Building for employee success at Irving Farm Coffee Roasters
DIVERSITY & INCLUSION IN THE COFFEE INDUSTRY
Designing and implementing inclusive work practices, roles and development opportunities to support employee efficacy and diverse hiring practices.
This is also my origin story — where I found operations and designing systems to support people in doing their best work.
Irving Farm Coffee Roasters, Upper East Side. 1424 3rd Ave, New York, NY
Irving Farm Coffee Roasters is a New York based specialty coffee company.
They grew from 3 to 8 locations while I was there. I helped open their Upper East Side location in 2015.
IFCR work to build equitable coffee partnerships around the world. They roast in New York and provide delicious specialty coffee + food all over NYC.
I was a people manager to 35 people, as we opened and built a new coffee shop on the upper east side. It was a daunting task, as I was very new to the industry - opening an entirely new location with new staff.
The company was growing fast and I was mostly trying to do my job, building tools for myself. But my successes and discoveries ended up supporting our other locations across the city.
That’s how I found my way into operations, by renewing old processes and piloting new programs in my shop: new menu launch, POS system, and a production kitchen .
Breakdown of the team and a typical week for me.
The business goals were to reduce costs on goods and resources.
As the manager, my mission was to create opportunities for people from many backgrounds to grow and do their best work.
It was a new shop, we had just opened, but I believed both were possible.
The problem was that work was lumpy across shifts & roles, work and responsibility was getting ignored in the shop, career paths & payment structures weren’t clear or fair. There were also only two entry points in the company (front of house or back of house) and they were not unified or working together.
Driven more by heart than by process - I knew i could reduce costs, but identify areas of efficiency. But i didn’t want to harp on my team about waste, i wanted to build in ownership + accountability. Pride in our work.
I worked every shift and documented the responsibilities I noticed.
I met with my teams to understand what was blocking them or helping them do their best work.
I analyzed the work & identified opportunities for efficiency and entry points for various skills sets - people could start and grow from many points in the company.
The Approach
Myself, the Kitchen Manager, Lead Barista, and Shift Lead.
In order to implement change, as a team we:
Investigated the work and the tasks & skills that it required
Documented workflows
Created resources & how-to’s for every corner of the shop & enabled my team to do the same
Cross-trained most of the team on every role to allow for discovery & understanding
Updated the payment structure so there was growth opportunity for everyone
Partnered with Community Organizations running Employment Programs
We had a deep understanding of the work and we understood how to share it. I was able to hire people with disabilities and recovering victims of human trafficking. We were recognized that year by the US Department of Labor and were given a National Disability Employment Awareness Month 2017 Award
We cut our costs by 30% -- but i could have done that and not considered the needs of my team or investigated the work. -- but instead i did consider my team and i had 0% attrition.
My team developed a sense of teamwork and pride in their work.
We were recognized in the industry for our diverse and inclusive hiring practices, Our Director of Retail was interviewed across several platforms -- which was really cool.
The company then took this team model and used it to inform how to run the all future shop openings
The Impact