Talent & Culture Strategy at McDonald's: When Culture Has to Travel Through Franchisees

This article is part of MokaHR's Talent & Culture Strategy series, which profiles how leading companies build their people strategies.

In 2022, McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski set out a blunt assessment of what the company needed to fix. Writing to employees following the publication of McDonald's first stand-alone Human Rights Policy, he acknowledged that the brand's scale — 40,000 restaurants, roughly 2 million people employed systemwide — created both an outsized responsibility and a difficult accountability challenge. For a company where approximately 95% of restaurants are operated by independent franchisees, embedding a consistent talent and culture strategy across that network is less an HR exercise than a franchise governance question.

That tension sits at the centre of how McDonald's approaches people strategy today. The company cannot simply mandate culture from Oak Brook. What it can do — and increasingly does — is design the programmes, frameworks, and accountability structures that give franchisees the tools and motivation to build the kind of workplaces that the Golden Arches brand requires. Understanding that distinction is essential for any HR leader benchmarking against McDonald's: this is talent strategy at systems scale, not company scale.

McDonald's has been named one of Forbes' "World's Best Employers" in recent years and received OnCon's Learning & Development Team of the Year Award among its Top 100 L&D Teams. The company launched its Future Forward International Leadership Development Programme in Milan in 2024, signalling a deliberate investment in building the next generation of cross-market leadership.

How does McDonald's attract and hire talent?

A talent destination with 150,000 corporate seats to fill

McDonald's articulates its ambition plainly in its corporate communications: it aims to be "an iconic talent destination — known as much for its people experience as for the Golden Arches." That is not marketing language; it reflects a genuine strategic challenge. The company competes for corporate and management talent against employers from multiple sectors — technology firms, consulting houses, and consumer goods companies — while also needing to attract and retain restaurant-level talent at a scale few organisations can comprehend.

The company's response has been to invest heavily in what it calls the "employee experience infrastructure." A multi-year digital transformation initiative is converting McDonald's talent processes from manual, locally inconsistent systems to a globally standardised platform. The objective, as stated in McDonald's corporate disclosures, is fourfold: elevate the employee experience, gain efficiency in HR operations, improve workforce management, and enable advanced people analytics. For an organisation with over 150,000 corporate employees across dozens of markets, that last capability — analytics and visibility into talent — represents a significant competitive shift.

The hiring process: structure, digital tools, and the speed question

At the corporate level, McDonald's hiring process is structured around behavioural interviewing and a digitised reference-checking workflow. An integration between SmartRecruiters and Xref, deployed in markets including Australia, reduced average reference turnaround time to 18 hours, with a 92% reference completion rate — and notably, 41% of references were collected outside normal business hours, illustrating how digital-first tools change the practical experience of hiring at scale. McDonald's Australia was recognised as an Employer of Choice in the 2018 and 2019 Australian Business Awards, in part attributable to the modernisation of its candidate-facing hiring process.

For restaurant management roles — the core of McDonald's operational talent pipeline — hiring is closely connected to internal development. McDonald's has long operated on a "promote from within" philosophy for restaurant management, with the pathway from crew member to restaurant manager to multi-unit operations leadership documented and incentivised. This internal pipeline serves both retention and recruitment: the brand's track record of developing crew members into owners and operators is a substantive part of its employer value proposition in markets where alternative employment is plentiful.

Inclusion as acquisition strategy

McDonald's framing of inclusion is explicitly tied to its competitive position in the labour market. As stated in its corporate disclosures, "embracing diversity as a competitive advantage" is the foundation of its recruitment strategy, not a standalone ESG commitment. The evidence for this appears in the numbers: women hold 44% of senior leadership positions globally (Sr. Director and above) as of 2024. Diverse-owned suppliers account for more than 25% of U.S. systemwide spend. In the U.S., 34% of franchisees come from diverse backgrounds — a figure that required decades of deliberate pipeline development.

The company runs Employee Business Networks (EBNs) — employee-led groups organised around shared backgrounds or identities — which operate as both support structures and informal talent development networks. These groups provide visibility for high-potential employees across the organisation, a mechanism that many large corporates implement in theory but struggle to connect to actual advancement outcomes. At McDonald's, the EBN model has been running long enough that it functions as a recognised career accelerant rather than a social club.

