Morale is at an all-time low. Employees are scared of losing their jobs and are frustrated at the lack of transparency from management. The company is starting to lose very talented people at a high rate for the first time in our company's history and this is going to continue to happen.
The most important P in our Plan to Win used to be People. That is no longer true. People are now at the bottom of the list. Instead of first focusing on how to improve our business and stop operating outdated processes, that could provide a substantial cost saving, and activating around legacy events that provide no overall business value or return on investment for the company (the Olympics, the Owner-Operator Convention, national & regional company events that require enormous budgets), the company has decided to cut personnel and benefits to employees.
Many of the job cuts have been at administrative and managerial levels of the company, which have a minimal impact on Q&A and cost savings. However, these are the people doing the actual functional work at the company. These are the worker bees who are making the contributions that keep the wheels turning and the lights on. There have been very few job cuts at the executive, officer or senior director level, yet this is where the most impact would take place. Company management needs to look carefully at all org charts in the company and question when there are senior directors or even directors who have no direct reports or when there are multiple senior directors or directors in a department. Is this necessary? If you have to cut personnel, at least cut the appropriate people, who impact the bottom line and do not impact the day to day work of keeping the company running.
Even for people who have retained their jobs, due to cuts in some benefits programs and changes in the G&A policy, there are new out of pockets costs for employees just to do their jobs. People are working longer hours for less pay, consolidation of jobs have put enormous burdens on smaller departments, while other departments continue to grow but have yet to show their value to the turnaround of our company.
Often times we operate in an environment in which we latch on to the new cool thing in the marketplace that a competitor is doing instead of focusing on innovative or building something new and proprietary to McDonald's. We look silly perpetually playing catch-up in our industry instead of trying to lead. We need to innovate around what our customers tell us they want, not what we think they want or what we see competitors doing. We have more resources and a bigger scale to showcase our innovation, yet our innovation at this point is doing what everyone else is already doing. We should be first to market with new conveniences for our customers.
