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 the 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) Name and describe your organization.

The organization that I will be using for this project will be Starbucks Coffee Company.
Starbucks is now considered a quick-service beverage vendor and not the coffee house it
used to be. Over the last decade not only has the flow of business changed but their entire
customer base has shifted from office workers, lawyers, doctors, and the latte drinkers of
old to the younger and sugar-enthused generation. They still try to work through their
missions and values that are centered around connecting each partner to something bigger
and making a change in our local communities. They champion many community service
events and projects and lean heavily into sustainability and ethical sourcing practices.
Lately, things in the company have been shifting away from these mission and value-
based endovers and have been focusing on maximizing profit and getting the most out of
each partner which has led to a lot of unionization and labor disputes within the company.

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

I am currently an Assistant Store Manager with Starbucks. I am a salaried retail leader

who has worked my way up from a barista role when I first started with the company in
2006. I left the company as a Shift Supervisor in 2008 and returned as a Supervisor in
2019 with the ambition to work my way up to a corporate role. I was told by my District
Manager at the time that it would be best for me if I became a Store Manager first
because that is where they pull candidates for corporate roles, but since the company
restricted everything due to a class action lawsuit they now have what they refer to as
Career Progression which means anyone in the company can interview for any role. So
now I have decided that I do not want to be a Store Manager and am working towards
getting into a corporate role where I can make changes to better support the partners in
the stores who do the hard work that I have done for so many years. I feel that in a
corporate setting, I can provide valuable insight into the day-to-day life of a barista and

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 the work that is done. Hopefully, I can find a way to improve that work and actually
make it easy to be a partner like the higher-ups are always talking about.

3) Describe the situation, including information you think will help the reader
understand the most important elements of the situation. (This will require
selectivity: part of the art of case writing is separating the essential facts from the
mass of information that might be included).

The situation I would like to discuss over the length of this course is the efforts the
partners have been making to unionize their Starbucks stores. This began a few years ago
with a few partners in Buffalo, New York and it had to do with the way their Store
Manager was running their store and the lack of support from corporate. Many things in
their store went broken for months and a lot of them were losing hours. The issue of
unwarranted separations and unfair discipline has also come up. I am a firm believer that
this company has practices in place to stop this from happening but the leaders in those
stores were not living through the old missions and values. I also believe that things in
this industry need to change but not necessarily sure that a union will change that. I think
the upper leadership needs to change. They need to be more aware of what is happening
in stores and what it is like to work there every day under some of the conditions the
company is putting us through. For example, to “finish strong” in our second financial
quarter they have suspended all hiring, training, and non-coverage budgets. They have
restricted all repairs to business-critical issues only. They have also restricted our daily
coverage budget to the point where each partner is doing the job of three. There has to be
another way for this company to make money and still be able to support the growth and
needs of the partners they say they care so much about.

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 Reference

FAQ — Starbucks Workers United. (n.d.). Starbucks Workers United.

https://sbworkersunited.org/frequently-asked-questions