Where McDonald's has faced genuine difficulty is in translating these corporate-level commitments to franchisee-operated restaurants, which employ the vast majority of the two-million-person systemwide workforce. A series of high-profile legal proceedings — including class action complaints related to harassment and workplace safety at franchise locations — underscored the limits of voluntary culture transmission in a franchise model. The company has responded by strengthening its Safe & Respectful Workplaces framework, including mandatory reporting mechanisms and updated Supplier and Franchise Code of Conduct standards updated in 2024. This is an area where McDonald's acknowledges ongoing work, not a solved problem.

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How does McDonald's develop and manage employee performance?

Hamburger University: the world's most recognisable corporate learning institution

Hamburger University has operated since 1961, predating most corporate universities by decades. That longevity is meaningful: HU is not a branding exercise but a genuinely embedded institution with campuses across multiple global markets and a curriculum that spans operational management, leadership development, and cross-cultural competency. The model combines hands-on experience — which is indispensable in a restaurant operations context — with structured classroom and online content and mentorship from senior managers.

In 2024, McDonald's received OnCon's Learning & Development Team of the Year Award among the Top 100 L&D Teams, recognising both the ambition and execution of its learning strategy. The company also launched Future Forward, a new international leadership development programme held in Milan, Italy, designed to build the next generation of senior leaders with cross-market experience. These are deliberate investments in an era when many organisations are cutting learning and development budgets: McDonald's is moving in the opposite direction.

For restaurant staff, the company introduced the Empowering Development Leaders programme in 2024 to support advancement at the restaurant management level. This programme addresses one of the persistent structural challenges in F&B talent management: the gap between developing capable crew members and creating management-ready candidates who can take on the operational and people leadership responsibilities of running a McDonald's restaurant.

The 4 Cs performance model

For corporate staff, McDonald's uses a continuous performance management model structured around four milestone conversations throughout the year: Commit, Connect, Conclude, and Career. This "4 Cs" approach replaced the annual review cycle that McDonald's, like many large organisations, had relied on for decades. The model asks managers to engage in critical conversations with direct reports at regular intervals, covering three areas simultaneously: business impact, values-led leadership, and individual career growth.

The design logic here is worth noting. By building career development into the same conversation structure as business performance assessment, McDonald's avoids the common failure mode where performance management and career development operate as entirely separate tracks — one that happens to the employee, one that happens when the employee asks for it. The 4 Cs model treats career navigation as a managerial responsibility, not an HR department service.

The company also tracks employee engagement and culture through an internal Inclusion Index — a quantitative measure of whether employees feel they can bring their authentic selves to work, share opinions freely, and access advancement opportunities. Critically, McDonald's CEO and Executive Officers are held accountable for Inclusion Index outcomes, connecting culture metrics directly to executive performance rather than treating them as a separate HR reporting function. This is a governance decision with real implications: when culture metrics affect executive compensation, they tend to get taken seriously.

What can HR leaders learn from McDonald's approach?

McDonald's talent strategy is shaped by a structural reality that most companies do not face: the company must simultaneously manage talent in its own corporate organisation and influence talent practices across an enormous franchise network where it has no direct employment relationship. For HR leaders outside the franchise world, the corporate-side lessons are more directly transferable — but the franchise challenge raises useful questions about how any large, multi-site organisation transmits culture and capability standards at scale.

Design accountability into culture, not just aspiration. McDonald's inclusion strategy has teeth because its CEO and executive officers are directly accountable for Inclusion Index outcomes. This is structurally different from publishing a diversity and inclusion statement or reporting metrics post hoc. For HR leaders looking to move beyond performative DEI commitments, the mechanism matters as much as the message: which leaders are accountable, for which specific metrics, and in what timeframe? AI-powered screening tools can help operationalise inclusion goals by standardising evaluation criteria and surfacing diversity pipeline data that makes accountability to those metrics meaningful.

Merge performance and career development into the same conversation. The 4 Cs model reflects a principle that is straightforward in theory and difficult in practice: people managers should be responsible for both performance assessment and career development, not one or the other. Many organisations separate these tracks, which produces annual reviews that are dreaded rather than useful and career development conversations that happen only when an employee is about to leave. McDonald's architecture treats these as inseparable. This requires well-designed workflows and manager capability — structured recruitment and talent management platforms can support this by building career development prompts and documentation into the same systems managers already use for performance tracking.

