Working Together for Change

Working with others to create change leads to better outcomes. Why? Because more informed perspectives means more complete, more appropriate, and more effective ideas. Get the whole system into the room, involve others in creating solutions, and whatever the issue you are trying to address — how to fight hunger or how to increase sales — you will get a better result.

Working together for change takes many forms for us.

In our supply chain, we’ve worked hard to develop strong relationships. Our coffee buyers spend weeks each year visiting and talking with coffee growers, explaining what qualities will fetch a premium price, and listening to their needs. Our engineers are on-site monthly in China, where our brewers are made. And through our annual “source trips,” dozens of our employees get to experience how coffee is produced and talk with the people who grow our beans.

Closer to home, we spend a lot of time listening to employee feedback and acting on that feedback to enhance our workplace. For example, when a recent survey revealed that employees felt that we weren’t doing an adequate job of celebrating personal milestones — from individuals’ birthdays to a successful software implementation — we made it a priority to celebrate more often. Likewise, when we discovered that employees who had formal mid-year check-ins with their supervisors had much higher job satisfaction, we overhauled our review process so that every employee has one.

In the area of corporate social responsibility reporting, we have worked with Ceres — a national network of investors, environmental organizations and other public interest groups that works with companies and investors to address sustainability challenges — since 2005 to help us identify key issues and areas where we could improve our performance. Ceres also helped us vet the ecotainer™ idea with environmental advocates when it was still in the development stage.

Why bring all these voices into the mix? Because the end result is better when we work together towards common goals.