Human Resource Management Analysis: Burger King Case Study

This essay provides a comprehensive analysis of Human Resource Management (HRM) within the context of Burger King Fast Food Services. It begins by describing the industry context, including the competitive landscape, key stakeholders, and current trends. The essay then examines Burger King's organizational structure, including its products, services, strategies, and performance metrics. A significant portion of the essay is dedicated to identifying and analyzing five key problems facing HRM practices at Burger King, such as competition, the franchised business model, talent attraction, supplier management, and employee engagement. The essay further explores the HRM-performance chain, linking HRM practices to employee outcomes. It provides recommendations on how Burger King can improve its HRM impact on organizational performance, focusing on financial, operational, and employee behavior aspects. Finally, the essay concludes by reflecting on the key learnings from the analysis, emphasizing the need for HR managers to be tech-savvy, strategic thinkers, and risk-takers. The essay uses academic references to support its arguments and provides a valuable case study for understanding HRM in the fast-food industry.

Running head: HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Human Resource Management
(Burger King Fast Food Services)
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author Note

1HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Discussion on human resource management under the context of Burger King
Fast Food Services:
Introduction:
Burger King or BK is a popular American global chain of fast food restaurants of
hamburgers. It is headquartered in unincorporated of Florida. The more significant launches of
Burger King has the chain of fast-food to decrease the operational complexities. It has also improved
the profitabilities for their franchises.
The following report analyses the various level of complexities and present trends in the
industry. Further, the diverse nature of activities undertaken, services and products developed and
current level of organizational performances are identified here. Besides, various issues faced by the
practices of human resource management at Burger King Fast Food Services is demonstrated
hereafter.
Describing the current context:
The present-day liabilities of human resource management has fallen under three main
sectors. They are staffing, employee compensation and benefits, designing and defining tasks. At
Burger King Fast Food Services, the purpose of HRM has been to maximize the organization’s
productivity ("Your weekend: our guide to what's on around Melbourne" 2018).
It is a fast food restaurant that falls under the industry of particular kind of restaurant serving
fast food cuisine and comprising of minimal table service. Here, the food is served as the part of a
meat-sweet diet (Hanaysha 2016). This industry forms a franchise operation and restaurant chain
providing standardized ingredients. This includes partially prepared foods and supplies every
restaurant through restricted supply channels (Guidry et al. 2015).

2HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
The key stakeholders include customers, suppliers, banks, stockholders, local council and
authority, media, stockholders, consultants and competitors. The present trend in the fast food
service industry in Australia has witnessed massive growth in the past five years (Nixon et al. 2015).
Here, revenue of the industry is seen to be rising at 3.7% every year and reached 19.7 billion dollars.
Understating the nature of the organization:
There are range of products that are sold depending on the specific time of the days, besides,
various lunch items like hamburgers and fries and conventionally not served during breakfast. The
new owners have been found to be relaxing the mandated hours for stores to open from 6 am till
midnight Monday through Saturday. On Sundays, it is till midnight (Zagorsky and Smith 2017).
The current strategy of Burger King includes an opening of more branches in various retail
locations (Abrams 2018).This is because of incidental advertisements offered by the storefronts. Its
present level of organizational performances includes alignment with core competencies, strategic
goals, internal rate of return more than 15% and developing customer service (Morris 2018).
Five problems in practicing HRM at Burger King:
Firstly, there is a rise in competition on the fast food industry in Australia. Secondly, their
entirely franchised business model has been bringing with various disadvantages (Beehner and
Blackwell 2016). Though recruitment is a key for human resource management of Burger King,
thirdly, there is lack of attraction of proper talents to different departments. Besides, HRM of Burger
King has been unsuccessful in choosing and monitoring their third-party partners and suppliers
(Cherney 2018). Thus they have failed to attain values and standards that their business has aspired.
Apart from this, there is a lack of proper considerable contribution to ownership as an essential
driver of engagement (Feltz 2018).

3HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Examining HRM-performance chain:
This indicates the link between HRM performance and different productive outcomes with
employees.
Improving the impact of HRM on present organizational policies:
The effect of HRM can be developed through the following organizational performances.
The first one is financial performance. The market performance and financial data is objective (Ryan
2015). Here specific instances of this type of performance include market value, market share,
revenue, return on equity and return on assets. Next, there is operational performance. Here the
typical measures include sales and innovation, service quality, production quality and productivity.
This kind of performance is easily breakable to various numbers. This includes, some new products
developed, the number of customer complaints and the number of products produced (Moulton
2018). Lastly, to examine the HRM-performance chain, employee behavior and attitudes are to be
considered. Instances of this include absenteeism and turnover, trust in management, commitments
and organizational citizenship behavior and job satisfaction (Santhanam et al. 2018).
Next, performance appraisals should be deployed at the Burger King. This is helpful to
access various productivity and performances. This indicates how efficiently the employees have
been performing on a job and implementing the improvement plan (Morris 2018). Besides, this can
be employed to find out who has required the training and who is needed to be fired, retained,
demoted and promoted. As far as training is concerned, it is the action to teach individuals with
special skills and kind of behavior. It is the process used for providing current employees with
behaviors, knowledge, abilities and skills needed to undertake the jobs (Davis et al. 2018). This has
been helpful to develop performance, productivity, capacity and capability of the employees at
Burger King. Further, this should enhance individual attitudes and skills.

4HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Learnings from the current study helpful to become an effective human resource manager:
The above research helps in understanding that human resource managers have needed to be
tech-savvy. Technology is helping to develop effective and processes of HR. Next, they are
intended to be a strategic thinker. Burger King has been necessary to align with goal of companies
through learning what the goals has been and supporting them. Here, employees at each level must
understand and know their part to promote their culture and philosophies of human resource
management. Lastly, the HRs should be taking risks. They must reach out to people who have never
thought of any opportunity for working for Burger King. This is not necessarily that they need more
applicants. The primary cause is that Burger King has required to do the proper thing.
Conclusion:
It is seen that human resource management of HRM has been focusing on various matching
needs of business. This includes the developments and requirements of employees. Burger King
depends on their people as their skills have contributed to achieve their business objectives. Here,
workforce planning is an active part of their strategic progress. Besides, personal development plans
are helpful for every people to grow both personally and professionally under the business. The
above milestones and guiding forces are important for HRM practices. These findings are useful for
HR managers of the Burger King to investigate their overall success and recognize the results of
those processes.

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References:
Abrams, R. (Aug. 20, 2018). 8 Fast-Food Chains Will End ‘No-Poach’ Policies. The New York
Times. ( 25 November 2018 ). pp 12.
Beehner, C.G. and Blackwell, M.J., 2016. The impact of workplace spirituality on food service
worker turnover intention. Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion, 13(4), pp.304-323.
Cherney, M. (Nov. 24, 2018). Your Snack’s Crunch Is Cloud-Verified. The Wall Street Journal. ( 25
November 2018 ). pp 12.
Davis, B., Lockwood, A., Alcott, P. and Pantelidis, I.S., 2018. Food and beverage management.
Routledge.
Feltz, V. (2018). Fast food advertising and Black Friday. BBC News. ( 25 November 2018 ). pp 20.
Guidry, J.D., Messner, M., Jin, Y. and Medina-Messner, V., 2015. From# mcdonaldsfail to#
dominossucks: An analysis of Instagram images about the 10 largest fast food companies. Corporate
Communications: An International Journal, 20(3), pp.344-359.
Hanaysha, J., 2016. The importance of social media advertisements in enhancing brand equity: A
study on fast food restaurant industry in Malaysia. International Journal of Innovation, Management
and Technology, 7(2), p.46.
Morris, L. (2018). Human rights count: Lunch with Elizabeth Evatt. Sydney Morning Herald. ( 23
November ). pp 24.
Morris, M. (3 Jul 2018). Fast-food job saves teen from juvenile detention as store manager gives
kids a second chance. ABC Podcasts - ABC Radio. ( 25 November 2018 ). pp 16.

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Moulton, D. (May 2018). Human Resources Research Leader. Deloitte. ( 25 November 2018 ). pp
15.
Nixon, L., Mejia, P., Dorfman, L., Cheyne, A., Young, S., Friedman, L.C., Gottlieb, M.A. and
Wooten, H., 2015. Fast-food fights: news coverage of local efforts to improve food environments
through land-use regulations, 2000–2013. American journal of public health, 105(3), pp.490-496.
Ryan, C., 2015. Trends in hospitality management research: a personal reflection. International
Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 27(3), pp.340-361.
Santhanam, N., Surana, K., Varanasi, S. and Zegeye, A. (May 2018). What’s ahead for food
processing and handling?. McKinsey & Company. ( 25 November 2018 ). pp 8.
Your weekend: our guide to what's on around Melbourne (2018). Your weekend: our guide to what's
on around Melbourne. The Age. ( 23 November ). pp 21.
Zagorsky, J.L. and Smith, P.K., 2017. The association between socioeconomic status and adult fast-
food consumption in the US. Economics & Human Biology, 27, pp.12-25.