OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Choosing an Organization Worksheet

Worksheet Objectives:
1. Identify an organization and situation you want to study over the remainder of the course.
2. Describe the organization and situation.

Complete the following making sure to support your ideas and cite from the textbook and other
course materials per APA guidelines. After the peer review, you have a chance to update this and
format for your Electronic Portfolio due in Module 6.

1) Describe your organization.

The organization I chose is Starbucks Coffee Company. It is an international

company that sells coffee and coffee related products. It was founded in the Seattle, WA
in 1971(Starbucks, 2021). It is known for being progressive and caring about its
employees, customers, and the communities it touches whether that is the coffee farmers
they buy from or neighborhoods where their stores are found. It is a multi-billion-dollar
company. It employs over 300,000 people (Forbes, 2021).

2) Describe how Describe your role in the organization (it can be internal or external).

I have a fairly long personal history with this company. First, I was a regular
customer for many years. Then I eventually was hired as a barista then promoted to shift
lead. I have been employed there for almost six years.

3) Describe the situation. (see the Canvas instructions for details, especially about how
your situation will be analyzed from five different perspectives over the next five
modules)

The situation I have chosen to analyze is the 2016-17 ‘perceived’ labor cuts and
fallout. I will be speaking from my personal experience and those I knew who also
worked for this company during this time. Some back story to this is Starbucks was in a
period of trying to expand their sales growth, one way they did this was in 2015 they
launched their mobile order and pay app. As someone who worked there when the app
was launched, I can say it was exciting while also being a bit stressful. We were now
expected to be able to keep up with the new demands of the app while still satisfying the
customers who chose to come in the store and order the traditional way. As more people
learned about the app the busier we got. This was about the same time that there was a
new customer satisfaction push.

1
 Starting in 2016 we started feeling stretched thin - like we weren’t getting the
same amount of labor we once had, even though we were busier. In sharing our
frustrations with our manager(s) we were told that they were being directed to schedule
less hours than normal. I remember during this time having so few people on a weekend
that our wait times were well over 20 minutes because we simply did not have the people
to get things out fast enough. This was making it impossible to provide the customer
service and satisfaction the company wanted (and that we wanted to give) as well as
draining the store level employees. There was a fairly high turnover rate during this time.
At the peak of this there was a partner from California who started a petition saying that
there were labor cuts leaving stores understaffed and baristas without they hours the
needed to live on. This petition got thousands of signatures from both baristas and
customers alike. After this petition took off executives finally sat down to figure
something out, while never actually acknowledging any labor cuts hence the ‘perceived’
in my initial description.
I would like to clarify that the situation was eventually rectified, and customer as
well as employee satisfaction did go up again.

2
 References

Starbucks Company Timeline. Starbucks Coffee Company. https://www.starbucks.com/about-

us/company-information/starbucks-company-timeline. 

Starbucks (SBUX). (2021, January 15). https://www.forbes.com/companies/starbucks/?

sh=3b56e1a928ac.