The following is not about data, nor machinery. The following is not about optimization nor cost measurement nor productivity.
Rather, it is about people and relationships, and making a difference in how humans look at and treat one another in the workplace to give each other some sense of security so that they invest in one another — and it is very personal to me.
I almost never write in the first person, but the best analysis of work experiences is what can be drawn from our own. It took some time to get to where I am, and there was a great deal of adversity along the way. As an outspoken person who put the firm before himself at almost every stage, I had to learn how to take credit for my own ideas and to put myself first at various points in my career. No one learns how to do this and no school teaches it well. I have watched and witnessed so many people with great ideals turn inward the minute they hit the working world; growing so afraid of being taken advantage of that their instinct drives them to put their own growth ahead of the firm.
But who can blame them?
The average firm’s leadership today cares more about upper-level profitability than it does on what kind of investments are needed in people to drive real productivity based on an equitable worker-consumer cycle built on stable working conditions. Everywhere we look, we see cost cutting and labor downsizing amidst technological transformation that continues to alienate workers and by extension consumers.
My first job in the private sector was as a contractor building a new department at a very wealthy firm. While the firm was a good place to work, my manager chose someone who fell in line with his way of work to advance, leaving the two innovators who built most of the department to eventually be phased out completely. My second round led me to a firm whose CEO valued my work but where my manager acted on insecurities to make life incredibly difficult for me as someone who just wanted to do his work and do it well – when I quit, half the firm did too. I went through several independent research roles before arriving at my current workplace. For the first time, I have the chance to breathe and feel confident that my work is valued above the insecurities of my leadership team. More importantly, my work has been stable and well-valued enabling me to be more confident and capable to do things like buy a home.
Uncertain Work Environments Create Unhappy Workers
The first part of my story is what too many employees face today: Uncertain work environments with no real investment made in them by their employers and insecure higher-ups so desperate to preserve their over-inflated pay structures that they alienate themselves from the general workforce, while alienating workers from each other and from management. The second half, where I am today, happens to fewer and fewer workers by the minute. Why do we do this to each other? And moreover, why is it that business leaders cannot see what this is doing to the economy and to the consumer on which the economy depends? When did stable work become a threat to the corporate existence and when did it become okay for a CEO to take a bonus while the rest of the workforce faces unemployment, pay cuts, or employment type changes?
Cost cutting should not be allowed to equate to profitability, and this is a conversation the world of work needs to have — the sooner the better.
Shareholders need to refocus their efforts on long-term profitability, which means real investment in revenue-generating activity — and consumer empowerment (i.e., employee empowerment) must precede consumer spending for this to happen. Furthermore, a recent case study submitted to Columbia University concluded that despite years of rhetoric, taxes are not a net bad. In fact, amidst stagnant wages, declining tax revenue costs the average consumer more money per dollar, reducing net take-home pay, because of the diminishing social safety net and reductions in government oversight that keep per capita spending focused on the programs that level the playing field the most. While this is not a political conversation, it is a mathematical one — Every federal tax dollar reduction means a magnitude higher increase in state-level taxes to fill in the gap on just basic infrastructure alone.
Can We Solve This Issue?
At the company-level, invest in your employees and provide them with stability and long-term growth, and you just might find that retention begins to increase, engagement improves, ideation and innovation rates rise, and revenue growth happens as a result. And while we are on the subject of investment, it turns out that it costs less to pay your taxes than it does to internally manage compliance around investments in the workforce. Japan, Germany, France, the UK, Sweden all seem to understand this.
Getting back to the core of this conversation, if your employees are anything like I was in the early days of my career, they are scared, uncertain, and struggling — they are finding more and more that their employers are not on their side. Socially, this is isolating, and that isolation carries to outside the workplace as we witness the destruction of community ethics and participation on a scale like never before. Employers — you are in a position to fix this and you stand to gain from helping all boats to rise. It is time that we all have this conversation as the new world of work demands a better coping infrastructure to keep the consumer empowered and the economy moving. For all our sakes, now is the time to be talking about this.
