Talent & Benefits
Led by the Company’s core values, we are committed to fostering workplaces where employees feel empowered to pursue their career aspirations with access to opportunity.
We believe providing a best-in-class employee experience – where people are given opportunities to learn and develop – is a business imperative. By looking after the people who work for the Company, we feel we can better equip and support them to deliver enhanced customer experiences.
Our Recent Progress
- Throughout 2023, the Company drove continuous improvement of our Performance Motivation process and resources for Company employees to help evolve our culture and increase efficiency as we continue building high-performing, engaged teams.
- Continued expectations in 2023 for senior leaders at the Company to help drive accountability and engage in inclusive behaviors that support talent development and help retain our future leaders.
- Created a Career Planning and Development Philosophy, as well as the Career Navigator guide, to support Corporate Staff in advancing their career journeys.
See our latest Purpose & Impact Report on the Goal Performance & Reporting page for more on our recent progress.
For related topics, see our pages about our commitments to Safe & Respectful Workplaces, Our Commitment to Inclusion and Human Rights.
Our Strategy
McDonald’s vision is to be an iconic talent destination – known as much for its people experience as for the Golden Arches. Based on our belief that the employee experience can positively impact the customer experience, we are relentlessly focused on running great restaurants, empowering our people and continuing to modernize our ways of working. We have designed and are deploying strategic human resources and talent management processes that help support our long-term business strategy.
Key to this strategy has been the development of an initiative to build the foundation for a seamless, personalized employee experience and the transition of our talent processes to a digital format. This initiative will establish “Glocal” (globally leveraged and locally relevant) processes and simplify the Company’s technology landscape with four transformation objectives: elevate the McDonald’s employee experience, gain efficiency, improve workforce management and enable advanced data analytics, insights and reporting. Achieving these objectives will help create internal visibility into the full breadth of talent at the Company.
On this page, we explain the following:
- Our support for our Corporate Staff (people working for the Company in the corporate headquarters, field and other offices).
- Our support for Restaurant Staff (people working in a McDonald’s restaurant, either for the Company or a Franchisee).
- Our approach to compensation and wages for Company employees.
- Our global benefits principles and locally relevant benefits for Company employees in certain locations.
Our Company and the People We Can Reach
Globally, Company employees, which include those in the Company's corporate and other offices as well as in Company-owned and operated restaurants, totaled over 150,000 as of year-end 2023, of which approximately 70% were based outside the U.S.
The over 2 million individuals who work in McDonald's franchised restaurants around the world are critical to the Company’s success, enabling it to drive long-term value creation and further its purpose and mission.
Accelerating the Organization
McDonald’s seeks to be faster, more innovative, more efficient and to offer more exciting career and work opportunities. To do so, we are evolving our culture and ways of working. As part of this transformation, we introduced four Cultural Norms in 2023 that are intended to guide how Company employees work, act and think:
- Start with the problem: We take time to define and align on the problem before we start solving it.
- Share and steal: We proudly share ideas and celebrate borrowing from each other when the solution already exists.
- Relentlessly prioritize: We actively prioritize work that solves problems for our customers and people, and stop projects that dull our focus.
- Discuss, don’t present: We use meetings efficiently to collaborate and move the problem forward.
To help integrate these Cultural Norms across the Company, we developed a People Manager toolkit that helps leaders engage their teams on what the Cultural Norms are and how to practice them.
Driving Values-Led Employee Progress
We believe working to deliver a best-in-class employee experience requires us to put the Company’s five core values into action. To help measure how we are progressing, we leverage various internal indices.
In particular, we use our Inclusion Index to measure behaviors and actions being taken to help ensure an inclusive environment for Company employees. The Index measures attributes that are critical to bringing one’s authentic self to work, such as feeling free to offer opinions and having opportunities to advance in the Company.
To better embed these inclusivity attributes into the Company’s workplace culture, efforts need to be driven from the top. That’s why we hold our leaders accountable for making tangible values-led progress.
Our Foundational Programs
Hamburger University® – Our Signature Learning Approach
Hamburger University (HU) is the Company’s signature learning and development approach.
