Sustainability Discussion 2: Complete the Starbucks Case Study (found in Important Documents) How has Starbucks structured its organization to have a social and environmental focus?Go to a Starbucks and sit and observe for at least an hour. Take notes about what you notice about: How the customers are treated? How the employees dress, act, interact? How the facilities are laid out? Analyze the organizational culture of Starbucks from your observations and case study analysis. Why did Starbucks choose the organizational culture? What facets of the culture make for effective employee engagement? What facets affect sales? What leadership qualities make the Starbucks model effective? Discuss 1:Initial post 2: Reply on 2 students

Student#1: CASE STUDY: STARBUCKS How the customers are treated? Starbucks provides its customer’s versatile environment, adding to the coffee. They always place the customers on top and comfort them with an ambience and friendly service. By providing service, they know customer name, also provides the good rewards for loyal customers. They also keep themselves open to take opinions or feedback from the customers to improvise their service at any point of time. Starbucks continuously is implementing customer feedback to create new products. By listening to customer wants and ideas, they are able to both satisfy demand and capitalize on previously unrealized opportunities. One great example is customer inspired Pumpkin Spice Latte, which is available in certain seasons and has generated a coffee craze. Their customers do their marketing for them, promoting the sensation person to person and via social networks. How the employees dress, act, interact? Employees who are also knowns as Partners in Starbucks are well trained and efficiently customer facing people. The new Starbucks Dress Code announced today invites baristas to shine as individuals while continuing to present a clean, neat and professional appearance. Effective immediately, a range of shirt colors beyond solid black and white are welcome, including gray, navy, dark denim and brown. The corporate work culture is highly disguised among the baristas to cover the polite and friendly ambience across the shop. They mostly put on a smiling face and help each other at the workplace and the hold it hassles free. Starbucks is encouraging employees to consider every patron that enters its stores a customer, whether they buy something or not. How the facilities are laid out? Starbucks holds 18000 stores across 64 countries with the almost disciplined work culture and better ambience. It has a open transparent work place, where brewing and making of food is seen visibly at the store. The ambience is well equipped to standard Starbucks format with plenty of amenities. Free WIFI is also an additional boost up to the customers who come and visit the place. Also they provide digital reward points for the purchase and then provide additional pay of for the loyal customers. Online store also helps to place pre orders and pick up at the ease. Analyze the organizational culture of Starbucks from your observations and case study analysis. Starbucks’ culture is powerful because it is tightly linked to the company’s distinctive capabilities. Starbucks has built a capability to foster a relationship-driven, employees-first approach, which encourages staff to form close bonds with each other. Called “partners” rather than employees. It creates a welcoming environment for customers of diverse backgrounds; it has built the capability to deliver on that aspiration into its HR processes. Together, these capabilities enable Starbucks to deliver on its strategic goal of being that “third place” that customers value. Starbucks Coffee’s organizational culture is a culture of belonging, inclusion and diversity. The combination of the company’s key cultural characteristics is unique and specific to the nature of its coffeehouse chain business. The internal cultural situation is reflected through the company’s human resource development programs and baristas’ interactions with customers. Why did Starbucks choose the organizational culture? Starbucks Corporation’s organizational culture is one of the most distinct characteristics of the firm. A company’s organizational or corporate culture widely influences employees and business performance through values, customs, traditions, and related behavioral expectations in the business organization. The way café employees work with each other and how they interact with customers are indicators of the company’s corporate culture. The warm and friendly ambiance in these coffee shops is part of the company’s cultural distinction from competitors. What facets of the culture make for effective employee engagement? Workplace culture could be a powerful tool to engage and retain talents in the longer term. Starbucks provide quite a lot of benefits to its employees, which makes them serve the higher purpose and stay long term with the organization. Critical illness insurance plan is issued for more than 10,000 parents of our partners (employees). Supporting critical illnesses for aging parents represents our responsibility as a company and honors the family values. Starbucks College Achievement Plan allowing partners to earn