Room and Board Case Study

Room and Board Case Study

John Gabbert fully owned Room & Board privately as a home-furnishings retailer that concentrated on offering products that blend simplicity in design with class to produce exceptional quality. According to Hess (2011), John elegantly designed the business’s culture to create the right environment for growth. The culture of the business was based on quality relationships and products. Unlike traditional businesses that focused on debt and equity-based growth models, Room & Board focused on a multi-stakeholder model that considered relationships and important quality aspects of business growth. As a result, John ensured that the business adopted a culture of maintaining quality not only on products alone but also in the various relationships the business had with its stakeholders. Essentially, a culture based on quality relationships results in value (Freudenreich et al., 2020). As a result, Room & Board drew great value from the practice by creating quality, long-lasting relationships with employees, vendors, and customers.

Regarding the company structure, John ensured that elitism, lengthy policy manuals, and eschewed rules were scrapped. Instead, Room & Board maintained an open environment where views from all individuals working in the business were taken seriously. Further, all workers were empowered to make decisions on various aspects of their work. On the part of human resource policies, Room & Board adopted a different policy for measuring employee satisfaction. Employee satisfaction is an important aspect that offers insight into how employees are contented with their work and helps an organization attain set goals (Groen et al., 2019). For Room & Board, employees were tracked based on the number of friends and family members they referred for jobs. Additionally, the number of employees participating in the company’s 401 (k) program was monitored. Essentially, this ensured a better connection between the company and its employees in attaining John’s vision.

References

Freudenreich, B., Lüdeke-Freund, F., & Schaltegger, S. (2020). A stakeholder theory perspective on business models: Value creation for sustainability. Journal of Business Ethics, 166(1), 3-18.

Groen, B., van der Voordt, T., Hoekstra, B., & van Sprang, H. (2019). Impact of employee satisfaction with facilities on self-assessed productivity support. Journal of Facilities Management. https://doi.org/10.1108/JFM-12-2018-0069

Hess, E. D. (2011). Growing An Entrepreneurial Business: Concepts & Cases (1st Ed). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Room and Board Case Study

Read the Room & Board case study at the end of Chapter 3 in our text. Explain how John elegantly designed Room & Board’s culture, structure, and human resource policies to consistently create the right environment to grow the Room & Board business.