What an insult to the actual food service workers.
Complete waste of time that could be better spent improving their conditions.
Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
171–180 of 353 posts
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#172I worked for a large tier 1 automotive supplier where every new hire, whether you were an executive, salesperson, whatever, had to work the assembly line for their first two weeks.
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#173I'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 ea…
Sure, there are a few things. That's why I qualified my statement. But they're necessarily going to be minor things, not the larger persistent problems that only become clear once you've spent some real time working.
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#174I'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.
As long as the customers don't know, I can imagine it might help.
Yeah, I guess I imagined he was looking for a whole-picture understanding, not just the customer interactions. But I suppose I was mistaken.
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#175Earlier 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…
Can you elaborate a bit on how the dishwasher role gets the restaurant out of jams?
I'm not certain I'd pay the bill for an expensive meal were it served on grubby crockery.
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#176It's a good idea PR or not. Seeing employee stress is good since just because work is being done doesn't mean the employees are able to do it effortlessly. Stress on employees I think is overlooked as long as the work is done. Or rather the employee stress isn't noticed since it's not measured or even thought about.
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#177Ideally, he gets reamed by some irate customers and gets to experience what the staff do on the daily.
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#178Allegedly Costco has a policy of making their white collar folks work on the floor of their stores and rotate positions before getting to the office, same with McDonalds. I would love to hear from someone with first hand experience to confirm or correct my impression. I did confirm that Costco gives good benefits and decent pay for all their automotive section employees, and since then I only buy tires there (since 2000) for that very reason. Every time I visit I reconfirm that is the case. It is not much in the great scheme of things, but it is an honest effort to buy from good employers.
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#179I 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.
The issue in my opinion is their day or two on the job really doesn't give them a good picture of what's going on. Sure they might see a few things but they could just as easily be an anomaly as they could be systemic. I wish upper management that are brought in from the outside would be required to work a month or two in the field and live on those wages. For example at Starbucks in the 2 days he works he might see that the espresso machine is getting loaded wrong 40% of the time slowing up the line. Seeing this he might go back to the mothership and decide everyone using the espresso machine needs more training to reduce the failures. What he is missing is that there are supposed to be three people working not two and the person making espresso is working his fifth double shift this week because the wages are so low they can't pay their rent and is making errors because he's tired. He would have also missed that the manager had sent a worker home that day and the day before because it wasn't busy and the manager wanted to improve his margins. He also missed the next day when it was really busy that same manager was demanding that an employee on their day off come in and work because they were busy and if they didn't come in they would be fired (leaving them even more short of people and creating more delays). It's like a person who fasts for 24h saying they know what it's like to be starving. If you really want to see what's going on a day or two simply won't cut it you need some time for things to sink in and if you don't know what's really going on how can you run a business properly?
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
You only onboard someone once. In theory, that person will have to be using the system every day for years. Why optimize for the one-time thing at the expense of the everyday use?
The math isn't straightforward. With a high enough rate of churn, there can be more onboarding work hours than post-onboarding work hours, especially if the onboarding ramp up time takes a while (as it presumably would if you only optimized for experienced use). And high rates of churn are not exactly uncommon.
Also, everybody goes through onboarding, and initial impressions have a lot of power. It's pretty easy to create a system that everyone hates just because it's a little difficult during onboarding. Social reinforcement can be stronger than reality.
(Personally, I still lean towards optimizing for experienced use, if you can do it without sacrificing the onboarding experience too much. Hotkeys that the new employee never needs to see or know about are a typical example, though I prefer a smoother ramp by mentioning the key on applicable menu items. The newbie can ignore it, the intermediate user can learn from it, the experienced user can ignore the menu.)