Working a shift is great. While co-workers may act different, most customers won't.
Now... CEOs with "push-button menu option" based call centers under them should be mandated to call monthly and complete some task.
Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
161–170 of 353 posts
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if he did the same thing at JC Penny when he was running it into the ground.
In his defense shoppers wanting stuff to appear to be on sale is pretty dumb.
Using an incorrect model of your clientele’s behavior and emotional responses is even dumber.
Of course, I would have made the same mistake as Johnson. But it is always a good reminder of how differently people’s brains work.
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I worked for a large logistics company we’d have a few days a year where we’d go downstairs and shadow someone using our software. It was very informative. The UX people were redesigning workflow to be “easier” and less information dense and the experienced people (who worked mostly on commissions mind you) where very pissed and wanted their hot keys and their at a glance information. It was very eye opening.
>The UX people were redesigning workflow to be “easier” and less information dense and the experienced people (who worked mostly on commissions mind you) where very pissed and wanted their hot keys and their at a glance information. That doesn't necessarily mean that the UX people were wrong though. Even if their changes made the experienced people slightly slower, it could be worth it if it significantly sped up onb…
It is possible to achieve both. Making an explicit choice to degrade the ability and satisfaction of experienced employees is just optimizing for staff churn.
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
My first career was a chef. When I asked a friend of the family who owned a restaurant when I was teenager what steps I should take to become a chef, the advice he gave was "Get a job as a dishwasher in a restaurant because the most important thing you need to know is to respect your dishwasher because anytime everything goes wrong and you are in a jam, it is your dishwasher who will save you." Unknown to me the rest…
Reminds me of something that my father told me: "Always be nice to nurses and janitors. Nurses run hospitals. Janitors run buildings. Secretaries run offices."
Right.
In the case of offices, the receptionist is the most important and powerful person there. They are the ones who have the ear of everybody else, have control of access to everyone else, know how things really work (as opposed to how everyone says they work), etc.
A good or bad word from the receptionist can literally make or break business deals.
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably better to just listen to the people that do it all day than to think you pop in as an outsider and have some special insight.
People need performance and narrative. Spending one day a month so you can say to fellow executives "I actually went and touched the problem, we need to fix it" and so employees can say to each other "he actually came and touched the problem, he must be working on fixing it" has real value. Actually learning about the problem and coming up with a solution is best done by listening to the people like you said, but the…
You're describing an incredibly toxic environment. Executives blowing each other off, employees not trusting executives, executives not considering a problem real until they've seen it themselves. All of this is a crutch in place of actual trust.
Yes, I realize this toxic environment is present in 95% of all companies in the U.S. That makes it worse, not better.
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#166I'm not sure I see the point of this, unless it's just for PR. Working a half day per month will tell you very little of importance in any workplace. And, if you're the CEO of the company and all of the other employees (and especially management) knows you're the CEO, working that half day will tell you exactly nothing.
I think you'd be surprised what even a little manufactured exposure can do. It doesn't need to be undercover. At almost every company I've worked at that asks for feedback I recommend some version of this. Some things I think you could learn in only a few hours at a Starbucks:
* "Wow that machine is a pain in the ass to use"
* "3 customers got angry at me because ____"
* "Making ___ the way Jane showed me was much easier than the training"
* "I hate it when customers pay using ____"Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Occasionally fairly major changes like what? I'm curious. There's nothing that shows the flaws of a process like running it yourself.
Probably better to just listen to the people that do it all day than to think you pop in as an outsider and have some special insight.
Why not both?
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#168I recall Amazon used to do something similar. Executives would sometimes take customer service shifts. The goal isn't PR or worker morale - most people see through stunts like that. The real goal is to help leaders better understand their product, its problems, and customer frustrations.
> Executives would sometimes take customer service shifts. This won't happen among most companies, but I'd love to see that become a common practice with at least some high-level developers. There's so many pain points in many customer service organizations that are easily solvable if a developer understood the frustration and waste with many customer service tasks. Nothing motivates more than having to do some annoy…
Don't worry, with no customer service the customers will also be placed into a void too.
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#169This is laudable, and it will be good if it had a return on investment by identifying opportunities for improvement.
On a personal level, however, it would only work for me if Mr Narasimhan decided he didn't like the taste of the coffee and changed it; I haven't visited a Starbucks in decades because I find their brew quite unpleasant!
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#170highest paid barista ever
It should be a shift swap. He works as a barista for barista pay and the person he takes the shift from should be CEO for a day for CEO pay. Business Insider says[1] the new CEO's compensation is something like $28 million, so the barista should get around $115k for the day's work. Maybe then both parties will come to realize whether or not the 3 orders of magnitude difference in pay is warranted. [1]: https://www.bu…
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