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Welcome to McDonaldâs
dp n="20"?dp n="21"? Welcome to McDonaldâs. Thatâs a familiar phrase to our customers. They hear it repeated more than 58 million times every day when they enter the Golden Arches in one of our 32,000 restaurants around the world. And thatâs also the spirit of inclusion we extend to the 1.6 million members of the McDonaldâs familyâbe they franchisees, restaurant workers, suppliers, or employees. Our welcome is inclusive and sincere because we know the diversity of our people helps us satisfy the worldâs most diverse customer base.
And thatâs the McDonaldâs Iâd like to welcome you to as we look at the evolution of inclusion and diversity under the Golden Arches and how our commitment to those principles has contributed to the success of our business.
McDonaldâs has been widely recognized as one of the most successful companies in providing opportunities for a wide diversity of peopleâfrom the crew rooms in our restaurants to the board-room for the corporation. Our commitment to diversity extends beyond our own employees to our franchisees and their employees and our suppliers and their employees as well.
This multifaceted and integrated approach to welcoming people has become an integral part of the McDonaldâs business modelâthe so-called âsecret sauceâ behind our growth as one of the worldâs most recognized brands. While diversity at McDonaldâs is all about the business, our efforts have also resulted in numerous honors from outside organizationsâincluding twice being voted by our peers as the Best Company for Diversity in Fortune magazine.
The numbers that people rely upon to make such judgments are strong, as you would expect, even though they reflect a direction, rather than a destination. As of January 1, 2009, our McDonaldâs workforceâfrom the crew members in our restaurants through our CEOâis comprised of 62 percent women, 35 percent Hispanics, 20 percent African Americans, 5 percent Asians, and 2 percent Native Americans. Many of those workers are holding their very first jobs, representing the launching pad for their careers at McDonaldâs, in the restaurant industry, or in virtually every other walk of life.
Small Part of the Story
But these numbers are only a small part of the story because we moved beyond simply counting heads a long time ago. Today, we are intent upon making heads count. So, at McDonaldâs, our definition of diversity includes a broad mix of different ideas, opinions, backgrounds, and life experiences in addition to the traditional measures like race and gender. Thatâs how we make diversity an active, living part of our business strategies at McDonaldâs. Maintaining a diverse and inclusive workforce is certainly the right and proper thing to do, but we have long maintained that it is also the smart thing to do.
Any company that hopes to serve a diverse customer base across the United States, and around the world, must reflect that same diversity in the restaurants, where we meet our customers face to face, and throughout our organization, where we design our products and services with the distinct wants and needs of our customers in mind. And our business results reflect the validity of mirroring our customers throughout our system very clearly.
McDonaldâs has grown to include more than 32,000 restaurants in 118 countries around the worldânearly 14,000 of them in the United States aloneâas of the beginning of 2009. We serve more than 58 million customers every single day around the world. Our annual sales at both franchise and company-owned restaurants amounted to more than $70 billion in 2008, producing $6.4 billion in operating income. By any yardstick, McDonaldâs is far and away the market leader in the Quick Service Restaurant categoryâa segment that we virtually created since we began operations more than five decades ago.
As McDonaldâs Global Chief Inclusion and Diversity Officer, I am as proud of our record as any of the 1.6 million people in our global family. But I must also tell you, in all honesty, that it wasnât always this way.
Societal Attitudes
When we were founded in 1955 by Ray Kroc, McDonaldâs reflected the attitudes of U.S. society in general. In that post-World War II environment, race and gender equality in the workforce were unheard of and talked about very little. It was very unusual when women, as epitomized by Rosie the Riveter, took on many factory and industrial jobs during the war. But, when the war was over, most women moved back into the home and made way for the veterans to return to their jobs. McDonaldâs itself didnât even allow women to work in our restaurants until the mid-1960s.
So, when pent-up societal issues in the United States began to erupt in the 1960s, McDonaldâs executivesâlike everyone else in the corporate business worldârealized that they had new challenges to face. It has not been a smooth road to get where we are today, and there surely are still bumps to overcome.
