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This can happen, but Paul "Kinko" Orfalea's book "Copy This!" goes into a lot of detail about how it makes sense to care about employees as people and doing so
by m0llusk 4y ago
This can happen, but Paul "Kinko" Orfalea's book "Copy This!" goes into a lot of detail about how it makes sense to care about employees as people and doing so actually contributes greatly to the bottom line. His company "Kinko's Copies" is not the greatest tech leader ever, but it provided basic services to ordinary people using low paid labor and managed to have employee morale and retention far above other companies in this class, fast food companies being perhaps notable for bad employee morale and turnover so extreme that at times it threatens operations.
- r0p3 4y agoThis example illustrates the first comment's point: it is fundamentally a transactional relationship. "Caring contributes greatly to the bottom line" means the goal of "caring" is increased productivity.
- m0llusk 4y agoNot to belabor the point, but if I understand the book correctly Paul did things this way because he believed it was the right thing to do and it was the best fit for him and his personality. Relating this way to employees allowed him to live with himself and humanized the business. So the increased productivity was a happy coincidence of his insistence on positive human interaction being a foundational element of business operations. He never really expected to be successful or anything like the great success which unfolded. The entire business was basically winging it in order to make money because he had trouble following more common paths.