By George Gates, President, Core-R.O.I. Inc
ATLANTA, Aug. 15, 2008 - “Before you can get opinions, ideas, solutions in the room you have to get people in the room. Hearts first, then heads.“ – Brian Lohmann
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read them. A cluster of recent items in the popular business media seems to trumpet a revolutionary new trend. One example is typical. Two highly successful CEO’s of two visible public companies touted the secret of their success. They pay attention constantly to the well-being of their employees. Not their shareholders...their employees. These two, confessed one-time slackers themselves, shared this startling common philosophy starting and growing their businesses: Take care of employees.
Employees take care of customers. Results take care of themselves. Everybody’s happy, shareholders included. You’d think we had stumbled on a new secret advantage: employees.
That got me thinking about my own view of recent workplace history. Most men (and some women) have fat ties and skinny ties hanging in their closet. If you wait long enough, each type eventually comes back into fashion. It’s the same thing here.
Fifty years ago, the world’s biggest corporation conducted the largest ever employee satisfaction survey. Then they promptly ignored the results and did nothing – employees didn’t matter. That was emblematic at the time of the creed that labor and management lived by for decades, “When we have the stick, we’ll hit you, because when you grab the stick you’ll hit us.” Or, as the late labor leader George Meany once quipped, “They pretended like they overpaid us, and we pretended like we were overworked.”
How things changed
Twenty-five years went by, and things shifted. Organizational theorists and commonsense leaders began paying attention to “balancing stakeholder requirements.” Back then, Russell Ackoff’s Redesigning the Future opened my eyes to the need to build companies that respond simultaneously to the demands and requirements of customers, employees, the wider communities where they operate, government and—of course—investors. Through the 1970s and early 1980s, labor and management, in most major US industry sectors, began to explore and invent new forms of working together, to set aside the stick and work towards their mutual best interests. In the workplace, we suddenly seemed to discover a singular truth about everyday employees. As my boss once remarked, “People shouldn’t have to check their brains and put on a diaper at the front door.” Employees mattered.
Then we reached for the skinny tie again. Along came reengineering, rightsizing, downsizing, process redesign, lean manufacturing, six sigma and a dozen others you could name. All good tools, techniques, models and approaches, if used well. They were all aimed at getting us leaner and meaner, but too often succeeded only at the latter. That was especially true when, in our zeal, we managed to use them on people instead of with them. When employees once again didn’t matter.
What about now?
So now, if the recent press is a harbinger, just maybe, we’re reaching again for an old tie that looks new to a lot of folks. Perhaps we’ve landed once again on the truth that no organization will succeed without fully engaging the passion, the heart, the creativity, the talent, the skills of its employees. And here I mean all its employees, top to bottom.
They’re not a captive audience. It may seem odd, during the current economic doldrums, but the risk of employee defections has actually increased. You’d think people would just hunker down and hold on tight. But a recent Employee Benefits Trend Study found that 22% of all employees changed jobs in the last year and-a-half, up 5% from the year before. Among young families with children under age 6, it was almost one-third higher.
Most of us aren’t Captains of Industry controlling whether or when employees matter or not. But, wherever we sit in the company, we’re not without influence. First, though I’m not recommending it, we can always leave. (Sure, that’s easier for some than others.) We each have the power to change the quality of our relationships at work, whether or not we’re the boss. And we certainly have the power both to invite and to offer more of what we bring through the door each day. Think about trying on that tie. It might just look good on you. Again. More on that next time.
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