CorpComms Magazine

When cult author Douglas Coupland defined a 'McJob' as a 'low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector', the phrase entered the English language faster than you could say 'chicken nuggets'.

It epitomised a typical attitude to the legions of burger-flippers who pass through the Golden Arches every year. No matter how many stars the staff wear on their uniforms, customers assume that a McJob is pointless and that the employees who hold one are unmotivated and beaten down by bad treatment - scarcely the image a company wants to project to its customers, especially those who fear that an unhappy waiter or waitress might spit in their food. Over ten years after Coupland's book Generation X: Tales for an accelerated culture was published, McDonald's is finally tackling the unflattering label head-on - a tactic that may provide the best PR it has had in years.

'Parents are realising that their children can come out of working at McDonald's and be better people for it,' maintains David Fairhurst, the company's UK vice president for people and formerly human resources director at Tesco. 'We are already getting better feedback on the brand.'

Fairhurst has launched two parallel initiatives that he hopes will show that McDonald's is not a dead end for its employees. The most ambitious is a vast training programme for the company's army of young staff, developed in association with Cambridge Training and Development and the Learning and Skills Council. Called Our Lounge, it will see 200 of the fast food giant's 1,200 UK outlets become fully accredited exam centres, while thousands of staff will be able to study and take NVQs and GCSEs while working for the company.

Skills crisis

The image of the average fast-food employee earnestly reciting Latin declensions while heating up an egg McMuffin might raise a smile or two, but Fairhurst is deadly serious about the initiative. He thinks Our Lounge will help defuse a basic skills time bomb that he claims is about to explode.

Fairhurst quotes the interim report of the ongoing Leitch Review of Skills, which suggests that if nothing is done to tackle the UK's education problems, 4 mn adults will lack the literacy skills of an eleven-year-old by 2020 and three times as many will lack the ability to perform basic numerical tasks. Fairhurst believes McDonald's, which is the UK's biggest employer of young people with more than 60 percent of its 76,000-strong workforce aged under 21, has a role to play in stopping this. McDonald's is unusual because it chooses staff on the basis of enthusiasm and personal qualities, but Fairhurst warns: 'UK Plc will be affected if we end up with a crisis of basic skills. We are providing online, lifelong support to set our people up for success.'

Our Lounge will cover everything from opening a bank account to answering people who ask employees what they are doing working in McDonald's.

It will also allow staff, who are expected to log on to the site from personal computers at home, to take mock tests on NVQs and core GCSEs. When the employee reaches the required standard, Our Lounge books the exam automatically and sends them to the nearest restaurant with a dedicated exam room. In a manner reminiscent of a McDonald's birthday party, the manager of the restaurant (presumably not dressed as Ronald McDonald) hands successful applicants their certificates. 'This is about providing our staff with competence,' Fairhurst says. 'We want everyone to leave their stint at McDonald's the better for it.' He expects up to 1,000 McDonald's employees to gain GCSE-equivalent qualifications in the next twelve months.

Selling the scheme

Fairhurst is backing up Our Lounge with an advertising campaign that he hopes will instil confidence in the company as an employer. With the strapline 'More than just a McJob', the campaign is intended to show people that McDonald's employees do have prospects and are well looked after. It attempts to turn round Coupland's unflattering definition with words like McProspects, McFlexible and McOpportunity.

'It has a playful degree of humility to it,' Fairhurst says. 'We are humbly submitting evidence to customers and saying, Take another look.'

Humility seems like a new angle for McDonald's, but experts appear to agree that it rather suits the company. Rita Clifton, chairman of brand consultancy Interbrand, is a fan of the 'McJob' campaign. 'It is quite unusual to see a big company like this show such self-consciousness and humour,' she says. 'McJob has almost passed into the language as meaning 'crap job', and McDonald's has shown that it is aware of that.'

But why should customers care how McDonald's treats its staff? Surely the company, which has been forced to close several restaurants in the UK due to falling popularity in recent years, has a far more difficult task ahead in persuading us that its food is not rubbish and will not make our children fat? The company is doing its best to improve brand perception by launching 'healthy' salads and fruit juice for children. It has even launched a web site called makeupyourownmind.co.uk, in a bid to become more accessible to customers who have questions about how the company works. Still, the company is dogged by bad publicity on the internet and beyond - perhaps most notable is Morgan Spurlock's recent film Super Size Me, in which the director and star lived on McDonald's meals for 30 days. A Google search for the words 'anti McDonald's' brings up five sites dedicated entirely to bringing the company down, and even a video game where players can feed growth hormones to cattle, motivate their staff by giving them a badge, or fire them if they get too ungrateful.

In the face of all this, staff education seems like a drop in the ocean - but it may give the company a PR battle that it can win. William Clutterbuck, a partner in financial public relations firm the Maitland Consultancy, likens Our Lounge to BT's campaign to upgrade its publicphone boxes in the 1990s. 'It was a small thing, but it changed the way people thought about the whole business,' he says. 'You can select one thing and make it better, and that can have a positive effect. The McDonald's campaign is quite clever; of course, the company has a huge hill to climb.'

Changing perceptions

Clifton says staff training is a smart area to choose. 'Marks & Spencer always had a fantastic reputation in terms of how it treated its people,' she says. 'It was way ahead of its time. Because the company treated its staff well, people definitely trusted the brand with other things as well, such as its position on the environment.' Clifton believes the McDonald's programme will improve the company's reputation: 'If it treats its staff well, people will assume that it is doing better at the broader issues too,' she says. 'The company's staff will also give better feedback to people.' She acknowledges, however, that 'McDonald's does have a reputation for rather poor quality food', and warns that it might take more than a staff education scheme to change that.

Fairhurst is so serious about changing the dead-end image of a McDonald's staff job that he has even hired a psychology professor to make the point for him.Adrian Furnham, professor of psychology at University College London, has carried out a study of parents whose children work at McDonald's that looks into their perceptions of their children's experiences with the company.

Furnham found that 90 percent of parents think working at McDonald's is good for their children; 72 percent have seen a positive change in their child since he or she began working there; and 60 percent see their child staying with McDonald's over the long term. Fairhurst says the study proves that most people's perceptions of the job are outdated. 'I shall feel really good when I get the Oxford English Dictionary to change its definition of a McJob,' he says. The OED is not known for changing its definitions on the basis of a bit of advertising or a few GCSEs, but if Fairhurst can achieve that, he will really be onto something.

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