Business Analysis: Starbucks High Performance Work System

Starbuck a company in pursue of high customer services, high quality products and focuses on the comfort of their customers, a company that is known to be one of the world’s great companies, and a company that create a great work environment and believe in the power of people by invest in staff. A company that focuses on growing big internationally without losing focus on customers’ satisfaction, quality product offering, staffing and the environment (Honack, R. 2009).
Staying small of Starbucks can be appreciated in the area of their Human Resources (HR) strategy and Human Resources (HR) policies that they adopt in making sure that no matter how big the company becomes, what matter most is the connections between the staff and the employer

To be able to achieve this proposition, HR strategy must be designed or redesigned as the environment is changing to correspond with their HR practices and Business Strategy. The success of this practice can be best achieved using High Performance Work System (HPWS) or using horizontal alignment system whereby employees treated as an assets, being motivated to perform highly, with a degree of autonomy and discretionary behaviour (Boxall & Purcell, 2011).
The strategic objectives of Starbucks is to provide a comfort and cosy environment where customers can meet and relax couple with the offering of quality/premium coffee and other products with well trained Baristas. In pursue of this Business strategy, there are other functional level strategy that needs to be identified in order to achieve this Business strategy, such as the HR, Marketing, Operations and Finance. HR department, for example, needs to be strategically developed and managed in order to achieve desired aim (Boxall & Purcell,

Starbucks recognised that it is important to develop and train staff using Best Practice to deliver world-class customer service which they saw as crucial to the company’s success. Starbucks focuses on building a deeply talented and committed work force from top executives to front-line staff by using HR tools (horizontal alignment).
According to (Drohan, et al., 2009), in their study on the challenges facing Irish hotel Industry in this recessionary time, they found out that international hotel chain Ritz-Carlton used best practice to deliver excellent customer service, firstly by creating superior service, then by utilising the ingenuity of their employees with respect to creating positive relationships with guests, thirdly using technology to create customers data-base and finally, effective use of employees communication skills and personalised services, all these practices were used to get competitive advantage over rivals (Drohan, et al.,