Starbucks made headlines twice in 2018.
In April, two black men sitting quietly in a Philadelphia store were arrested after Starbucks employees called the police on them. Their only crime: waiting for a friend to arrive before placing their order.
The incident, caught on video, created outrage across the country and sparked a few nascent boycotts even as the company apologized and admitted that it had acted wrongly.
But in May, the headlines changed. The company shut down all 8,000 corporate locations on a Tuesday and put 175,000 managers and employees through a mandatory racial bias training. The goal: avoid creating situations in which implicit biases could lead to future racial injustice.
For Starbucks human resources trainers, it was a rapid and sweeping effort. According to some outside estimates, shutting the stores down for the day could cost the company north of $16 million. That’s even before accounting for the cost of putting together a comprehensive training regimen, which included a guidebook and a compelling video presentation, all on very short notice.
But so far, it also has every appearance of being the right thing to do.
When The Goal Is Important, The Costs May Be Great
Not many organizations have human resources departments with the flexibility and sway to put the entire company on pause for a reset day… particularly not when a multi-million dollar price tag is attached. What Starbucks trainers accomplished in less than a month is a model for how HR teams can materially contribute to corporate strategy.
But it wasn’t easy. Threading the needle of American racial politics doesn’t leave anyone unscathed and the publicity around the training program, once it had been announced, was intense.
The company almost immediately decided to assemble an outside team of advisers to help develop the training program. In doing so it hoped to work directly with the affected communities to avoid coming off as insular or giving the appearance that the training was merely a PR move.
An early decision to include a representative from the Anti-Defamation League, however, drew protests from the Black Lives Matter movement, resulting in that representative’s dismissal… which in turn caused accusations of anti-Jewish bias in the process.
Nonetheless, the company pulled in representatives from the NAACP and Demos, and hired documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson Jr. to build the curriculum and video presentation.
