McDonald’s Restaurants came out top at the 2014 Personnel Today Awards, named as overall winner for implementing an innovative new HR technology platform.
This year’s awards ceremony, the biggest in five years, attracted 950 HR professionals from some of the UK’s top employers.
Rob Brydon, star of panel show Would I Lie To You? and The Trip, entertained guests in the glamorous surroundings of the Great Room in the Grosvenor House Hotel in London.
McDonald’s beat competition from entrants in 22 categories, including teams and individuals from 106 businesses, to bag the coveted overall award.
This is the second time that the restaurant chain has won Personnel Today’s overall award, also having claimed it in 2008 for the way it aligned its HR goals with those of the business.
This year, the judges praised the company’s “PeopleStuff†system, which provides a “hire to retire†service to employees. It is a web-based system that allows staff and managers to do a range of work-related activities, from booking shifts to gaining manager approval.
As a result of implementing the system, restaurants have enjoyed lower crew turnover and improved productivity. McDonald’s also came top of the Excellence in HR through Technology category.
Om Prakash Choudhary, head of EMEA at Reflexis talked to Lokvani about the award.
How does it feel to win this award?
This award is a vindication of Reflexis transformation of workforce management software. It traditionally focused on serving organizations from a top-down view. We added a small clause to the problem from ‘What can employees to do to help us meet business needs’ an additional component - ‘and how can we be in alignment with our employees needs as well?’. We are delighted that Retail is increasingly embracing our engineered shift.
It seems to be a very interesting for it seems to enable greater efficiency and job satisfaction for min wage earners. What is the key component to that?
The landscape of retail workers has undergone dramatic shift in the last 10 years. These minimum wage earners live in a changing world where definitions of parenting, social contributions, societal relationships are evolving. Software needs to be considerate to the employees for many good reasons but primarily because such workers are at the frontline of customer engagement – and directly responsible for meeting customer demands and protecting brand equity. Retailers need to make minimum wage earners happy about their job.
What is Reflexis looking forward to going ahead?
We press on. 2014 is the best year ever in our company’s history – and we think that is because we spend more on R&D, we live and breathe Retail and we are able to foresee transformations in an shifting world – and assist retailers through those.
On a lighter note, as you know Ranjani, both Reflexis EMEA and Reflexis-India hope the Patriots win the Superbowl this year. For some strange reason (Prashanth :-)?) it seems to have a direct correlation to our bonus plans.
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