McDonald’s needed to deploy a curriculum to more than 14,000 restaurants for department managers and build in an instructor-led coaching and collaboration session that didn’t require department managers to leave the restaurant. This also included enabling all 22 regions to deploy virtual collaborations for 40,000-plus department managers.
Solution
As part of the Restaurant Department Management (RDM) curriculum, each department manager has his or her own functional curricula (Kitchen Manager, Guest Services Manager, People Manager). One of the course offerings in the Department Manager curriculum is a Virtual Collaboration class for each of the department managers. The Virtual Collaboration, or VC, is an online discussion led by Hamburger University professors. The objective of the VC is for department managers to share what they have put into practice from their learnings during their use of the curriculum. This is an opportunity for the managers as a peer group to discuss and learn best practices, successes, and how to improve job performance. In addition, there are also one or two specific topics the VC will focus on. For example, the Guest Service Manager VC includes discussions on Arranging the Service Stock Area and Cash Audits.
The Virtual Collaboration is delivered completely via Web conferencing software and is consumed directly by the department managers in their restaurants. Each VC includes managers from multiple regions of the country, which managers report is invaluable to their learning. Not only do they hear other managers with similar issues, but also how they solve them and how everyone together can affect the success of more than 14,000 restaurants.
In 2013, the facilitation of the Virtual Collaborations changed from a centralized delivery model where collaborations were only taught from Hamburger University to all collaborations now being taught from McDonald’s 22 regional training offices. This was a tremendous effort to build Virtual Collaboration spaces and train and certify all of the 130-plus facilitators to deliver Virtual Collaborations (which they had never done before). The train-the-trainer sessions were taught using the Virtual Collaboration tool and included many hands-on practice activities and an overall certification process.
Results
Since implementing Virtual Collaborations, more than 25,000 department managers have been reached, with no cost for travel and no time away from the restaurant, saving owners/operators hundreds of thousands of dollars across the system. Because of this delivery vehicle, adoption of RDM and the associated curriculum helped McDonald’s exceed the goal of 80 percent of its owners/operators having at least one restaurant on RDM. Since handing off the deployment of the Virtual Collaborations to the field, participation in the collaborations grew by more than 100 participants in each of the three department manager curricula.
As McDonald’s measures its curriculum effectiveness with Level 1 surveys, the Virtual Collaboration scores comparatively with instructor-led classes and exceeds goals in three different measurement areas (Learning Activities, Learning Methods, Instructor Effectiveness). Evaluation results are on par with instructor-led training scores in the following areas:
- Content = 5.5/6.0
- Activities = 5.4/6.0
- Methods = 5.4/6.0
- Learning Effectiveness = 5.4/6.0
- Application of Learning = 5.4/6.0
- Predicted Job Performance = 5.3/6.0
- Instructor Effectiveness = 5.4/6.0
- Boss Engagement = 5.2/6.0
