What Makes a Great Place to Work?
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Starbucks Perks More Than Coffee
At Starbucks, CEO Howard Schultz understood that the single most important aspect of creating an enduring brand is its people. Schultz wanted to set Starbucks apart from other coffee shops and service businesses, and he did this by offering health benefits and stock ownership for people who work part-time. It had never been done before, and it came with a cost.
In addition to employee benefits, funding to build the brand was funneled into operations to create an experience that would enable the brand to endure and be sold profitably for many years to come. So instead of expensive marketing and advertising campaigns, the company focused on experiential marketing.
Scott Bedbury, the president of marketing of Starbucks at the time, explains. “The stores were once four white walls. There was no comfortable furniture, fireplaces, or music. So we set out to create an experience in the stores and a level of brand equity that most traditionally marketed brands couldn’t touch. That meant constant creative development of products and the look and feel of the stores. It wasn’t cheap. The first year, we spent $100 million building out stores, which is a significant marketing budget for anyone.”
But the defining moment for the brand was the stock option and employee benefit plan. This laid the foundation for the company’s internal brand, and was Schultz’s mission from the very beginning, explains Bedbury. “When Howard took over the company, he was not a rich man and he didn’t own a house or even a car. Howard grew up poor in Brooklyn and was influenced strongly by his dad, who never got health benefits from any of his employers. This fueled Howard’s drive to create a company that put employees first. He is passionate that when it comes to customers versus employees, employees will always come first.”
But it wasn’t easy, and it took a lot of courage to present this idea to investors. Bedbury said, “When Howard tried to raise $2.8 million to buy the company from the three founders, he made 220 presentations and he got shut down in all but 12 of them. He was seen as an idealist who was going to put an unnecessary burden on the bottom line by offering benefits to part-time employees who viewed this as a temporary job. But Howard convinced them that turnover would drop, which it did. Store manager attrition was 15 percent, and part-time hourly employees were 65 percent, compared to McDonalds and Taco Bell, which were about 200–300 percent a year. That’s turning over your workforce every four months, and when you do that, your service suffers and there are all kinds of problems. I don’t know why more people don’t do it. If you give up some equity to employees, they’ll reward you for that.” [1] [2] [3] [4]
Every year, Great Place to Work Canada analyzes comments from thousands of employees and compiles a list of “The 100 Best Companies to Work for in Canada,” which is published in Fortune magazine. Having compiled its list for more than twenty years, the institute concludes that the defining characteristic of a great company to work for is trust between managers and employees. Employees overwhelmingly say that they want to work at a place where employees “trust the people they work for, have pride in what they do, and enjoy the people they work with.” [5] They report that they’re motivated to perform well because they’re challenged, respected, treated fairly, and appreciated. They take pride in what they do, are made to feel that they make a difference, and are given opportunities for advancement. [6]
Job Redesign
The average employee spends more than two thousand hours a year at work. If the job is tedious, unpleasant, or otherwise unfulfilling, the employee probably won’t be motivated to perform at a very high level. Many companies practice a policy of job redesign to make jobs more interesting and challenging. Common strategies include job rotation, job enlargement, and job enrichment.
Job Rotation
Specialization promotes efficiency because workers get very good at doing particular tasks. The drawback is the tedium of repeating the same task day in and day out. The practice of job rotation allows employees to rotate from one job to another on a systematic basis, often but not necessarily cycling back to their original tasks. A computer maker, for example, might rotate a technician into the sales department to increase the employee’s awareness of customer needs and to give the employee a broader understanding of the company’s goals and operations. A hotel might rotate an accounting clerk to the check-in desk for a few hours each day to add variety to the daily workload. Through job rotation, employees develop new skills and gain experience that increases their value to the company. So great is the benefit of this practice that many companies have established rotational training programs that include scheduled rotations during the first 2-3 years of employment. Companies benefit because cross-trained employees can fill in for absentees, thus providing greater flexibility in scheduling, offering fresh ideas on work practices, and becoming promotion-ready more quickly.
Job Enlargement
Instead of a job in which you performed just one or two tasks, wouldn’t you prefer a job that gave you many different tasks? In theory, you’d be less bored and more highly motivated if you had a chance at job enlargement—the policy of enhancing a job by adding tasks at similar skill levels. The job of the sales clerk, for example, might be expanded to include gift-wrapping and packaging items for shipment. The additional duties would add variety without entailing higher skill levels.
Job Enrichment
Merely expanding a job by adding similar tasks won’t necessarily “enrich” it by making it more challenging and rewarding. Job enrichment is the practice of adding tasks that increase both responsibility and opportunity for growth. It provides the kinds of benefits that, according to Maslow and Herzberg, contribute to job satisfaction: stimulating work, a sense of personal achievement, self-esteem, recognition, and a chance to reach your potential.
