Our Associates - Our Team
We feel the sustainability of our business starts with our commitment and responsibility to our associates. This commitment goes beyond just growing their professional skills. For many of our team members, working in one of our restaurants is often their first job. So we strive to develop their life skills - foundational abilities such as teamwork, responsibility, problem solving, positive energy, and a relentless drive to serve and satisfy customers - so they can grow to their full capability, be successful in whatever they do, and achieve their dreams.
Our How We Win Together Principles (HWWT2) guide all aspects of our associates' daily work lives, professional and personal development and customer interactions. "Believe in All People" is the first of our HWWT2 principles because we believe everyone has the potential to make a difference.
We know our greatest competitive strengths are our culture and over 1 million associates in our restaurants and our Restaurant Support Centers worldwide. We also recognize that since for many of them, working in one of our restaurants is often their first job, this puts us in a unique position to help our people start their careers and develop their skills. We take this responsibility seriously. We are dedicated to teaching our front-line team members the life skills they need to be successful in whatever they do - from getting to work on time, teamwork and accountability to listening to our customers, and learning how to resolve issues and recover when mistakes are made.
Our business is diverse and complex. Over 80 percent of our U.S. restaurants are owned by franchisees or licensees. In our company-owned restaurants and Restaurant Support Centers, we directly employ only about 25 percent of the total number of Yum! associates. For that reason, we cannot oversee associate practices in all of our over 38,000 restaurants. We do, however, offer guidelines, coaching and training to encourage our franchisees and licensees to implement and manage best practices in accordance with our corporate goals and objectives.
The strength of our culture and commitment to associate growth is measured regularly. For example, in 2009 in our U.S. company-owned restaurants, 82 percent of our Restaurant General Managers (RGMs) and 66 percent of our Shift Managers were promoted to those positions from within the company.
