McDonald’s scorecard is commendably concise, but ends up not giving the whole picture
The McDonald’s 2011 Global Sustainability Scorecard kicks off with “About This Report: Less is More”, and attempts to communicate, in pithy fashion, the company’s sustainability performance over its latest full year. Together with an accompanying “GRI-based index”, a portal to other company information, the scorecard proffers a snapshot of the fast-food giant’s performance and a window into its broader approach to sustainability.
Given stakeholders’ short attention spans and increasing demands for information, a scorecard is an excellent idea whose time has come. Moreover, the Global Reporting Initiative’s move to seek more granular and more detailed information makes it imperative that companies communicate performance clearly, concisely, and without boring readers to death.
The McDonald’s scorecard is certainly concise. It tells stories meant to illustrate progress on largely qualitative goals in five priority areas. Quotes from managers and external stakeholders provide personal perspective on the featured programmes. Each page contains a smattering of data, “key performance indicators” from 2006 to 2010 (though one may ask what happened to the 2011 data).
Of this sparse and puzzling mix of data – after all, McDonald’s has been reporting on sustainability performance since 2002 – most impressive are gender diversity figures. More than half of store managers are women, and women account for 28.1% of higher-than-VP-level executives. And the fact that in many countries employee training can count towards an entire semester’s worth of college credit counters the longstanding “McJobs” concept – that McDonald’s workers face a dead-end in terms of professional development.
The scorecard and its accompanying “best practices” pieces largely fail, however, to place the company’s primary impacts in the broad context of McDonald’s’ global operations. And while the best practices pieces offer an abundance of stories, the data selected for presentation offer a narrowly circumscribed view of the company’s performance: a collage of disjointed snippets rather than a cohesive view of the bigger picture.
Lacking materiality
The 13-page scorecard devotes an average of 675 words to each of its five broad priority areas: nutrition and wellbeing, sustainable supply chain, environmental responsibility, employee experience, and community. Read together, the scorecard and best practices pieces do little to enlighten readers on what McDonald’s considers material issues within those broad categories. A materiality analysis would have helped in that regard – but perhaps would reveal more than the company wants to discuss.
The company’s goals around nutrition and wellbeing focus on raising awareness of and providing more choices for fruit and vegetables on its menu. Progress against these very qualitative goals seems to be measured only by the number of menu items containing fruit or vegetables, rather than any indication that its efforts are actually helping customers to make healthier choices. These goals and metrics merely nibble around the edges of what must be a significant risk: concern over McDonald’s contribution to the growing problem of obesity in some of its largest markets.
Research efforts
To its credit, McDonald’s has reformulated some of its products to reduce salt and increase vegetable content. Yet the company’s advertising budget has recently been estimated, by the New York Times, at more than $2bn. It would be useful to know how that compares with nutritional research and investment in efforts to improve nutritional content of its products.
Stakeholders looking for a complete picture of McDonald’s environmental performance will be disappointed. The scorecard reports energy usage “in the restaurant” in kilowatt-hours per transaction but provides no additional data to help readers understand what that figure represents in the aggregate or how it relates to overall greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
In fact, the scorecard avoids discussion of climate change altogether, which is surprising given the dependence of the McDonald’s supply chain on water for agricultural production and the significant contribution of beef cattle to global GHG emissions. McDonald’s discusses reducing GHG emissions in a companion piece, “Best of Green 2012”, but only in the context of greening the company’s car fleet.
One bright spot is the company’s reporting on sustainable fish sourcing. The company reports that 99% of all fish is sourced from MSC-certified fisheries.
There are plenty of stories of efforts to improve the company’s environmental and social performance: unbleached napkins in Canada, a new environmental management system in China, an extra cent per pound for tomato workers in Florida. But those efforts are piecemeal and the results impossible to divine.
What’s missing is the big picture. Stakeholders looking to the scorecard and accompanying documents to assess McDonald’s’ environmental and social performance will get, at best, only an impression. Perhaps that is the intent.
Kathee Rebernak is the founder and chief executive of consulting firm Framework LLC.
Snapshot
Materiality analysis? No
Goals? Yes, all qualitative.
Targets? No
Follows GRI? Publishes partial GRI index; no application level stated.
Assurance? No
Stakeholder input? Yes
Seeks feedback? No
Key strength: Percentage of women in company and owned-store management.
Chief weakness: Lacks context for performance.
Pleasant surprise: College credit for employee training.