Employees. Remember them? Maybe not, since it’s stunning how many employers routinely demonstrate the indifference - if not the hostility - they have for their own people. You know, the folks actually getting the work done.
The dying Washington Post just fired one-third of its staff with the grace and nimbleness of a blind, drunken hippopotamus. Owner Jeff Bezos and now-departed Publisher/CEO Will Lewis lacked the class, dignity, and common sense to have announced the firings themselves, choosing to hide and in the latter’s case to attend Super Bowl parties. Yes, it’s true that how you undertake firings of some employees communicates volumes to the rest of them. These creeps don’t understand this point, however, and what’s worse; they don’t care. Proof? The Post has stranded their fired employees in far-flung locations around the world including war zones without seeing to their safety and paying their way back home.
In the Foreword to restaurateur Will Guidara’s 2022 book “Unreasonable Hospitality,” leadership guru Simon Senek writes, “If he (Guidara) wants his frontline teams to obsess about how they made their customers feel, he has to obsess about how he made his employees feel.” Guidara and Chef Daniel Humm’s Eleven Madison Park earned recognition as the “World’s Best Restaurant” in 2017, based in part on an authentic commitment to employees. It has to be an authentic, tangible commitment, too, since all employees see through the bullshit, another point not understood by the Bezos bros.
Costco gets the idea. As Bezos and his ilk embrace the slimy side of political expedience, Costco remains deeply committed to values-based, ethical capitalism. This includes real, operational support for employee well-being. Costco pays and treats its people well. The company stands for something and their employees know it. Costco does not cave in to political expediency by being bullied into changing its values, policies, and practices as some law firms and universities have done. In this spirit, a sidebar salute on this Super Bowl Sunday to New England Patriots' owner Robert Kraft who, like Bezos, has weather-vaned his way back into the arms of a blatant racist. This from a man whose talented football employees are comprised mostly of Black men. How should these employees interpret their boss's embrace of a racist?
The result for Costco in choosing to do the right thing? Its annual turnover rate of eight percent compares to a staggering 60 percent for the retail sector generally. Can you imagine the millions of dollars Costco saves as a result? The company's high employee-satisfaction rates coupled with enviable performance on platforms such as Glassdoor and Indeed act as magnets for attracting and retaining great people and sustaining good morale.
Yes, the Washington Post finds itself in the middle of wrenching changes plaguing journalism in what has become a challenging business with all kinds of margin pressures. Well, Costco’s mass-market retail sector and even Eleven Madison Park’s high-end, fine-dining market can be just as fickle, tumultuous, and financially pressed. It always a question of whether you have the right leaders to meet the moment, which must start by treating employees with respect and communicating with them forthrightly.