However, there were several factors that helped McDonaldâs appreciate the value of diversity that came into play throughout its evolution. I will mention them briefly here because they represent the theme of this historical look at diversity development, and they will come into sharper focus throughout this book. It is my opinion that they are replicable by any other organization that is struggling to embrace diversity today, whether your efforts are just beginning, or started earlier and are now stalled, or are still on your organizational âto doâ list.
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Support From the Top
The first essential element is a strong and unwavering commitment to diversity from senior management.
Ray Kroc created a unique organization when he started McDonaldâs in the 1950s, using a business model that seemed downright radical at the time because he set up McDonaldâs like a three-legged stool, with the legs of the stool representing the franchisees, suppliers, and company. Each leg of the stool had to prosper for the others to succeed, thereby creating a partnership of interests that required the entire system to work together.
Kroc used to say, âNone of us is as good as all of us,â and, while it was originally aimed at the way McDonaldâs three-legged stool had to operate, it was prophetic in the way it came to apply to our diversity efforts as well.
Above all else, Kroc was interested in selling hamburgers, and when it became clear to him and to Fred Turner, his right-hand man, that we needed African American, Hispanic, and Asian entrepreneurs to help sell more hamburgers in minority communities, that was the approach they took. Like everything Kroc and Turner took on, they did so enthusiastically, and McDonaldâs top management has reflected that commitment through the years. Leadership from the top is critically important in embracing diversity.
Training Is Key
The second important element is training and education.
This was also a well-ingrained attribute at McDonaldâs from the very beginning. We hired so many high school kids that we quickly became Americaâs favorite first job. That meant we had to train our people in basic restaurant operationsâand, indeed, in fundamental on-the-job behaviors and attitudesâto get them up and running.
In addition, we needed to train our owner/operators and store managers in advanced restaurant operationsâhow to run a restaurant âthe McDonaldâs way,â if you willâand that meant creating Hamburger University, our state-of-the-art training center, as well as regional training centers. So, from the early days, McDonaldâs was a company that understood the value of training and used training to accomplish our business goals.
Training became one of the important tools we used to make diversity work at McDonaldâs Corporation as well. We discovered that bringing people in the front door was the easy part. But, without training to develop corporate survival skills, those same people would soon walk out the back door. So we trained our women and minority employees to understand the corporate environment and develop strategies for personal success. We also trained their managers and supervisors so they could learn how to understand and manage a diverse workforce.
Thatâs why our diversity training and education continues to this dayâit reflects all that we have learned and addresses the barriers that we still need to overcome.
Networks Are Invaluable
Finally, the third element that fosters a diverse workforce is employee networks.
Networks are established in our home office and in every region of the country and most of the world to foster relationships and career development opportunities through meetings and seminars that enhance our employeesâ development and promotional opportunities. We patterned our employee networks after the associations that our minority and women owner/operator members formed to leverage their own interests, like the National Black McDonaldâs Operators Association, the Women Operators Network, the McDonaldâs Hispanic Operators Association, and the Asian McDonaldâs Operators Association.
Today, there are employee networks for Women, African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Gays and Lesbians, Young Professionals, and Working Mothers, and they keep our people connected, in touch with potential mentors, and on top of career development opportunities.
Management support, training and education, and networks are the three building blocks for an effective diversity initiative in any company, and my own personal career reflects all three of those elements as well. Itâs how I came to be what I am today.
Telling Our Story
I am the last of 11 children raised in a farming family in McBee, South Carolina, and my aspiration as I was growing up was to be a secretary for a major corporation in New York City. That goal turned out to be a launching pad for where I ultimately wound up.
Today, in my role as Vice President and Global Chief Diversity Officer at McDonaldâs Corporation, I work closely with the companyâs senior officers, and, for some time, I worked every day in the very same office where Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonaldâs, once worked. There isnât a day that goes by without my taking a moment to consider the awesome capability people have to grow into greater responsibilities when they are given a chance.
It has been an amazing journeyâfor me and for McDonaldâsâand thatâs why I have decided to tell this story, this evolutionary tale of how a little hamburger company grew to be one of the most diverse and inclusive business organizations in the world. Itâs not only a fascinating history, but I believe others can learn a great deal from McDonaldâs experience.
To tell this story, I have interviewed dozens of people who have been an integral part of McDonaldâs diversity historyâfrom past senior management to my colleagues today, from pioneering owner/ ...