Since first opening in Illinois in 1961, HU has grown to have nine campuses globally as of 2023. It provides training for Company employees, as well as for Franchisees and their employees,1 and has helped prepare thousands of people for leadership positions in the McDonald’s System.
Our Corporate Staff
Our Corporate Staff work daily to help make a positive impact on the Company’s business, people and communities. In turn, the Company is committed to their professional development and to supporting Corporate Staff as they pursue their career paths.
The Company wants Corporate Staff to have a meaningful and impactful career at McDonald’s, and offers robust opportunities to help them develop professionally, explore career-related interests and aspirations and navigate their careers.
McDonald’s ambition is to create a place where people can work, develop, mentor and lead alongside other top talent.
Building High-Performing and Highly Engaged Teams
McDonald’s believes in motivating employee performance. Throughout the year, the Company encourages People Managers to engage in critical conversations with their direct reports to help drive business impact, values-led leadership and individual career growth. This Performance Motivation process involves four milestone conversations – the “4 Cs” of Commit, Connect, Conclude and Career – along with sharing frequent, real-time feedback year-round. Each of these important conversations helps ensure Company employees are focused on the right priorities, have an opportunity to reflect and review progress, and can discuss feedback and development opportunities.
Encouraging Employees to Be Their BEST
McDonald’s sets high expectations for how its employees lead the business and each other. We use our competency framework, the BEST model, to define four categories of behaviors, each designed to help enable high performance for Corporate Staff at all levels. These categories are: the Building Blocks that make employees successful at McDonald’s, as well as the three areas needed to drive results: Execution, Strategy and Talent.
The BEST model helps define what good performance looks like and McDonald’s uses it as a foundation for hiring, developing and assessing talent. It serves as a compass for Company employees and People Managers when exchanging feedback and directing continuous growth and development. When selecting candidates for specific roles, demonstration of BEST is considered along with key factors such as skills, experiences and other job requirements.
The Leaders of Tomorrow
To help shape career paths for certain Corporate Staff, we offer the opportunity for some individuals to participate in leadership development programs such as “Inspire” or “Elevate.” These are delivered through a series of workshops and are designed to help develop new and existing people leaders.
Building Our Talent Pipeline and Developing Our Future Leaders
Leadership at McDonald’s is accountable for acting to advance a talent pool that will support the Company’s long-term success. In 2022, we introduced expectations for Officers to engage in inclusive behaviors that support talent development and help build a strong, diverse succession pipeline. The focus is on encouraging the behaviors and actions that help ensure business continuity. Leaders’ actions against these expectations contribute to their annual performance ratings and incentive compensation.
To enhance our ability to build strong leadership pipelines, we have a global Talent Review process for Company employees. The process provides a common language by which to assess and identify high potential leaders and inform succession planning.
Continuing Education Support for Corporate Staff
We have partnered with DePaul University to offer the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business online Master of Business Administration degree program for certain Corporate Staff. DePaul provides a 25% tuition discount that eligible Corporate Staff can combine with their McDonald’s educational assistance benefits. The program is designed to help give students some of the skills they may need to move into leadership roles at McDonald’s. Together with DePaul’s business professors and academic staff, we have created a customized course outline including strategic management, finance, marketing and effective business communication courses.
Career Planning and Development Philosophy
We’ve created a comprehensive Career Planning and Development Philosophy deeply rooted in the Company’s purpose, mission and values to help our Corporate Staff on their career journey. This Philosophy guides employees in how to develop their careers and details how McDonald’s can help build strong leadership pipelines.
There are many ways we put the Philosophy in action. For example, we created the Career Navigator, a guide for employees to use when exploring the tools, services and offerings available to help them on their career journeys. We also provide resources for People Managers to develop employees’ skills to help support their career aspirations. For example, our annual Career Conversations are opportunities for employees to discuss career plans with their People Manager and receive advice about how to pursue them. We provide guidance to all Corporate Staff on how to have an effective Career Conversation from both a People Manager and employee perspective, to help ensure employees make the most of these conversations. People Managers are also encouraged to periodically hold a one-on-one opportunity for leaders to listen and for people to share their perspectives on what they enjoy and what could be even better at McDonald’s.