Invest in the pipeline, not just the hiring event. McDonald's ability to promote from within at restaurant management and above — and to cultivate diverse franchisee ownership over decades — reflects an understanding that talent strategy operates on a longer timescale than most quarterly plans accommodate. The Future Forward programme and Hamburger University are investments in people who are not yet ready for their next role but will be within two to three years. Organisations that only activate their talent strategy when a role opens inevitably overpay, underperform on retention, and miss the candidates who would have been the best fit had they been nurtured earlier. Talent pipeline and analytics tools that track candidate progression over time — including silver medallists and internal development candidates — are what make this kind of longitudinal strategy operational rather than theoretical.

Acknowledge the hard problems honestly. McDonald's approach to franchisee workplace standards is a genuine ongoing challenge, not a solved problem, and the company acknowledges it in its public disclosures. For HR directors, this is a useful reminder that scale creates compliance and culture gaps that no policy document fully closes. The honest assessment — "more work is needed" — is more credible to sophisticated observers than a corporate communications exercise that presents everything as already solved. This applies internally as well: HR teams that surface and address engagement or culture gaps early, rather than managing the optics, tend to build more durable organisations. This approach contrasts with the more aspirational framing common at companies like Lululemon, where the brand's culture narrative is tightly managed, or P&G, where the long internal development track makes hard trade-offs less visible to outsiders.

What is it like to work at McDonald's?

For corporate staff, McDonald's offers a working environment shaped by its five core values: Community, Inclusion, Family, Service, and Integrity. The BeWell@McD platform supports five pillars of well-being — Physical, Emotional, Financial, Social, and Workplace — and the company runs a Global Well-Being Committee established in 2022 to coordinate delivery across markets. Specific initiatives include Well-Being Wednesdays in Austria, Canada, Italy, and the U.K.; access to the Sonder health and safety app for employees in Australia; and a Doctor on Demand service for U.S. company restaurant staff.

Benefits for U.S. corporate and company-restaurant staff include health and welfare coverage, retirement plans, paid time off, parental leave, educational assistance, life insurance, short- and long-term disability leave, and paid volunteer time. Employees who have worked for the company for ten or more years are eligible for an eight-week paid sabbatical — a benefit that is notable in a sector not known for longevity-based rewards. McDonald's also offers critical illness insurance, mental health support programmes, discounted childcare, emergency relief, and virtual urgent care access.

For restaurant staff — whether employed directly by McDonald's in company-operated locations or by franchisees — the experience is more variable. Pay transparency is a stated commitment: the company aims to communicate pay programmes "regularly and transparently" and benchmarks compensation periodically against market peers. The actual experience in franchisee restaurants, however, depends significantly on the individual operator. This variability is one of the central tensions in McDonald's employer brand: the corporate promise is consistent, but the delivery is not.

The company has faced well-publicised challenges on this front. High-profile harassment complaints at franchise locations prompted the introduction of mandatory safe workplace training and an updated Human Rights Policy in 2024. McDonald's is candid that this represents ongoing effort rather than a completed programme. For the large majority of corporate employees, however, the culture is characterised by genuine investment in career mobility — many senior leaders entered the business as restaurant crew members — and a structured approach to development that takes people capability seriously as a business priority, not a support function.

Frequently asked questions

How does McDonald's hire and develop talent? McDonald's uses structured behavioural interviewing and a digital reference-checking workflow via SmartRecruiters, which has reduced average reference turnaround to 18 hours with a 92% completion rate. Once hired, employees are developed through Hamburger University and a continuous performance model built around four milestone conversations per year.

What is Hamburger University at McDonald's? Hamburger University is McDonald's global centre of training excellence, operational since 1961, combining on-site and online learning with hands-on experience and mentoring. It serves both restaurant managers and corporate staff, and in 2024 McDonald's L&D team received OnCon's L&D Team of the Year Award in recognition of the programmes built around it.

What is McDonald's approach to diversity and inclusion? McDonald's tracks inclusion through an internal Inclusion Index and holds its CEO and executive officers directly accountable for outcomes. As of 2024, women hold 44% of senior leadership positions globally, 34% of U.S. franchisees are from diverse backgrounds, and diverse-owned suppliers account for more than 25% of U.S. systemwide spend.

What benefits does McDonald's offer its employees? In the U.S., benefits include health coverage, retirement savings, paid parental leave, educational assistance, and an eight-week paid sabbatical after ten years of service. The company's BeWell@McD platform supports physical, emotional, financial, social, and workplace well-being globally.

See also:

• Talent & Culture Strategy at Starbucks: Building the Best Job in Retail

• Talent & Culture Strategy at Lululemon: When Your Store Associates Are Called Educators

• Talent & Culture Strategy at P&G: Building from Within

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