How McDonald’s Engages Its Workforce Through Everyday Value and Recognition

We spoke with Ashleigh Cunningham, Training Consultant at McDonald's Australia, on how they partner with Reward Gateway. Here's what she told us. 

What led you to partner with Reward Gateway?

"We wanted to add to our EVP for our employees and look at how can we give them the most about working for McDonald's and how can we add to their day to day life and, you know, be that employer of choice."

Amid Australia's cost of living crisis, how does offering employee discounts and financial wellbeing resources support your people?

"Obviously, there's lots of talk out there about wanting higher wages and wanting wages to match the crisis and match the cost of living.

We can't just go and give everybody a pay rise as much as we'd love to. We've obviously got budgets and things, and there's a process to that. But this allows us to find another way to how do we help our people? How do we support them in this?

And the best thing that we can do is direct them to my benefits. And the best part too is now there's even the gifting function. So it's not just about them and how to support them. It's how can they use it to gift to friends, family, all that kind of thing. So I think the platform's not just about them now. It's now about everybody, their whole family."

How have you engaged your people in the program?

"We actually struggled a bit with this being that we have such a challenging demographic being that we have fourteen year old employees all the way up to people that have have slowed down in life and are semi retired that are working in our restaurants.

So, we are constantly looking at innovative ways to drive the platform and get people on. And I think the best thing that we can do is be looking for highlighting different benefits, on the platform, whether it's different personas, that we've been looking at or whether it is, you know, the daily deals is a great one, and we will do post on our online platforms to get people's attention and link them back to my benefits.

I think the spending guides as well, like the amount of people that access those and have a look at them on a regular basis as well is just I think everything is just keeps directing them there, is how we get them on

How has leveraging the Reward Gateway platform helped your team strengthen connections, improve communication and drive productivity? 

"It's really interesting. We've got some franchisees out there that actually use the platform really, really well, so they drive engagement in their restaurants. But actually do use that recognition side of it as well and incorporate everything, and I guess it just it it builds a culture.

We use it like we've got a, people month that we have every year, so we hold that in August. And we update the cards to match, and we put all of that in. And we just keep driving everybody to support your people, do this, do this. And just I think that the biggest thing for us is we just keep bringing it back to it's you and what supports you in this current environment and how you can get the most out of being an employee at McDonald's."

What would you say to other organisations considering Reward Gateway?

"I would say I think it's a great platform. I would just challenge them to get the most out of it and work out what that is and whether it's a twelve, eighteen, twenty four month plan and really challenge your demographic.

How can you really entice them? Because that's been our biggest challenge and we're still getting over that hurdle. But how do we get bang for buck in terms of getting that usage and and continuous usage, not just getting people onto the platform once?

And we've had to challenge the where we're feeding the information. So we do it we were doing it just at orientation, at orientation, but now we're also doing it at a three month point because I feel like when you start, there's a lot going on and a lot of policies, procedures, and things. So it's like, let's do it at a check-in point and reiterate it so that they remember that there is this awesome benefit of being employed with us."