Restaurant Staff
McDonald’s is committed to providing training, education and career pathways to empower Restaurant Staff. We and our Franchisees want to make McDonald’s one of the best places to work and offer development opportunities unique to McDonald’s restaurants.
We encourage Franchisees to have similar aspirations and have developed optional toolkits of principles and best practices to help Franchisees recruit and retain talent. The toolkits include activation guides to bring McDonald’s values to life, and talent attraction and employer branding materials. McDonald’s also offers recruitment and retention workshops to Franchisees.
By creating an environment of learning and development, McDonald’s is focused on attracting and retaining the very best people and enabling its Franchisees to do the same. The Company is dedicated to providing learning and development opportunities for employees at all stages of their professional journey, whether or not they choose to build a career within the McDonald’s System.
Continuing Education Support for Restaurant Staff
We believe opportunity starts with education – which is why McDonald’s offers avenues for learning to its Restaurant Staff and encourages our Franchisees to do the same. Archways to Opportunity®, for example, is a comprehensive education strategy that includes offering eligible Restaurant Staff employees at participating restaurants in the U.S. access to programs that provide an opportunity to grow and learn – whether that means graduating from high school or college, learning English as a second language, or obtaining access to academic or career advisors.
McDonald’s also offers apprenticeships – opportunities to earn nationally recognized qualifications while working – to Restaurant Staff in several European markets to help promote and improve access to vocational training.
Talent Recognition
Our recognition framework encourages dedicated effort, rewards results and celebrates career milestones in a meaningful way. We have five global pinnacle awards that reward high achievers among Corporate Staff, Restaurant Staff and Franchisees.
Awards
Every year, through our annual Presidents’ Award, we reward Corporate Staff who have demonstrated all five of our Company values; an annual Shining Light Award goes to Corporate Staff as nominated by their peers who have best demonstrated one of the Company’s values in action. The Circle of Excellence is an annual award given to Corporate Staff teams who have contributed most to our Company purpose, mission and values.
Our Ray Kroc Award for Restaurant Managers (which may be awarded to Company or Franchisee Restaurant Staff) is presented for values-led behaviors, as well as for noteworthy business and financial results, and the Fred Turner Golden Arch Awards recognize Franchisees who have made significant contributions to McDonald’s purpose, mission and values. Winners of these two awards are recognized at our Worldwide Convention, typically held every other year.
SHINE Platform
SHINE is McDonald’s peer recognition program for Corporate Staff, designed to help drive a culture of recognition and shared success. The platform is accessible to Corporate Staff in our global functions and enables people to allocate virtual points to colleagues they believe are worthy of recognition.
Each point-based recognition is valued at 500 points, which translates to $5 that can be redeemed for a range of rewards including merchandise, gift cards and more. It is a key component of the Company’s efforts to encourage employees to celebrate the moments that matter and to recognize those going above and beyond to succeed under the Golden Arches.
Compensation, Wages and Benefits
To help attract and retain talent at all levels of the Company, we provide competitive compensation commensurate with a Company employee’s position. We periodically evaluate competitive wage data and market trends to help determine appropriate wage ranges, in addition to complying with all applicable laws.
The following Global Pay Principles help ensure that good pay practices are understood and consistently implemented for all Company employees.
- Competitive: We aim to align pay opportunities with the external value of a job to help the Company attract, engage, retain and motivate talent. The competitiveness of the Company’s pay rates is reviewed periodically relative to McDonald’s size, scale, performance and talent needs.
- Non-discriminatory: Company employees are compensated at a level commensurate with their role, responsibility, impact, location, experience, knowledge, skills and performance, irrespective of gender, race, ethnicity or any other similar protected personal characteristics.
- Performance-based: We design our pay to be focused on motivating high performance, recognizing achievement and reinforcing behaviors that align with the Company’s values.
- Understandable: We aim to communicate pay programs regularly and transparently. We strive for simplicity and focus in the design of our programs to help ensure Company employees understand what determines their pay.
- Compliant: We comply with all applicable legal and regulatory requirements and standards.
