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It’s Only Common Sense: A New Year Means a New Outlook on People

If you have not figured this out yet, you’d better get on board and do it fast. If you have been getting away with treating your people poorly, you are about to get a rude awakening. And I mean a really rude awakening.

It’s a new ball game out there. The choice of whether to come to work for you is like something we have probably not seen in our lifetimes.

There are not enough people to fill all the job openings we have. The good people who are out there, the ones you would love to have come work for your company, are being very selective about to whom they hitch their wagon.

What bothers me is that there are still companies in the 21st century that are treating their employees very poorly. The rules are simple: If you treat your employees poorly, they are going to turn around and treat your customers as poorly, if not worse. That has always been the case.

Similarly, companies that have always treated their employees well are always–and I mean always–very well-run, successful companies.

Treating employees well has always been an option. Take this quote from David Ogilvy, one of the most successful advertising executives in the history of advertising. This is a letter he wrote in the 1950s to one of his largest clients about sticking up for his employees.

“I’ve come to resign your business because your Executive Vice President is a shit. He’s treating your people atrocious and he’s treating my people atrocious. I’m not going to allow this man to go on demoralizing the people of Ogilvy & Mather.”

And this is what leading industry leader Tom Peters had to say about treating people well in his amazing new book Excellence Now: Extreme Humanism:

“Profound: (Yes, it merits the word ‘profound,” I guess it’s also a ‘profound’ comment to point out that so many smart people don’t get it). If you want to WOW the customer, first, you must WOW the people who WOW the customer.”

And now with the labor shortages we are experiencing and will continue to experience for the next few years we are going to have to up our game if we are serious about succeeding. Frankly, it is a game that has needed upping for years.

This is not just about COVID, or about some people getting extra money. Those things might be factors, but the reality is, we were having a hard time manning our shops even before the pandemic. Except that, back then, we were blaming it on our favorite target, “the millennials.” (Don’t you love it when over-the-hill 60- and 70-year-olds start explaining how millennials think?) Nope, it was more about our work not being that rewarding. It was all about the rest of us being too unexcited to even make our work seem exciting for the young people coming into our industry.

Be honest: how many of us have a full-blown orientation package in your company where you talk about our industry, and its rich history of building products that have changed the world? How many of us have taken the time, when hiring a plater or an etcher, to explain that this job could be the first step toward a rich and rewarding career?

It’s pretty much a standard industry joke that nobody in our business ever said, when we were kids, “When I grow up, I want to build printed circuit boards.”  And that attitude has pretty much stuck with us decades later. It’s a damned shame.

This is a great industry. We are building game changing products that, to quote Steve Jobs, “are putting a dent in the world.”

If we got our act together, if we started properly developing our story of who we are and that we are doing some very important work, we could have a much more successful time of it bringing new and younger, talented people into our profession.

Remember, when we hire someone, we are not giving them a job, we are giving them a future. We have to show them they are entering an exciting career, one that we ourselves are excited about showing them.

We must treat both new and current employees with the kind of loyalty and respect that we want them to give to our customers, not to mention (and this is important) to one another.

From Tom Peters’ new book, here are some examples of how to put people first:

• Give people enriching and rewarding lives
• Help them to become more than they have ever been before, more than they ever dreamed of being
• Get people to give a shit. People who care do great work. Caring is the most important aspect of doing a great job.
• Build a culture in which individuals have the means to truly thrive, to succeed. To be happy in their work, to be fulfilled and growing.
• Employees are our first customers, our most important customers.
• I have developed a complete, new employee training program, contact me if you’re interested in hiring and keeping great people.

In the meantime, as we start 2022, make sure that you remember that one thing. Your employees are going to treat your customers exactly how you treat them.

It’s only common sense.

Dan Beaulieu is president of D.B. Management Group.