What's More Important Than Productivity?
What's More Important Than Productivity?
Amazon, Marco Rubio, and being heard as a human being.
Amazon is a lean mean, sales machine. From the very beginning, they focused on reducing waste in the company. Waste of money, waste of time, waste of work, all of it.
Eventually, with enough infrastructure, processes, and sales, they started making huge profits.
They’re a household name and they’ve gone from selling books to selling groceries and computing time.
This sounds pretty good on paper and most business people envy Amazon’s success but no one seems to be considering the actual costs.
Amazon’s warehouse conditions are notoriously bad. Poor safety conditions, robotic speed quotas, and low compensation. They also have a horrible carbon footprint that is mostly preventable.
Even Marco Rubio, a Republican Senator from Florida wrote an Op-Ed about it in USA Today.
Workers are now starting a landmark union, which as far as I know, is the first of its kind. Unions in the past were initiated to protect workers from industries that didn’t have workers’ best interests at heart.
“But Chris! This is industry! The railroads required sacrifice and grit! Coal mines required the lungs of young men so that we could have electricity!”
I disagree. This is just how the story went.
This isn’t how it could have gone. In fact, I have a lot of feelings about business and its purpose. Here’s a post I write every year around Christmas time to remind us what business is for.
It’s a trust problem, not a money problem.
When you’re running your company or building your business, you have a choice. You can optimize for productivity or you can accept tradeoffs to make sure your employees (or contractors) are treated well.
Railroads and coal mines saw profits, but they were built on the backs of the workers. The lungs that those workers gave never cashed out enough to send a family of young kids to college. The profits went to Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller and others.
Yes, yes, yes, some of those rich folks were known as philanthropists who donated back to communities. I even praised them for this in another post a few weeks ago. But let’s be clear, much of the profit margin came from work being performed at low compensation rates.
The value created by workers was and is now translated into company profits. Some of those profits go to salaries and some are reinvested in the company. This is all fine and dandy, but the problem is when there are a few hugely disproportionate salaries at the top and the deal doesn’t seem fair anymore.
When a CEO is spending more money than they need but employees don’t have basic safety concerns met, there’s a problem. It’s not about the money at that point. It’s about priorities and what that CEO thinks is the purpose of an employee. Are they part of your team or are they supposed to serve you?
When companies attempt to cut costs and improve efficiency by slashing employees and salaries, it creates a trust problem. The deal is harder to accept when you don’t trust that the people writing the contract have your best interest at heart.
Humans will never be machines.
Ultimately, the problem with this industrial way of thinking is that people aren’t machines. They’re people. They need different things to feel happy, fulfilled, or productive. Treating them as cogs in a machine is not a long-term strategy. You’re trying to fit a human-shaped peg into a cog-shaped hole.
As a business, Amazon (and others, they’re just the biggest) has a choice. Amazon either sees this as an HR problem or a PR problem. Either they fix the root issue and improve work conditions for employees or they spend resources on PR and lawyers to make the problem go away.
The point here is that there are more important things in life and work than productivity or industry. It’s great if you’re a philanthropist like Carnegie or Rockefeller, but doesn’t it matter how you got there? I think all of us can agree that it does.
What really pisses me off, though, is that even though most people would agree with this, most people also see Jeff Bezos as extraordinarily successful. They see him as a courageous frontiersman instead of a jerk who is actively hurting the people working to make him rich.
This misplaced cultural value is related to the whole “tough guy” thing I wrote about a few weeks ago. It’s not the same, but there’s some overlap.
Stop talking. Practice listening.
As you approach your work, consider the human impacts. Consider how you interact with other people and what they need. Ask yourself how you see employees and workers in general. Are they there for the sake of the company or is the company there for the sake of the people?
Does it even make sense to make a ton of money in a way that hurts others so that you can donate half of it to create a hospital? What if it hurts others just a little bit? What’s a little bit? I have no idea how to do that calculation but I strongly dislike the approach of minimizing salaries and compensation as a solution to increasing company savings or profits.
Right now, in the context of COVID-19 and the important rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, more people are asking to be heard than ever before.
And isn’t that the most human thing ever?
The only trouble is that we all want to be heard and when we’re all talking, no one is listening.