McDonald’s People Brand Standards Set Global Expectations to Prevent Harassment, Discrimination, Retaliation

McDonald’s corporate People Brand Standards set a single, company-level expectation that spans the global organization and its public-facing materials. The policy framework is explicitly named the People Brand Standards and appears in some public documents under the alternate label Safe & Respectful, signaling the company’s stated commitment to consistent behavior across markets.

The standards articulate the company’s global expectations for preventing four specific harms: harassment, discrimination, retaliation, and workplace violence. Those four categories are listed as central concerns within the People Brand Standards and are presented as the behaviors McDonald’s aims to prevent across its corporate operations and employee touchpoints.

Public materials sometimes refer to the policy suite as Safe & Respectful rather than People Brand Standards, which creates two recognizable labels for managers, crew members, and corporate staff to reference. Using both names in external-facing content ties the internal brand language to the company’s public commitments, and the dual terminology appears in materials that describe the same set of expectations.

For McDonald’s employees and leaders, the People Brand Standards function as a baseline corporate statement about conduct: they name harassment, discrimination, retaliation, and workplace violence as unacceptable and set a global expectation that those behaviors be prevented. The standards are positioned as company-level guidance meant to apply across regions, and the presence of the alternate Safe & Respectful label in public materials reinforces that the policy is intended to be visible both inside stores and in broader stakeholder communications.

Taken together, McDonald’s use of the People Brand Standards and the Safe & Respectful label frames corporate expectations around four clearly named risks to workplace safety and rights. The two names and the explicit list of prohibited behaviors give managers and employees a concise vocabulary to identify what the company says it will prevent, and they establish a single point of reference for those expectations across McDonald’s global operations.