Supporting Employee Well-Being
Taking steps to help Company employees be happy and healthy is something we champion. The BeWell@McD internal web page is designed to support Company employees in developing physical, emotional, financial, social and workplace well-being strategies, providing frameworks and tools that can be leveraged by leaders globally. In 2022, we created a Global Well-Being Committee to help drive this work, and the Company offers several well-being resources, including:
- A Global Well-Being Framework.
- Best practice sharing across our five well-being pillars: Physical, Emotional, Financial, Social and Workplace.
- Regular additions and enhancements to McDonald’s benefits, offerings and resources for staff and Company-owned and operated restaurant employees.
- Support to improve the communication of our well-being programs.
- The McDonald’s Workplace platform.
Using Workplace to Spread the Word About Well-Being
Our Workplace platform is a key enabler of our well-being strategy. It serves as a space to share supportive messages and updates on well-being initiatives such as during the “HowRU?” World Mental Health Day campaign and “Save a Little, Save a Lot” World Savings Day campaign.
Fostering Well-Being Worldwide
We believe McDonald’s can be a leader in promoting welfare in the workplace. We encourage appropriate conversations about well-being and provide support options for those who may be struggling. For example:
- In markets including Austria, Canada, Italy and the UK, we celebrate Well-Being Wednesdays where key messages about health and well-being are shared each week with Corporate Staff and Company Restaurant Staff.
- In Australia, Company employees have access to Sonder, a platform that empowers people to take control of their health and safety through an easy-to-use app.
- In Poland, some Company employees have volunteered to be Well-Being Ambassadors, and promote good health through a range of activities such as sharing their personal mental health stories.
- The U.S. market offers a Doctor on Demand service for Company Restaurant Staff to help them more conveniently access needed medical advice.
Global Benefits Principles and Locally Relevant Rewards
We offer market-competitive benefits to individuals employed by the Company and provide resources to our Franchisees to support them in designing competitive benefit packages for their employees.
In most countries, we offer benefits to full- and part-time Company employees working more than a certain number of hours.
Below, we’ve provided an overview of core benefits offered in our top six Company-operated markets by revenue as of 2023. Our Global People teams work to identify the needs of Corporate Staff and Company Restaurant Staff and aim to create market-competitive benefit packages which are reviewed regularly and benchmarked against peers.
The U.S.
In the U.S., we offer health & welfare and retirement benefits, as well as paid time off and parental leave, to Corporate Staff and Company-owned Restaurant Staff working more than a certain number of hours or based on position. We also provide life insurance, paid short-term and long-term disability leave, educational assistance and paid volunteer time off. An eight-week paid sabbatical is available for employees who have worked for the Company for 10 years.
We offer Company employees in the U.S. a wide range of benefits and programs to help support their needs and goals, including critical illness insurance, access to mental health support programs, discounted childcare, emergency relief, an employee discount program, a prescription drug discount program, pet insurance, legal insurance and virtual urgent care.
Australia
In Australia, all Company employees have access to retirement benefits, fully funded by employer contributions, as required by law. Additionally, we offer healthcare benefits, paid time off2 and parental leave to Corporate Staff and Company-owned Restaurant Staff working more than a certain number of hours.
Canada
In Canada, all Company employees have access to public healthcare funded by employer health tax. Additionally, we offer healthcare and retirement benefits as well as paid time off and parental leave to Corporate Staff and Company-owned Restaurant Staff working more than a certain number of hours.
France
In France, all Company employees are automatically enrolled in retirement benefits provided for by law. Additionally, we offer healthcare benefits, paid time off and parental leave to Corporate Staff and Company-owned Restaurant Staff, as provided for by law or by Company agreements.
Germany
In Germany, all Company employees are covered by the comprehensive public healthcare system and automatically enrolled in retirement benefits provided for by law. Additionally, we offer paid time off and parental leave to Corporate Staff of majority-owned subsidiaries and Company-owned Restaurant Staff working more than a certain number of hours.
The U.K.
In the U.K., all Company employees are covered by the public healthcare system and automatically enrolled in retirement benefits provided for by law. Additionally, we offer paid time off and parental leave to Corporate Staff of majority-owned subsidiaries and Company-owned Restaurant Staff working more than a certain number of hours.
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