Giving Compass' Take:

•  In response to Starbucks employees calling the police on two of their customers without real cause, the company enforced a mandatory half day of racial bias training for all store employees.  However,  Diversity & Inclusion experts say this is not a problem with a one-stop reactive solution and instead needs to be an ongoing learning process about racial tensions and discrimination. 

• How can Starbucks create a more long-term plan for addressing racial bias? 

•  Read more details about the controversial arrest that lead to Starbucks re-orienting their policies. 

Two young men did what millions of consumers often do when they arrange to meet friends for coffee: They entered a Starbucks café, sat down and waited for the other member of their party to arrive. And as you have probably already heard, they were promptly arrested. The manager called the police and had them escorted out in handcuffs.

Not surprisingly, the Starbucks corporation has been doing damage control ever since. The company has acknowledged that there is a perception – accurately or not – that black patrons are held to a different, more rigorous standard than white patrons. The coffee roaster is also aware that this perceived inequity is a public relations disaster for any corporation, especially one that has touted the sustainable development goals for years.

How Starbucks should teach its staff about racial equity and corporate diversity policies appears to be an ongoing discussion. According to the company, it plans to engage civil rights leaders to craft the workshop, and while it has offered names of some of the experts, as of press time it hadn’t clarified how it will ensure its staff ascribe to the lessons.

“I appreciate when a company says it explicitly wants to tackle racism. But there’s enough evidence about how to promote this agenda inside companies to suggest that shutting everything down for an afternoon and doing a mandatory training won’t yield the results that a company wants,” said Nicole Sanchez, CEO and founder of Vaya Consulting, a firm that helps companies build healthy cultures.

“If Starbucks wants to change the way their employees discuss, think about, and behave around issues of race and racism, they should consider a multi-part experience that allows employees to reflect in-between sessions. Starbucks’ current proposal is an incredibly expensive proposition for potentially very minimal impact.”

Read the full article about racial bias by Jan Lee at TriplePundit