Don't mock the Mac

Why shouldn't McDonald's award A-levels? Whether or not you support its products, this is a company that is good at what it does.

Yet McDonald's has been the butt of every pocket cartoonist in the land since the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) announced this week that it had authorised McDonalds, Network Rail and Flybe to award qualifications to staff.

McDonalds will train staff in customer services, marketing, hygiene and human resources, awarding them with qualifications equivalent to GCSEs or A-levels. Employees at Network Rail will be able to access training in track engineering equivalent to a PhD.

Daily Telegraph readers were particularly scathing in the newspaper's letters page but that says more about Telegraph readers than it does about McDonalds.

Perhaps I should come clean at this point and declare my sometime consulting role at McDonald's as a member of its European Stakeholder Group. Does this mean I refrain from criticising the company? Far from it.

There are a lot of things I don't like about McDonalds. Mostly it's the little plastic toys and the horrid clown. Then there's the product - the burgers and the salty chips. But how many of us can say we have never succumbed at times of stress?

But if you take away the product(that's what you do with a McDonald's hamburger isn't it?) there is a lot of good stuff lurking within the McEmpire. The staff training would put to shame a lot of the so-called academic offerings in schools.

You might learn how to bake a cake in domestic science lessons at school, but at McDonald's you learn about nutrition, not just about making hamburgers. It's true that McDonald's has not yet learned how to switch on the world's children to healthy eating. But neither has Jamie Oliver.

Then again Jamie Oliver is not responsible for this alarming map. I'm not sure McDonald's could be absolved in the same way. As the Daddy of fast food merchants it should not be surprised to find itself in the dock on obesity.

But it is on the case. Unfortunately McDonald's, like the tobacco, soft drinks and confectionery companies, is in the addiction business. Almost all of us eat too much sugar and companies like McDonald's have created attractive and efficient delivery systems. Now as their markets become more socially aware they face a conflict between their business aims - selling lots of hamburgers - and promoting a healthy society.

It's going to be a long road but we need to be realistic. McDonald's is not going to go away. But it can reform itself and I think it is reforming, although in some areas more slowly than others. In its employing approach I believe it has more than reformed. Much of its training, pay and conditions are first class in its sector.

Its social awareness is exemplary. McDonalds hasn't turned its back on the poor as some more elitist businesses have done. It is down town, lighting up parts of cities that have been deserted by other businesses. It is working with communities, serving cheap but well cooked food to people who don't earn much and giving jobs to people who might struggle otherwise to find work. But these aren't any old jobs, they are jobs that have prospects, where people can rise up within the company.

David Fairhurst, McDonald's UK head of HR (his full job title would take you longer than it does to eat a burger) has challenged the term McJob as a pejorative, and rightly so. He wants it's definition as an unstimulating job with few prospects removing from the dictionary.

A McJob is a real job and a McA-level will be a real A-level as worthy as anything in History or Geography and probably a little more useful. So don't mock the mac. It's trying hard and deserves our support. It has mine.

And the winner is......

Yes it’s that time of year when people and companies get awards. I hate awards. You don’t say no to one and it’s always nice to get one, but they are so subjective and many of them are not fully representative of their industries.

Frankly if you can’t put “award winning” before whatever piece of self-marketing you are preparing these days you might as well go home. Award winning has become so ubiquitous that it is losing its meaning as a result.

In my own case you might as well talk about Richard Donkin, the “air breathing” journalist. The awards I won were such a long time ago, reflecting a time of my life when I was slightly less cynical. I’m still proud of them, but they sit there on the CV like old medals that are rarely taken out of the drawer.

These days I get to sample the other side of the process as a judge in both The Work Foundation's Workworld Awards for journalists and the Confederation of British Industry’s Human Capital Awards.

Why do I do it? Two reasons: Firstly, it’s nice that someone thinks you are experienced enough to recognise quality when you see it; secondly, it helps to keep you in touch with who is doing good stuff.

I know from experience, then, how much of a lottery they are. I have seen how a seemingly runaway winner can be overtaken on the rails by a back marker whipped to the front by a powerful advocate among the judges.

Another thing I don’t like about most of the awards is that you are required to enter them. Many people and companies simply don’t bother. Either they are too busy to enter, they’re fed up of losing or they won last year and are suffering from “award fatigue.” This means that a lot of good people and companies are overlooked.

Then there are awards themselves. How many of them exist as a genuine form of recognition and how many are inspired by the marketing department of a particular organisation? Let’s not kid ourselves. The main reason there are so many awards is that they are about marketing and promotion.

In human resources there are so many. Personnel Today magazine has them. Human Resources Magazine has them and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and People Management has its People Management Award. Then there’s the CBI awards that I have already mentioned.

There ought to be an awards bunker for those who want to avoid all those dickie-bow events at Grosvenor House in London. At least the HR people maintain a reasonable sense of decorum, unlike a minority who attend journalists’ awards that often degenerate in to a bun fight among the tabloids.

Perhaps there should be an award for the most professional awards ceremony.

Age management

I'm working up a column on "age management," A concept I picked up from TAEN, the Age and Employment Network. I'm not sure what it means but I think it has something to do with finding what TAEN calls "good work for older people."

On the other hand, you could apply the concept to all age groups, matching the right kind of work to to the age group best suited to do it.

One problem with age in the workplace is that attitudes to age change just as we age. George Carlin puts it in a nutshell here. My thanks to Reg Starkey for that link. Reg has campaigned for years to end age-stereotyping in the advertising industry. I think we share the same sense of humour.

There are some other great George Carlin sayings here.