EX Study Irresistible Organization - Retail Coffee Companies | Customer Centric Solutions LLC

The Irresistible Organization

The recent Great Resignation and resulting War on Talent have made a focus on employee experience even more important. Employees for many organizations, especially in retail, are the front-line when serving the needs of customers. As well, they are critical assets when it comes to both growing and thriving as a business.

#greatresignation #warontalent #employeeexperience #employeeengagement

An irresistible organization is described as “a place employees clamor to join and that rivals want to become.” - Josh Bersin

The Irresistible Organization by Josh Bersin Company

The Josh Bersin Company describes six core tenets of an irresistible organization as follows:

Meaningful work – job values and fit; autonomy and agency; agile teams, supportive coworkers; and time to focus, innovate, and recover.
Hands-on management – clear goals with stretch opportunities; regular coaching and feedback; a focus on management development; and transparent, simple performance management.
Positive workplace – tools, processes, and systems to get work done productively; appreciation, recognition, and rewards; flexible hours and workspace; and inclusive, diverse, and a sense of belonging and community.
Health and wellbeing – safety and security in all aspects of work; personal fitness, health, and physical wellbeing support; psychological and emotional wellbeing and support; and family and financial support.
Growth opportunity – open, facilitated job and role mobility; career growth in multiple paths; many forms of learning as needed; and a culture that supports learning.
Trust in leadership – mission and purpose beyond financial goals; transparency, empathy, and integrity of leadership; continuous investment in people; and focus on society, environment, and community.

The EX Study using Adoreboard

The study I chose to perform was to evaluate Employee Experience at six retail coffee brands: Caribou Coffee, Dunkin KSA, Dutch Bros Coffee, Peet's Coffee, Philz Coffee, and Starbucks.

Determining the degree to which each of these six retail coffee brands was an irresistible organization. Benchmarking them across six (6) major dimensions and over twenty (20) different sub-dimensions.

To perform it I pulled over 10,000 Glassdoor employee reviews from two time periods: pre-pandemic and post-pandemic. I was interested in seeing the degree to which employee experience had changed over time during the past couple of years - a challenging period for most of us.

To analyze this large dataset of open-ended, text-based employee feedback I leveraged the Adoreboard emotional AI platform. It excells at analyzing large datasets quickly and efficiently summarizing key topics and themes; scoring them based upon the 'emotions' within the employee or customer feedback.

Note: Even though this particular study is focused on analyzing employee experience (using Glassdoor employee reviews). Adoreboard is an extremely useful tool for analyzing customer and/or product reviews as well. The platform integrates with Qualtrics, Zendesk, SurveyMonkey , Twitter, and Reddit, Inc..

What's an Adorescore?

An Adorescore is a single measure of the emotional performance of a dataset (collection of employee, customer, or product reviews). Adorescores are assigned to the entire dataset as well as to sub-sets of the dataset related to individual topics or themes (more on this later).

An Adorescore is measured on a scale of -100 to +100. The higher the number the greater the level of positive emotions. The lower the score the greater the presence of negative emotions.

Adorescores are classified as follows: Very Poor: -100 to -36; Poor: -5 to -15; Fair: -14 to 24; Good: 25 to 43; and Very Good: 44 to 100.

Customer Centric LLC - Adorescores for Six Retail Coffee Brands

As you can see overall Adorescores for the retail coffee brands in this study ranged from a low of Dunkin KSA [+5] to a high of Dutch Bros Coffee [+49]. That is a significant delta.

To arrive at the calculation of an Adorescore, Adoreboard measures the intensity of emotions expressed in feedback (employee, customer, or product) across 8 core Emotion Indexes and 24 different emotions (based upon the Plutchik Model).

The 8 core Emotions are a combination of positive (surprise, joy, trust, interest) and negative (apprehension, anger, disgust, sadness) emotions. Each of the eight core emotion are analyzed in terms of their intensity level (low, medium, high).

A few examples as being: Serenity (low) > Joy (medium) > Ecstasy (high) and Annoyance (low) > Anger (medium) > Rage (high).

Each and every employee review/comment is analyzed based upon its ‘semantic meaning’ and given an Emotion Score [emotion plus intensity level]. These Emotions Scores are then mapped to different Topics/Themes and aggregated into an overall Adore score [-100 to +100] similar to the range associated with NPS scores.

Therefore, just like popular brands can have a range of NPS scores: Apple (+47), AT&T (+15), CVS Health (-5), Humana (+32), Target (+43), The Home Depot (-5), Wells Fargo (-2); companies can fall into a range regarding their Adorescore.

Except that I find (and you will as well) Adorescores to be more actionable given they are grouped into more granular topics/themes providing the necessary context for taking action. And they can always be correlated to Net Promoter scores if you have them for a given customer.

Pre-pandemic vs. Post-pandemic

One of the premises of this study was that due to the pandemic many people would re-evaluate the employee-employee relationship as well as their specific job and work enviornment. They would re-assess what is most important to them and what is not all that important.

My hypothesis was that we would see a decline in how employees perceived or 'emotionally assessed' their individual employee experience.

Customer Centric LLC - A comparison of pre-pandemic vs. post-pandemic Adorescores across each Retail Coffee Brand

My hypothesis was correct! Adorescores related to Employee Experience declined for each of the six retail coffee brands with the exception of Dunkin Donuts KSA (however, they started at the bottom).

In addition, both Peet's Coffee and Starbucks had rather significant declines, a whopping seventeen points in Adorescore.

