University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: February 1, 2007

By JACQUELINE GHOSEN
and KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Contributors

What really happens after you place an order for a Big Mac or a Whopper with Cheese?

Jerry Newman’s latest book, "My Secret Life on the McJob," took him behind the counter at seven fast-food restaurants.

Jerry M. Newman, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor and chair of the Department of Organizations and Human Resources, School of Management, knows because he worked undercover in seven fast-food restaurants across the country, observing operations from the top down—from the biggest management whoppers to the smallest fries at the fry station.

"I wanted to see if a McDonald's in Boulder, Colo., and a McDonald's in Biloxi, Miss., are able to replicate human-resource practices, as well as burger-making techniques," says Newman, who chronicles his experiences as an entry-level employee in a new book, "My Secret Life on the McJob: Lessons from Behind the Counter Guaranteed to Supersize Any Management Style" (December 2006, McGraw-Hill).

The book takes readers behind the scene at Burger King, Wendy's, Arby's, Krystal and McDonald's, and serves up keen insights into management techniques that can be applied to companies with 6,000 locations or just six employees.

The fast food business is the perfect place to investigate management styles, says Newman, because super-sized mega-burger companies boast steady profits, despite high turnover rates, repetitive job duties and fast-paced, high-pressure work environments.

"If you survive a fast food job," he says, "you learn two important lessons: You learn reliability is important and you learn how to handle pressure because every day there is a lunch rush."

What is it that promotes motivation in fast-food employees and boosts the bottom line? Newman's insights—gained from reporting to both compelling, and tyrannical, supervisors—reveal the ultimate key to a positive and high-performing workplace is management style—even if the team is putting pickles on burgers.

The turnover rate at the most effective restaurant featured in the book, which was in Buffalo, was almost 400 percent lower than the least effective, says Newman.

At the worst-case workplace, he quips, "The McLeader was not nearly as good as the McFood."

A consummate people watcher, Newman's keen insights about reactions, emotions, management styles, behavior modifications and the power of praise were recorded each night in notebooks he kept after a long day on the job. The diaries offer glimpses of employees chided for their supposedly easy jobs; managers who cultivated positive images and encouraged friendships and enthusiasm; bosses who were unfeeling; hierarchies that were rigid; and vast corporate and day-to-day differences between competitors that serve up nearly identical meals.

The best managers were "ego-architects," who built up employee confidence with praise for a job well done, says Newman. The worst were "ego-undertakers," who sought out weaknesses in employees' self-images and reacted to mistakes with insults based on them.

No stranger to the fast-food environment, Newman worked two years at Crazy Jim's Blimpy Burger while an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan in the late 1960s. Fast food is "hard work," he says, noting one of the reasons he would move on to a different workplace after two or three weeks was because the jobs wore him out. He prepared burgers, sandwiches and fries, mopped floors, worked the front cash register and even hurt his back stooping over low counters for hours on end.

In order to provide a local address and not arouse employers' suspicions, Newman says the restaurants investigated for the project were all located near his home in Amherst, his condo in North Florida or his sister's house in Michigan. All of the work that went into the book was done between 2004 and 2005, partly while on sabbatical. He conducted additional research at a local Wendy's as recently as October, however.

After spending so much time rushing from behind a lectern to behind a cash register—not to mention once enlisting a graduate student to take on a fast-food job in order to compare night-versus-day shift supervisors in the same restaurant—Newman's unconventional project peaked the interest of many of his students and colleagues.

"I was going up the elevator one day," he says, "and one of our more distinguished professors said: 'You may be the only faculty in the school who could do this.' I think he was talking about my willingness to approach unusual issues from absurd directions."