Starbucks' human resource strategy and service excellence alignment

¶ … Career Page, the company has the tag line "connect to something bigger," and this illustrates the way that Starbucks' human resources strategy aligns with its overall strategy. First and foremost, Starbucks is in the service industry, selling the Starbucks Experience to its customers. To provide that service, the company wants to hire motivated people that provide a consistently high level of service. Starbucks needs to accomplish this even though it does not necessarily pay a high wage. Connecting to something bigger implies a high level of intrinsic motivation, which is precisely what will drive Starbucks employees to deliver an excellent customer experience every time.

Strategic Objectives

Starbucks' mission statement is "to nurture the human spirit -- one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time." The company subdivides its objectives by stakeholder, noting how customers, stores, neighborhoods and shareholders all relate to its strategic objectives. Employees ("partners") have passion and can be themselves, treating each other with respect and dignity. This allows for a higher degree of expressiveness and actualization, two things that will result in better customer service perceptions. Further, the company highlights that it wants to "connect with, laugh with and uplift the lives of our customers," things that require a high level of staff engagement to achieve. The company therefore wants to find people who are engaged, and have a high level of intrinsic motivation to perform.

Alignment

There is a high degree of alignment between the human resource strategy and the overall strategy at Starbucks. The company realizes that the product (coffee) is not nearly as important as the service offering. As such, finding the right people is essential to success. The coffee business is highly competitive, and if service standards begin to suffer, Starbucks will see its business decline as customers defect to competitors. Not only does the company place emphasis on recruiting, but its training processes help to build the sense of common culture, and to reinforce the message that the employee is part of something bigger. For example, new employees have a ceremonial coffee tasting as part of their onboarding experience. This serves to welcome the employee into the company, create bonds with co-workers and foster the sense of being part of something big (Frasch, 2014).

Another element of alignment in the onboarding process is that new hires are taken around the store. At the different points of the store, it is explained to them the different moments of truth that customers have. This allows the employee to see their role through the eyes of the customer, something that enhances the commitment to customer service and keeps the employee aware at all times of the importance of service perfection (Frasch, 2014).

For a company in the service industry, delivering on the service promise is essential to maintaining market leadership. Starbucks recognizes that you not only need to find the right people, but you have to train them, and make them believe in what they are doing right from day one. By having an initiation ceremony, the company is able to foster that sense of participating in something larger than themselves, and being shown the Starbucks experience through the eyes of the customer reinforces this. The objective of Starbucks as an organization is to deliver exceptional service, with each encounter with the brand being personal and meaningful. The company's HR strategies reflect the importance of this, noting that employees are hired for their ability to deliver on these types of customer experiences, and then Starbucks follows through with training that puts the employee into the right state of mind with respect to the job to perform the Starbucks level of service.

Conclusion

As a service industry company, Starbucks will achieve its strategic objectives if it is able to hire the right people to deliver a high level of service consistently. To that end, the company undertakes a number of tactics, including seeking out people with a natural service orientation, onboarding to create a sense of working for something bigger than yourself, and finally training the staff to see the customer experience through the customer's eyes. All of these human resources tactics not only seek to meet the human resources objectives, but they have a high level of alignment with the company's overall objectives.