Benchmarking Results - Six Retail Coffee Brands

After analyzing all the different datasets (Glassdoor reviews for each of the six retail coffee brands) here is a summary of how each of the six companies benchmarked across the six core tenets of an irresistible organization.

Customer Centric LLC - Irresistible Organization: Benchmarking Six Retail Coffee Brands

Relative performance across each dimension of an irresistible organization differed for each of the six retail coffee companies.

Dutch Bros Coffee stood out across across the board; highlights were as follows:

Meaningful Work: Job Fit [+22]; Culture/Value Fit [+38]; Agency [+48]; and Autonoomy [+41].
Hands-on Management: Regular Coaching & Feedback [+59]; Good Management [+26]; and Focus on Management Development [+18].
Positive Workplace: Tools, Processes & Systems [-44]; Workplace Environment (People/Place) [+42]; and Workplace Environment (Customer) [+35].
Health & Wellbeing: Safety & Security [-28]; Physical Wellbeing [+34]; Psychological and Emotional Wellbeing [+22]; and Family and Financial Support [+31].
Growth Opportunity: Job Mobility [+37]; Career Growth in Multiple Paths [+27]; and Culture that Supports Learning [+30].
Trust in Leadership: Organization Trust [-18].

Highlights for Caribou Coffee were as follows:

Meaningful Work: Culture/value fit [+25]; Autonomy [+12]; and Supportive Coworkers [+19].
Hands-on Management: Regular Coaching & Feedback [+11] and Good Management [-25].
Positive Workplace: Appreciation, Recognition & Rewards [+34]; Flexible Hours and Workspace [+25]; Workplace Environment (People/Place) [+22]; and Workplace Environment (People/Place) [-24].
Health & Wellbeing: Physical Wellbeing [-46]; Psychological and Emotional Wellbeing [-51].
Growth Opportunity: Job Mobility [+20] and Culture that Supports Learning [-20].
Trust in Leadership: Organization Trust [-34].

Highlights for Dunkin Donuts KSA were as follows:

Meaningful Work: Job Fit [+21]; Culture/Values Fit [+18]; and Supportive Coworkers [-24].
Hands-on Management: Regular Coaching & Feedback [-33]; Good Management [-24]; and Performance Management [+35].
Positive Workplace: Tools, Processes & Systems [-46]; Workplace Environment (People/Place) [+14]; Workplace Environment (Customer) [-20]; and Flexible Hours & Workspace [-11].
Health & Wellbeing: Safety and Security [-42]; Family and Financial Support [-16]; and Work Life Balance [-18].
Growth Opportunity: Job Mobility [-6] and Career Growth in Multiple Paths [-17].
Trust in Leadership: Organization Trust [-36].

Highlights for Peet's Coffee were as follows:

Meaningful Work: Job Fit [+26]; Culture/Value Fit [+24]; and Autonomy [+16].
Hands-on Management: Clear Goals [+13]; Regular Coaching & Feedback [+43]; and Good Management [+12].
Positive Workplace: Tools, Processes & Systems [+28]; Appreciation, Recognition & Rewards [-7]; Flexible Hours & Workspace [+23].
Health & Wellbeing: Psychological and Emotional Wellbeing [-18]; Family and Financial Support [+18]; and Work Life Balance [-2].
Growth Opportunity: Job Mobility [-8]; Career Growth in Multiple Paths [-11]; and Culture that Supports Learning [+23].
Trust in Leadership: Organization Trust [-24].

Highlights for Philz Coffee were as follows:

Meaningful Work: Job Fit [+36]; Agency [+41]; and Supportive Coworkers [+26].
Hands-on Management: Regular Coaching & Feedback [-14]; Good Management [+43]; Performance Management [+27].
Positive Workplace: Tools, Processes & Systems [+37]; Appreciation, Recognition & Rewards [+44]; Workplace Environment (Customer) [+15]; Flexible Hours and Workspace [+32].
Health & Wellbeing: Physical Wellbeing [+39]; Family and Financial Support [-12]; and Work Life Balance [+22].
Growth Opportunity: Job Mobility [+37]; Career Growth in Multiple Paths [+31]; and Multiple Forms of Learning [+5].
Trust in Leadership: Organization Trust [+36].

Highlights for Starbucks were as follows:

Meaningful Work: Job Fit [+4]; Agency [+19]; and Autonomy [+22].
Hands-on Management: Clear Goals [+62]; Regular Coaching & Feedback [-20]; Good Management [-16]; and Focus on Management Development [+41].
Positive Workplace: Tools, Processes & Systems [-9]; Appreciation, Recognition & Rewards [-27]; Workplace Environment (People/Place) [+22]; Workplace Environment (Customer) [-15].
Health & Wellbeing: Safety and Security [-4]; Physical Wellbeing [-16]; Psychological and Emotional Wellbeing [-20]; Family and Financial Support [+7].
Growth Opportunity: Job Mobility [+20]; Career Growth in Multiple Paths [+22]; Many Forms of Learning [+27].
Trust in Leadership: Organization Trust [-8].

In Summary

Hope you enjoyed reading the overview of the EX Irresistible Organization Study performed evaluating over 10,000 Glassdoor employee reviews. There is plenty of more detail (topics, themes, scores, analysis) in the datasets analyzed. Believe me, volumes of data.

If you wish to learn more about leveraging 'emotional analytics' as part of your own future EX or CX study, reach out and Talk with Us at www.customercentricllc.com.