and make it difficult for frontline employees to do a good job and thrive in front of the customers. I want my students to feel that. This way, when they are in these positions, they’ll think of how this decision impacts the frontline workers and the work they do.. I want my students to be able to work with frontline employees, understand who they are, understand where they’re coming from, and also understand all the good ideas they might have.
In one of our workshops, a company member posed this question verbatim: “All else being constant, what happens when you raise pay?” The company found that pay has an effect on turnover, reducing turnover. Yet the effect was so little. It was a single-digit increase, decrease in turnover. Again, companies that adopted the good jobs system didn’t just increase pay, they created a whole new system. They were able to reduce turnover by 25 percent or by half.
Data can tell what happens when we increase staffing levels to support profitability, but it doesn’t tell us the impact on our customers, on our employees, the overall morale, and people’s ability to do a good job. “In order to win with our customers, we have to execute well operationally. In order to execute well operationally, we have to keep the employee turnover low and set our employees up for success. Therefore, we must invest in our people and make these operational choices.”