bachelor’s degrees through Arizona State University with full tuition reimbursement by the company. With 80 percent female partners (employees), Starbucks Korea collaborated with the Ministry of Gender Equality developing this Program to help women resume their careers after childbirth. They can work shorter with more flexible hours while receiving full company benefits, incentives and bonuses. Apart them the above, they encourage employees with multiple rewards and recognition programs. Frequent discussions are arranged with the partners and the Managers to discuss on the authentic engaging conversations that cultivate growth, foster trust, facilitate insights and drive performance. What facets affect sales? Starbucks have been expanding internationally more rapidly at present as operational and franchise stores, these creates the popularity and generates trust among the consumers. Revenues are higher from company owned stores. With initiatives to drive traffic to existing stores and a firm expansion plan in place, Starbucks is well-poised to begin the next fiscal year. They enable “Fair Trade” in procuring the products from the direct farmers, which enables them to get massive bonus by eliminating the middle men and also get the highest quality of products. They constantly innovating on the product line to be sold in their shops which enable them to focus on the latest market analyzed products. What leadership qualities make the Starbucks model effective? Howard Schultz, founder of Starbucks is a transformational leader who kicked off the U.S.'s second coffee revolution. Idealized Influence, Inspirational Motivation, Intellectual Stimulation, Individualized Consideration are always considered as traits of him. Being the inspirational communicator he is, he was able to convey his message and his managerial team came back more energized as ever. Keeping the employees happy were considered to be main focus in providing business revenue. Aside from identifying what customers need from other business channels, they are also contributing to the economic development of communities. student#2: In most organizations, culture and strategy tend to be discussed in separate conversations. Executives know that culture is important and that a negative culture can hurt company performance, but they often don’t know what to do about it. Or they attempt to improve the situation by launching a culture initiative to “make the workplace more positive.” What most executive teams typically fail to do is to connect the company’s culture with how the company makes its strategy work. Take Starbucks: The cafe chain positions itself not just as a seller of coffee but as an experience provider, creating a “third place” for conviviality beyond home and the workplace. Walk into a Starbucks anywhere in the world and you will find a consistently comfortable and welcoming ambiance. But you don’t get that simply by telling your staff to be warm and friendly. Starbucks’ culture is powerful because it is tightly linked to the company’s distinctive capabilities. The feel of Starbucks stores isn’t created merely by the layout and the décor — it exists because the people behind the counter understand how their work fits into a common purpose, and recognize how to accomplish great things together without needing to follow a script. Over many years, Starbucks has built a capability to foster a relationship-driven, employees-first approach, which encourages staff to form close bonds with each other. Called “partners” rather than employees, even part-time staff (in the U.S.) receive stock options and health insurance. At the height of the global financial crisis, when other companies were cutting HR costs wherever they could, Starbucks invested in staff training, including coffee tastings and courses that ultimately qualified for credit at higher education institutions. Former company president Howard Behar believed that employees who feel cared for will care about their customers. One former Starbucks worker noted that “nobody at Starbucks ever ordered anyone to do anything. It was always: ‘Would you do me a favor?’ Or something similar.” While most organizations somewhat support the notions of diversity and inclusivity, Starbucks not only understands the importance of having staff of diverse backgrounds in order to create a welcoming environment for customers of diverse backgrounds; it has built the capability to deliver on that aspiration into its HR processes. Together, these capabilities enable Starbucks to deliver on its strategic goal of being that “third place” that customers value. Companies whose culture and strategy are not aligned in this way often struggle to understand how they can make the linkage. Every company has its own distinctive culture — the reservoir of behaviors, traits, values and mind-sets that people in an enterprise share. But cultures are complicated, with hundreds of disparate elements. Often, these elements are not good or bad in and of themselves, but they have aspects with both positive and negative implications. When most companies try to improve their culture, they focus on the negative aspects, and try to fix them. This sounds reasonable, but what we’ve learned is that the opposite approach is much more successful.