Fast food giantÂ’s staff benefits scheme drive HR efficiency

Fast food giant’s staff benefits scheme drive HR efficiency

Direct marketing specialist DMB Group is helping McDonald’s Restaurants deliver a voluntary benefits scheme to their employees in over 1,200 restaurants and offices across the UK.

The benefits scheme enables over 80,000 employees to access a range of significant discounts from leading retailers and providers across three distinct areas: shopping, leisure time and personal care. Every employee is issued with a personalised Employee Discount Card.

The specialist in providing direct marketing and database management solutions, has been managing the logistics of the Employee Discount Card scheme in the UK for two years and said it has continually refined the system and its service to fit with McDonald’s needs.

Central management proves key to success

Simon Stevenson, client services director at DMB Group said: “McDonald’s is a huge business with a high number of staff spread far and wide across the UK, so providing a solution to suit all geographic areas from a centrally managed hub was vital to the scheme being a success.

“Being able to constantly manage up-to-date data – ensuring ex-employees are removed and new ones added in a timely fashion – was critical to the effective management of the scheme, saving HR [human resources] and management a huge amount of time.”

Neal Blackshire, benefits and compensation manager at McDonald’s Restaurants added: “Our people are essential to our ongoing success and we have created a benefit which appeals across our diverse employee base.

“The card ordering system we employ from DMB provides a full audit trail, meaning we can check on system usage in real-time, and as it’s entirely automated – including the issuing of new cards – we save a large amount of time and effort whilst ensuring that all cards are received by our employees on schedule.”

Accurate data helps improve staff productivity

Stevenson added: “Reward schemes can be very beneficial for a range of businesses and are relatively simple to set up, however, critical to their success is the continuous and effective management of data.

“In rewarding staff for their loyalty, employers can dramatically improve on staff retention rates, reducing retraining costs and helping to maintain a steady rate of natural turnover.

“Employers can also gain a large amount of knowledge about their employees’ preferences or how they choose to use their reward scheme, whatever its parameters may be, to enable them to tailor the scheme throughout the employees’ time with the company.”