Global Human Resource Management
McDonald's Company, responding to the growing need to train its employees and managers to provide excellent customer service to its 18, 380 branches worldwide, has established the Hamburger University. The Hamburger University was established in 1961 to serve as a worldwide Management Training Center, with its main headquarters located in Oak Brook, Illinois. It currently educates and trains 65, 000 managers from around the world, and has training centers in England, Japan, Germany, and Australia. The Hamburger University in Illinois trains McDonald's employees to achieve global training in fast food restaurant management, which mainly centers on customer satisfaction and service. One of the most important features of the McDonald's global training is its ability to fuse both local and international standards of customer service. Since McDonald's caters fast food to numerous countries with different cultures, i.e., different food preferences and habits, the difficult task of providing diverse, yet, excellent customer and food service is the burden of managers and service crew employees of the company. Thus, in order to satisfy both requirements, McDonald's looks at demographic information and facts of a particular nation before opening a new branch. Apart from demographics, McDonald's also looks at psychographics, which studies the values that people observe in their culture, such as the case of India, where vegetables are preferred over meat, and Saudi Arabia, where there are two divisions in a McDonald's restaurant -- one for men, and the other for women and children. It is also important to note that McDonald's employees are also essential factors that contribute significantly to the fast food company's success worldwide. By creating a balance between excellent food and customer service and superior training management and provision of quality employee benefits, McDonald's has become, indeed, a globally enterprising international company.
Bibliography
Solomon, C. (1996). Big Mac's McGlobal HR Secrets. Personnel Journal, Vol 75, Issue 4.
