Getting a Taste of Two Opposing Cultures
How important is company culture to Gen Y? In this raw and brutally honest article, Justin Chou recounts his own personal story as an actual Gen Y employee and what he’s experienced working in two vastly different corporate cultures for companies in the same industry. His advice is worth reading for business owners and job seekers alike.
Bittersweet Cultures
Company cultures are a bittersweet thing. Most CEOs have a rough idea of where they want their organization to go, the kinds of people they want to hire, and the values and norms they want their employees to live by. From there, it’s usually a matter of how well they can implement their culture throughout their organization that determines how successful they can become. Other CEO’s seem to have no sense of culture whatsoever. They hire whoever they can get, the training that they give their employees is absolute crap, and they’re just in the business to make a quick buck while their employees have no idea what they’re doing, who they’re working for, and why they decided to involve themselves with the organization in the first place.
As the fortunate soul that I am, I have had the privilege of working with both types of companies. The first company of which I’m going to talk about was my first shot at a part-time position. I had just completed grade 11, and a friend of mine referred me for a job selling ice cream at a major sporting venue. There was no interview required and I got to watch all the events in the arena while getting paid to sell my favorite dessert. Seemed like a sweet first job (literally).
Around six months after I got hired, my manager promoted me to assistant manager. I was made responsible for managing the entire team, single-handedly restocking inventory before every shift, doing periodical inventory counts, filing paperwork, and cashing in and out the entire team of 10 employees while also dealing with the higher ups in the arena (which was run under a completely different organization). There was very minimal training, and after only getting a taste of my first ever part time job, I was thrown into the shark tank. My manager who is paid on a fixed yearly salary began to only ever “show up” when he had tickets to an event. So he essentially got paid to do nothing and all his work came down on my shoulders.
This is where everything started going downhill. To manage a group of 10 teenagers was one thing, but none of them even knew who they were working for (they had never seen their real manager), and most of them wanted the job for the sole purpose of watching the events, seeing their friends and eating ice cream. They took advantage of the fact that there was no clear direction of what the company thought was good and bad, and they would frequently begin writing-off inventory for their own use, stealing money, and lying knowing that they could get away with it as easily as they did. To make matters worse, I could almost never get a hold of my manager or any higher ups to report these cases, and whenever I did, I would usually take the blame. Everything was in ruins at that point, and I only stayed because I had no other job at the time.
This was when I got desperate. I applied absolutely everywhere I could in an effort to get out of that shithole, and the only callback that I received after almost a year of applying was at my neighborhood Starbucks. At the time, I really didn’t want to work in a coffee shop because not only had I never drank coffee up until that point (this changed very quickly), but I also had my mind on other “cooler” positions which were clearly out of my league at the time. So being the desperate fool that I was, I took the job as soon as I received the offer and carried on from there.
At first, I absolutely hated life as a barista. I went through two gruelling weeks of training, and catching on to the lingo took me months. My manager was an absolute stickler, and got on my case for every little mistake that I made, whether it was in how I prepared a drink or how I interacted with customers. The first few months were an absolute nightmare. Little did I know however, that my manager did all this so that I could correct my bad habits and live by the Starbucks culture; practicing all the values and norms that he had learned in his time with the company. These values and norms also happened to be the exact same ones that CEO Howard Schultz actively preached to his “partners.”
It wasn’t until about a year after my hiring that I finally began to see the connection. I began to cover shifts in stores all over the district, and I became pleasantly surprised at just how well everybody was aligned and how easy it was to connect and have fun with partners that would otherwise be complete strangers.
Howard has empowered his company. He hired people that believe in what he believes in, and translated it throughout the organization. This created an environment where any team of partners could work together effectively and enjoy every moment of it. Customers would also be able to see just how much we were enjoying our jobs, and it would be a major factor (other than the coffee) that would keep them coming back. Most of them in fact could safely call their location of choice a “Third Place”, because they would spend so much time in the store that it quickly became their home away from home. So whenever you hear all those stories about just how great of an environment Starbucks is to be in, don’t doubt a word of it. The cult is real.
To sum up, here are my final words of advice: before you decide to involve yourself in an organization, be sure to do some research, and don’t just be drawn into it by how “cool” the job looks or how easy it seems. And for those looking to start their own organization: be sure you clearly define what it is you want and follow through with it in everything you do. Eliminate anyone who deviates from what your company is set out to achieve, and create a culture that makes everyone feel like they are a part of something special.
Whatever you do, don’t be on the bitter end of bittersweet company cultures. It’s an unhealthy thing to be a part of.
Written by: Justin Chou
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