Hitting targets with
new ways of training people.
McDonald’s trains several hundreds
of young employees every year.
This time the training is different!
Learningbank case: McDonald’s
October 2016
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Hitting targets
with new ways of training people.
HR & Training Consultant Thorbjørn Milling lets us in on why employees are going
to battle against bacteria in a new, exciting learning game with focus on a very
important topic for all McDonald’s employees: Food safety.
McDonald’s has an ambition to be an attractive workplace to young people. And every year
hundreds of young people aged 16 to 20 are trained.
In order to optimise the training strategy, McDonald’s has decided to use new technologies and
media including gamified learning concepts: The goal is to turn a ‘dry and boring’ subject into
something fun and relevant and thus get better learning results.
You have 30 days to get it
”You cannot work in a McDonald’s restaurtant, before you have gone through the obligatory
training programme. And you must pass the course within the first 30 days,” says Thorbjørn.
However, the training materials in a large global corporation can sometimes lack a bit of edge:
“We do not want training materials that look like they came from some far off head quarter. We are
McDonald’s employees, but we are also Danes. And our culture is characterised by high spirits and
a good sense of humor. Our training materials should reflect this! And especially during the last
two years we have had a focus on reinventing our training: It is great to find a local partner, who
can support this,” Thorbjørn explains, referring to the cooperation with Learningbank.”
Goodbye to the old hygiene certificate - and hello to relevant knowledge
Until recently, Danish law required that companies only use approved standard hygiene training
and licences from specific third parties for all employees handling food.
However, this standard solution was not optimal, Thorbjørn explains: “The training was identical no
matter if you worked in a candy store, in a restaurant or in a hotel. And for example learning how to
re-heat a soup is not relevant to our employees!” The Danish law was recently changed
enabling companies to train their own staff. Therefore McDonald’s decided to create its own
training materials about food safety.
”We are going to phase out the old training programme, where the employee recieved one or
several printed flyers with formal knowledge. This will be replaced by our new learning game from
Learningbank where all content is relevant no matter if your job is to prepare our world famous
McDonald’s French fries or serve our guests at the counter.”
Learningbank A/S, Støberigade 14, 2450 Copenhagen SV
www.learningbank.dk
Help, my colleagues have dissapeared!
Uniquely for McDonald’s training programme,
Learningbank created the story of a young employee
who by mistake mixes some of the cleaning chemicals
thereby causing a magic explosion!
This explosion casts as spell, so his colleagues are
reduced to the size of bacteria - just like the ones he has
to battle.
His learning quest now is to restore his colleagues to
normal size. But in order to do so, he needs to overcome
several challenges, which in turn teaches him a lot about
good hygiene.
About working with the Learningbank Team
”Being a large corporation with many priorities in a dynamic market means we have busy agendas. And in
fact my time is probably the scarcest ressource in this project. It was crucial for us to find a partner who truly
understood and accepted this,” Thorbjørn explains.
”Learningbank has caught just the right atmosphere: You cannot help laughing a little bit, when the bacteria
utter their ‘roar’! It is the small details that make the overall impression very convincing,” Thorbjørn explains.
One of the challenges was creating a fun and engaging learning game - and yet keep it serious! This is
accomplished with a food safety test in a Jeopardy format at the end. If you don’t pass, you have to take it
again until you do.
Be bold!
Thorbjørn says: “At Mc Donald’s we have a motto. We keep reminding ourselves to: “Be bold!” What this
means to us is that we should have the courage to stand out and find new and better ways of doing things.
I believe we have done this here. This is definetely the most modern example of digital learning I have come
across yet. And I cannot wait to launch it to the whole organisation.”
Learningbank A/S, Støberigade 14, 2450 Copenhagen SV
www.learningbank.dk
Facts and background
Thorbjørn Milling is the HR & Training consultant at McDonald’s. He has a background from the restaurants, where he has worked as a service employee and later as a manager of several restaurants.
“We think of ourselves as a ‘people organisation’. We truly believe that we cannot accomplish anything
without our employees. Therefore HR, education and training is always a high priority. It is in our culture
and DNA as a company. Our founder, Ray Kroc, used to say: ‘We’re not a hamburger business serving
people, we’re a people business serving hamburgers.’ And our organisation still works by that philosophy
today!” Thorbjørn says.
During the next two years, all McDonald’s restaurants are going to be re-designed. This means new
service, new kithen platform, new operations and new competences. This new strategy has already been
rolled out in large parts of the world including USA. Europe is the last continent to join, and now the turn
has come to the Nordics, where McDonald’s Denmark in 2016 started the journey towards ‘Restaurant of
the Future’.
The cooperation with Learningbank and the new learning game forms part of this strategy.
Learningbank A/S, Støberigade 14, 2450 Copenhagen SV
www.learningbank.dk
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Learningbank A/S, Støberigade 14, 2450 Copenhagen SV
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