Starbucks’s HR chief aims to fuel customer loyalty by investing in workers

Sara Kelly, executive vice president and chief partner officer for Starbucks, has been with the coffee chain her entire career.

She held a number of different HR roles with Starbucks before being appointed CPO in 2022, and says those where she worked directly with retail employees helped shape how she approaches her role today.

For about a decade, “I worked alongside our retail stores, supporting our retail stores, which was the best way to really get a full appreciation and understanding for Starbucks,” she said. Kelly described a “flywheel” between employee experience, customer experience, and shareholder returns that initially drew her to Starbucks.

“If we invest in our partners and we deliver on that in-store experience for them, they will deliver on the experience for our customers,” she explained, using the term Starbucks uses to describe employees.

Keeping this flywheel turning is perhaps more complicated than ever today as Starbucks pursues a cost-cutting strategy that’s involved layoffs and store closures, and continues to face criticism and a strike from unionized store members over working conditions.

Kelly spoke about investments Starbucks has made to improve the employee experience amid these challenges, including improvements to the scheduling system and a pilot program focused on middle managers.

Supporting store workers. In recent years, some Starbucks employees have raised concerns about unpredictable scheduling and understaffing at the stores. Wait times for Starbucks drinks rose in the years after the pandemic, in part because some locations weren’t adequately staffed, Bloomberg reported in 2024. Inconsistent scheduling has been an animating issue among unionized baristas currently seeking to secure a contract with Starbucks, and prompted a $39 million settlement with New York City over violations of its Fair Workweek Law on Dec. 1.

Starbucks is seeking to address some of these concerns with a $500 million investment in staffing, labor, and scheduling support. “One of the things our partners have told us is how important their preferred schedules are, and getting their preferred schedules,” Kelly said.

The investment Kelly mentioned has gone toward updating scheduling tools, expanding rosters, and developing a “Shift Marketplace” tool to help employees get the hours they want. She attributed record low turnover in part to such investments, and said most workers (85%) are getting their preferred schedules, citing a statistic from partner survey data that Starbucks leadership has shared even as an ongoing strike points to concerns from some workers about scheduling.

Starbucks also decided to add an assistant store manager role after hearing “very loudly from our partners, particularly with our store managers, that they needed additional support.” The chain piloted the program in select locations like California, Texas, and Illinois to start, and CEO Brian Niccol has said he’d like to have an assistant store manager in nearly every US location over the next year.

The new role has helped Starbucks work toward its goal of filling more than 90% of retail roles internally, Kelly said. “Adding that role gives a proof point…a barista and a shift supervisor can look to to continue to advance their career into management and give them a pathway into management.”

Ongoing challenges. The efforts Kelly described are part of a broader turnaround strategy Niccol announced in September 2024, dubbed “Back to Starbucks.” A key focus area for the retailer is improving the employee experience for baristas, with the goal of “making Starbucks the best place to work, with career opportunities and a clear path to growth,” Niccol said.

Though the turnaround strategy is focused in part on improving the employee experience, it’s also involved corporate layoffs and store closures. Kelly said Starbucks has been able to retain and move some employees affected by these closures into other stores.

Members of Starbucks Workers United, which represents some 11,000 baristas across 550 stores, have also continued to raise concerns about working conditions even as the company has deepened investments in areas such as staffing. An August survey co-sponsored by the union found most Starbucks workers continued to experience issues with staffing and scheduling, despite corporate policies intended to improve these aspects of the employee experience. More than 1,000 unionized workers are currently on strike after negotiations for a contract over better staffing and higher pay with Starbucks stalled.

Kelly said Starbucks has been bargaining in good faith with the union, previously reaching more than 30 tentative agreements on a contract, “and our commitment to that has not changed.”

She continued that Starbucks’s investment into the “in-store partner experience,” characterized by predictable scheduling and preferred hours, is “directly correlated to that commitment of making Starbucks the best job in retail for every partner that wears their green apron.”