Job design in McDonald

As everyone knows, McDonald’s Corporation is one of the biggest franchise fast-food restaurants throughout the world. Therefore, the implementation of appropriate job design within the organization itself becomes an extra significant issue facing by the manager. As Wood et al (2010, p159) states: “Job design involves the planning and specification of job tasks and the work setting designated for their accomplishment.” Each staff is designed a particular set of jobs in McDonald’s. For example, some crew members cook food items in kitchen, some crew member work on the front counter and cafe, while others might doing the cleaning.

Also there is manager or supervisor who supervises the entire crew and look after overall wellbeing of the restaurant. The corporation cannot satisfy every staff needs or assigned them to the right task which they are capable with, in this case, the jobs affect the staff negatively. In McDonald’s, work is typically characterized as repetitive, boring and monotonous. In these respects, it is intellectually unchallenging and factory-like.

Despite what may be promised, these jobs will not lead to a career or useful skill acquisition (Ritzer, 1993). Therefore, issue might occur since every staff is designed to a particular job and the repetitive job routine could possibly lead to low performance and dissatisfaction. Basically, there are four approaches used in the job design. These include job simplification, job enlargement, job rotation and job enrichment. However, only job simplification will be discussed throughout this report then will focus on how difficult to sustain a consistent workforce within a corporation.

First of all, job simplification is standardizing work procedures and work done by people in clearly defined and specialized tasks (Wood et al, 2010, p159). For example, if McDonald’s restaurants reengineered its facilities, it would redesign the entire stores which including the order-taking technology, kitchen design and eating areas. However, if the corporation wants the job of cashier needed to be changed, the corporation could simply implement a job simplification (Hellriegel, Jackson and Slocum, 2008, p403).

This is because the crew can learn tasks in a short period with little or no mental effort; also, the low skill and low cost crew can be hired and trained easily. In this situation, it will possibly comes up with a few disadvantages include higher rates of staff turnover, loss of efficiency due to low-quality work and results in crew experiencing boredom and low job satisfaction. According to McDonald’s (McDonald’s Corporate, 2011), “High turnover rates are a challenge for any company in the food service industry, including McDonald’s”. For this situation, higher retention rates for attract quality staff to stay with the company may apply.

Secondly, perhaps it is a challenging task in the 21st century global economy to sustaining a stable and qualified diversity workforce, particularly at the fast-food restaurant level. For instance, the mobility of today’s workforce and poor perceptions of employment in some areas of the quick service industry present special challenges for McDonald’s (McDonald’s Corporate, 2011). While repetitive job for continuous several hours a day can often cause the crew feel the uninteresting in their jobs and lead to ineffectiveness, the crew maybe start looking for some other interesting job instead of staying in McDonald’s.

As Gould (2010) states, “McJobs are characterized as low skilled, low paid and with poor career prospects. They embody the worst elements of low-skilled service sector employment”. Consequently, if the pay and reward system in the corporation was poorly established it could affect the performance of employees as well as lead to job dissatisfaction. While job dissatisfaction occurs, the human resource department and the manager may need to propose a way to reward the crew. However it appears that many crews are unaware of, or uninterested in, the reward or benefits proposed from human resource department (Gould, 2010).