I’m a Starbucks worker and company’s ‘connection scores’ mean we can lose hours if customers leave bad reviews
STARBUCKS employees have hit out at the coffee chain's employee rating system that means they can lose hours if customers give them a low rating for service.
When a store or employee's 'connection score' drops below a certain threshold, workers would be punished with less hours, according to reports.
More than 20 former and current Starbucks employees sat down with to discuss the rating system and how it impacts their work lives.
Starbucks uses connection scores - based on customer ratings - to determine how all of their cafes in the United States are performing.
Several of the workers alleged that in many instances, a low connection score directly impacts the number of hours employees get to work.
"You’re just kind of pumping out drinks. I think a lot of people just get into a groove," a Starbucks worker in Cleveland told NBC.
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"But then somewhere in the back of your head, if you don’t say hi to everybody or you don’t have a little conversation with everybody in between all of this rush and noise and other stuff going on, it’s like, oh, you know, this will affect my store’s numbers.”
While employees say Starbucks won't directly cut your pay if your connection score is low, they will cut the number of hours your store is open.
With fewer opening hours, you have less chance to schedule shifts, resulting in less income.
A Starbucks spokesperson has repeatedly denied that connection scores influence any store hours.
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When it comes to survey feedback, like connection score rankings, results are not always the most accurate.
Researchers say that people can be influenced by prejudices, including an employee's race or gender.
“Customer feedback is notoriously unreliable and discriminatory, particularly against women and people of color,” Dallan Flake, a law professor at Ohio Northern University, told NBC.
“Despite this, businesses are relying on it more and more in making employment-related decisions, such as promotion, termination and pay rates.”
Starbucks collects reviews for the score by sending email surveys to those on its email list.
The survey includes questions on a scale of 1-7, from strongly disagree to strongly agree.
Questions range from drink and food taste, to store cleanliness, to questions like "Did the employees made an effort to get to know me?”
The scores are updated at the beginning of each week, and use score data from the previous eight weeks.
“There was a lot of shame for those of us that had low scores,” former Starbucks store manager Heather Weizsacker told NBC. “Sometimes other managers would even make ‘jokes’— very demoralizing.”
Other employees say that they have to make fake conversations with customers to keep their scores up, making them feel weird and uncomfortable.
Making these conversations to improve their scores also puts a hindrance on the speed with which they can move customers out the door.
“It’s frustrating because there’s a lot of push and drive to focus on speed and volume, but in the same breadth, have us make these connections with people,” said Olivia Lewis, a worker at a Starbucks in Boone, North Carolina.
“That’s what we want to do. We’re in the service industry. We love talking to people. But you can’t do both.”
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Researchers point out that by adding an additional task to the employees' jobs, talking and serving coffee, Starbucks is contributing to quick employee burnout.
While Starbucks denies the allegations, some employees claim that connection scores are also related to employee bonuses.
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