Case Study: Starbucks
By:
Thomas Engel
Nevada State College

A new challenge for retail companies is finding a way to retain the employees they have and keep them motivated. While trying to maintain and run a company, companies have to find a way to lower the turnover rate and how to satisfy the employees. The answer to lowering the turnover rate and satisfying the employees that work in a company is through job design (Bauer & Erdogan, 2013). Job design has a major impact on many parts such as motivation, commitment, turnover, and job satisfaction. The question now is how to implement this into a business properly so that a company can have a lower turnover rate and motivate their workers. Starbucks has found the answer and is a great company to follow in their design. Howard Schultz bought II Gironale in 1985 from the three original owners that lived in Seattle. Schultz and a group of investors decided to change the name of the coffee bar to Starbucks. When he acquired Starbucks he pursued his dream to make everyone taste his coffee, he expanded across the United States and then focused on expanded throughout the world. By 2002, Schultz opened up 5,688 throughout the world and grew over 300 times it size in the last ten years. (Gulati, 2002) Howard Schultz states the reason for this success is due to the employees that they have had. He quickly recognized by nurturing employees through compensation, promotion, and feedback mechanism was a great way to develop the company culture. By implementing the parts stated above Starbucks has had one of the lowest turnover rates in companies today. Starbucks was listed as number four in 2011 for the Best Customer experience in the Global Customer Experience Management Survey (nbrii.com). When Schultz was in Italy where he got his idea of how wanted Starbucks to be ran, he quickly implemented some of his experiences of the coffee bars into Starbucks. He made made Starbucks into a relationship-oriented company that focused on creating a relationship with their customers, suppliers, alliance partners, and their own employees. He knew that when making a relationship with these different parts of the business he could build trust with them. By building trust he knew that customers would come back, employees would work harder, suppliers and alliances each party is convinced the at the other is mutually success. Trust with their employees is one of the biggest factors for Starbucks. When employees trust that the companies they tend to give all that they have to that company. One of the interesting quotes of the company is “We offer the finest coffees in the world, grown, prepared by the finest people. Our employees, who we call partners, are at the heart of the Starbucks Experience. We believe in treating our partners with respect and dignity. We are proud to offer two landmark programs for our partners: comprehensive health coverage for our qualified full-time and part-time partners and equity in the company through Bean Stock” (globalassets.starbucks.com). Starbucks makes it known publicly on their site that the heart of Starbucks Experience is in their partners who are their serving their customers. Starbucks knows that if they treat their partners with respect and dignity that they will in turn give the Starbucks Experience that the company wants. So Starbucks has put in the job design to treat their employees with respect and dignity by giving them stock options and comprehensive health coverage. Starbucks even goes the extra step by training them as soon as their hired and showing the employee that they are the heart of the company.
Starbucks has also done training for their employees on how to be communicators of its brand. By training their employees on how to be communicators of the brand, Starbucks knew this would an entertaining, comfortable, and trusting environment for the customers. Many companies will use money toward