Starbucks Employee Engagement

While Starbucks has a strong culture of “serving up good” through service and community connection initiatives, the company recognized that its store employees often lacked information about what work was happening and what engagement options were available to them. Of the baristas we spoke to, only 1 in 30 had ever heard of Starbucks stores doing social impact work.

We worked closely with Starbucks employees at all levels to create a strategy for engaging them in global social impact work — aiming to provide corporate leaders with the values store employees want to see reflected in social impact opportunities, the roles they can play and meaningful programmatic options for the corporate team to deploy. In addition, we provided tools, resources and an impact measurement framework — all part of a detailed blueprint for partner participation.

We started by investigating what was holding store employees back from participating in global social impact initiatives and what might motivate them to take part. This included one-on-one interviews with store employees, polling of store managers, and focus groups with baristas to identify the issues that mattered most to them. After the rollout of the strategy, we helped Starbucks map the quality of its current social impact opportunities against the new assessment framework to ensure they were delivering on their goals.