perceptions and, as an inverse measure of customer satisfaction, information about complaints we’ve received. This data can also be analyzed by every manager in our business to clearly see how employee engagement influences our overall performance.

You can read the full article in the latest issue of SCM.

See you next week.

Mandy Thatcher,
Editor
mandy.thatcher@melcrum.com

Further reading
Key findings of engagement study Engagement boosts retention and satisfaction Getting employees engaged after change