Jennie Scroggs-Ienzer remembers exactly where she was when she discovered just how far her career might take her — Hamburger University.
Seriously.
The former head of McDonald’s Corp.’s business in Portugal and now one of the chain’s franchisees in France, Scroggs-Ienzer credits her stint at the company’s largest training center with helping her look beyond her counter job at a McDonald’s restaurant in North Carolina.
“It was the first vision I had of how big McDonald’s really is,” Scroggs-Ienzer said in an interview. “I had just known my local restaurant until then.”
Twenty years later, McDonald’s is working to restore that prestige to Hamburger University — a 130,000-square-foot facility at McDonald’s Oak Brook, Ill., headquarters that has trained 75,000 restaurant managers — after years of efforts to disperse its training efforts to regional offices throughout the United States.
“The way we were doing it wasn’t as efficient and we weren’t getting the desired results,” Diana Thomas, McDonald’s head of U.S. training and dean of HU, said in an interview at the company’s headquarters.
“You can’t get a consistent customer experience if you don’t have consistency in the training.”
Following years of sluggish sales, McDonald’s has turned its U.S. business around in the last two years thanks to healthier new menu items, a catchy advertising campaign and initiatives like later hours and cashless payments.
But behind the scenes, the world’s No. 1 fast-food chain thinks HU can play a vital role not only in making sure its hamburgers taste the same in Shanghai as they do in Chicago, but also in convincing talented employees that a job flipping burgers is worthwhile.
That’s no small task for a company with employee turnover rates of around 100 percent that has faced criticism over the perception that fast-food jobs are low-paying and dead end.
But employees like Thomas and Scroggs-Ienzer, who started their McDonald’s careers as teenagers in their home towns, speak nostalgically about their first visits to HU — and McDonald’s hopes renewed efforts to create buzz around the center will do the same for a new generation of staff.
In its first step toward revamping the center, McDonald’s relocated its main training courses back to Oak Brook — a move that resulted in lower attendance at the company’s primary training courses, Thomas said.
As a result, HU officials are now working to convince franchisees that paying for workers to make the trip to Illinois is worth it.
McDonald’s puts up the funds to train its managers, though costs for transportation and accommodation at HU’s own lodge are up to the franchisees. Higher-level workers pay more to cover “the cost of running those courses,” Thomas said.
A spokeswoman declined to give details on HU’s budget.
One way HU has been trying to recruit students is by making courses more fun and interactive rather than lecture-based. Exercises for restaurant manager trainees, for instance, include a “scavenger hunt” about McDonald’s history using artifacts from a small museum recently installed in HU’s main corridor.
Students from across the globe are able to participate in such activities with the help of simultaneous interpreters working in 28 languages.
The recreated office of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc is also a new addition to HU’s front entrance to help teach students about McDonald’s heritage and create “a greater level of energy and excitement,” a spokeswoman said.
The company also recently installed a full-scale McDonald’s restaurant at HU used exclusively for training students on everything from speeding up customer orders to fixing faulty shake machines.
Thanks to such initiatives, attendance at HU was up 40 percent last year, and 5,000 of the chain’s 1.6 million employees are expected to make the pilgrimage to HU in 2005, Thomas said.
“You need to understand what temperature fries need to be cooked at,” Thomas said. “It is amazing the detail we get into and how seriously people take this.”