Consider, for example, the evolving role of support staff in the contemporary office. Today, employees who used to be called “secretaries” assume many duties previously in the domain of management, such as project coordination and public relations. Information technology has enriched their jobs because they can now apply such skills as word processing, desktop publishing, creating spreadsheets, and managing databases. That’s why we now use a term such as administrative assistant instead of a secretary. [7]
Work/Life Balance
Building a career requires a substantial commitment in time and energy, and most people find that they aren’t left with much time for non-work activities. Fortunately, many organizations recognize the need to help employees strike a balance between their work and home lives [8]. By helping employees combine satisfying careers and fulfilling personal lives, companies tend to end up with a happier, less stressed, and more productive workforce. The financial benefits include lower absenteeism, turnover, and healthcare costs.
Alternative Work Arrangements
The accounting firm KPMG LLP has consistently made the list of “Canada’s Top Family-Friendly Employers” [9], and is committed to helping “employees balance work and their personal lives through a variety of flexible work options.” [10]
- Flextime – Employers who provide for flextime set guidelines that allow employees to designate starting and quitting times. Guidelines, for example, might specify that all employees must work eight hours a day (with an hour for lunch) and that four of those hours must be between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. Thus, you could come in at 7 a.m. and leave at 4 p.m., while coworkers arrive at 10 a.m. and leave at 7 p.m. With permission, you could even choose to work from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., take two hours for lunch, and then work from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.
. - Compressed Workweek – Rather than work eight hours a day for five days a week, you might elect to earn a three-day weekend by working ten hours a day for four days a week.
. - Job Sharing – Under job sharing, two people share one full-time position, splitting the salary and benefits of the position as each handles half the job. Often they arrange their schedules to include at least an hour of shared time during which they can communicate about the job.
. - Work-from-Home – Working from home (or from some other non-work location) enables you to save on commuting time, enjoy more flexible work hours, and have more opportunities to spend time with your family. A study of 5,500 IBM employees (one-fifth of whom work from home) found that those who worked at home not only had a better balance between work and home life but also were more highly motivated and less likely to leave the organization. [11]
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Working at home means that you have to discipline yourself to avoid distractions, such as TV, personal phone calls, and home chores, and also not be impacted by feeling isolated from social interaction in the workplace.
. - Family-Friendly Programs – In addition to alternative work arrangements, many employers, including KPMG LLP and BASF Canada, offer programs and benefits designed to help employees meet family and home obligations while maintaining busy careers. As exemplar companies, they offer the following benefits. [12]
Amazon Workers Upset Over Job Cuts & Return to Office Mandate [13]
- Blog, MarketSmarter, http://www.marketsmarter.com/blog, accessed March 12, 2018 ↵
- Carmine Gallo, “How Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz Inspired Us to Dream Bigger,” Forbes, https://www.forbes.com, December 2, 2016 ↵
- Tanza Loudenback, “The Story Behind the Rise of Starbucks’ Howard Shultz, Who Just Gave a Raise to Every US Employee of His $82 Billion Coffee Company,” Business Insider, http://www.businessinsider.com, July 11, 2016 ↵
- Monique Reece, Real-Time Marketing for Business Growth (Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press/Pearson, 2010) ↵
- Great Place to Work Institute® (2018). “The Definition of A Great Workplace” Retrieved from: https://www.greatplacetowork.ca/en/about-us/trust-model ↵
- Rohman, J. (2015). “15 Practice Areas Critical to Achieving a Great Workplace.” Great Place to Work Institute® Retrieved from: http://www.greatplacetowork.com/events-and-insights/blogs-and-news/3040-15-practice-areas-critical-to-achieving-a-great-workplace ↵
- Kerka, S. (1995). “The Changing Role of Support Staff.” ERIC Clearinghouse on Adult, Career, and Vocational Education (ACVE) ARCHIVE Trends and Issues Alerts. Retrieved from: http://www.calpro-online.org/eric/docgen.asp?tbl=archive&ID=A019 ↵
- Greenhaus, J., Collins, K., & Shaw, J. (2003). “The Relationship between Work-Family Balance and Quality of Life.” Journal of Vocational Behavior 63(3). p. 510–31. ↵
- Canada’s Top Family-Friendly Employers. (2019). Retrieved from: http://www.canadastop100.com/family/ ↵
- Mediacorp Canada Inc. (2019). Retrieved from: https://content.eluta.ca/top-employer-kpmg ↵
- WFC Resources Inc.. (n.d.) “The Business Case for Telecommuting.” Career/Life Alliances Services Inc. ↵
- Yerema, R. & Leung, K. (2018). BASF Canada Inc: Recognized as one of Canada’s top 100 employers (2019). Retrieved from: https://content.eluta.ca/top-employer-basf-canada ↵
- KING 5 Seattle. (2023, May 31). Amazon workers upset over job cuts, return-to-work mandate stage walkout [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEV7uWB5Pn4 ↵
