The principles of quality, service and cleanliness start with our people. They train their top quality managers to drive the business through every restaurant in the UK. McDonalds opens up to 100 new restaurants every year, creating managerial opportunities for dynamic leaders. There is more to managing a restaurant than you would actually think. It’s not all just about serving the food and drinks to the customers, or handling to train your employees how to give good service and running a restaurant profitably.
It is also about respected as a contributor to the community and playing your part in marketing a world well-known brand. McDonald’s mission statement is as follows… “To build a business we can be proud of which our customers can trust and enjoy”. McDonald’s management is set to separate all the working areas into different sections making it easier to handle situations and problems. E. g. if you are recruiting new employees then you would have a separate team of employees within the company that handle all the Interviews of jobs.
The ‘new look’ organisation: In the post-millennium business world, organisations are radically different from the old-fashioned, top-down organisations of the past. Today, many organisations that directly provide services for customers (cafs, restaurants, banks, building societies, insurance companies, supermarket, etc. ) including McDonalds put the customer First. Recently, McDonalds have started drawing their organisational structure charts with the customers at the top. If you cannot satisfy your customers, you do not have a business.
Perhaps next most important in the organisation are the front-line workers who deal directly with the customers – the lecturers and teachers in educational institutions, the people answering the telephones in banks and behind the front-line workers are the backup people, such as information and communications technology specialists, warehouse supply staff, etc. Further back the managers who are responsible for creating the systems and procedures that make the organisation run smoothly. * The changing organizational context: A business concept that has been growing in importance has been that of the ‘flexible firm’.
In the past, many large organisations had a large core of full-time workers who expected a job for life. Throughout the country, after leaving school people would start working with an employer like Boots or McDonalds. Brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts might all work for the same employer. Today, the pool of core workers in an organisation has been severely slimmed down. Instead, organisations rely more and more on peripheral and external workers to carry out work tasks. Core workers tend to be multiskilled, full time, and enjoying good pay conditions and benefits.
Peripheral workers are those who are not employees of the firm (agency temps, workers in contracted-out services and the self-employed). The flexible firm sets out to cut its labour costs to a minimum by limiting core workers relative to peripheral and external workers. Increasingly, therefore organisations have slimmed down through a process known as downsizing’ or delayering’ (as layers are stripped out of the organisation). Hardest hit have been the core workers whose numbers have been heavily reduced While the number of core workers has been cut back, organisations have been able to cut their costs by taking on cheaper forms of employees.
Part-time and temporary workers, therefore, are the fastest-growing part of the employment scene. This growth is represented in recent figures for Leicester, which can be regarded as representative of what is happening in a great many urban areas in this country. In a new competitive world in which information and communication technology has made it possible for organisations to contract out many of their functions, and in which competition has forced many organisations to seek new ways of reducing their costs, organisations have sought new structures.
Big companies have realised that, in order to stay ‘big’ in a dynamic world, they have had to act as if they are small. Hence the emphasis on contracting out non-core activities. The need to be liked and the urge to survive sometimes clash, as when, in order to survive, a company finds it necessary to shed staff. In such circumstances, the need to be liked may encourage the company to treat the employees it proposes to discard with even greater consideration. The person company is better placed.
Even in prosperity, the person company will tend to do better than the machine company. People are people, they are not machines. They will generally prefer to work in a person company. The person company will have different structures, systems and a different culture from the machine company. In structural terms, the person company will be far less hierarchical than the machine company, allowing decision-making by individuals within the organisation at all levels.
In terms of systems, the person company will create the systems that allow flexibility at all levels, thus supporting individual decision-making. The culture of the machine organisation will be concerned with getting products out, with little thought for the needs of the people who make the product. In contrast, the people company will place a great deal of emphasis on supporting the personal development of individuals within the organisation – it is likely to have a democratic culture.
