Better Future for McDonalds Company - Essay Example

The company has a great emphasis on customer and employee satisfaction; it is also very innovative with new trends and tastes being introduced in new products. Despite the company’s success, it is faced with intense competition from other food chains such as KFC and Burger King. Therefore, it is necessary for McDonald’s’ leaders to adjust and improve the organization in several areas as a way of surviving this intense competition in the future.Recommendations for a better future.

The company should apply efficient reward and performance practices so as to attract result-driven professionals in the company who can succeed in a performance-based environment. This technique is a crucial employee motivator. Several ways of employee motivation include; giving them bonus payments, recognizing hardworking employees, and giving them authority. McDonald's should consider giving employees bonus packages as per their performance. Continental Airlines introduced a bonus incentive package where employees would receive $65 monthly to ensure on-time flight operations, and it has improved its services.

An effective reward management system instills a sense of ownership in the employees as they tend to focus on job improvement in the company. One disadvantage of the strategy is that the employees can be de-motivated if the goals set to receive a bonus are too hard to achieve (Puffer 1999).Being a multinational company, Mcdonald's should use a decentralized organizational structure as opposed to a centralized structure to allow managers to make appropriate and pragmatic decisions for their outlets contextually.

This is because restaurants in different countries might not be faced with similar challenges. Decentralized decision-making allows a subsidiary company to make its decisions to solve local problems better than the parent company making decisions for a business in a foreign country. The disadvantage with decentralized decision-making is that if a wrong decision is made in a subsidiary restaurant, the losses arising from bad decisions affect returns generated by the parent company. Bringing decision-making back to the parent company might also result in the organization's political fallout.

(Simon et al. 2005). However, this has the advantage of avoiding affecting operations of other subsidiaries in other regions.McDonald's should focus on improving employee interpersonal and communication skills to minimize conflicts at work. Most conflicts are brought about by misunderstanding among employees, and this can be solved by teaching the employees to listen to one another and acknowledge each other. This recommendation has been a success at Starbucks where employees are trained on the importance of effective communication (Ritson 2007).

The disadvantage with improving communication skills is that there are employees of different personalities and diverse backgrounds, thus necessitating the need to be trained in communication and interpersonal skills.To improve the company’s leadership and organizational structure, Mcdonald's should focus on employing and promoting more experienced employees into managerial positions; they should also train the current employees on managerial skills. This will ensure that the employees are capable of taking the managerial roles bestowed on them when the more experienced employees retire or leave the company.

The disadvantage of this method is it is expensive for the company to conduct seminars to train the employees (Giber & Linkage 2009). Conversely, the company should adopt an inclusive strategy that incorporates employees in the decision-making process. This can help the company get the views of employees on various decisions and changes before they are implemented to avoid instances of resistance. Ultimately, by applying the above-discussed recommendations, Mcdonald's will be able to cope with the current competition from Burger King and KFC.

The company will also grow into a better, more profitable organization in the future.