How to treat your employees

I often find myself con­fused by my own val­ues. My reac­tions to some sit­u­a­tions leave me bemused and I fre­quent­ly don’t con­scious­ly rec­og­nize the aspects that offend or please me. I do try to trust my reac­tions, but some­times it is hard to jus­ti­fy when I can’t put my fin­ger on the cause.

It both­ers me to see boss­es mis­treat or dis­re­spect their employ­ees. Even when they are advo­cat­ing on my behalf, maybe espe­cial­ly when they are, I sit in judg­ment and find myself want­i­ng to take my busi­ness elsewhere.

I’ve assumed that my squea­mish­ness comes from a basic assump­tion that all peo­ple deserve to be treat­ed with dig­ni­ty, but that’s always rung hol­low. Sure, I believe that, but it nev­er felt like the whole story.

I’ve begun read­ing Stephen Cov­ey’s Sev­en Habits again. I have start­ed it sev­er­al times and nev­er got­ten far­ther than about one quar­ter of the way through. Ear­ly in the book he lays out what he calls the “P/PC bal­ance.” P is for Pro­duc­tion and PC is for Pro­duc­tion Capa­bil­i­ty. The idea is to always take care of both the goose and the gold­en eggs.

“There are orga­ni­za­tions that talk a lot about the cus­tomer and then com­plete­ly neglect the peo­ple that deal with the cus­tomer the employ­ees. The PC prin­ci­ple is to always treat your employ­ees exact­ly as you want them to treat your best customers.”

This sud­den­ly pulls my val­ues into focus. No won­der it both­ers me to see an employ­er treat an employ­ee with less than per­fect respect. It’s because I want to be treat­ed fair­ly and with respect as a cus­tomer. It’s like the dat­ing max­im: some­one who is nice to you but rude to the wait­er is not a nice per­son. You want to have rela­tion­ships with good and trust­wor­thy peo­ple? Pay atten­tion to how they treat oth­er people.

In this light, want­i­ng to do busi­ness only with respect­ful employ­ers is not altru­is­tic, it’s self­ish. (Not that these are mutu­al­ly exclu­sive!) Who wants to shop where the sign reads, “we cheat the oth­er guy and pass the sav­ings on to you”? How long before I become “the oth­er guy?”

Maybe this should­n’t be more pow­er­ful for me than the altru­is­tic aspect, but in the self­less motive there is always the ques­tion of whether it’s real­ly my busi­ness. Talk of uni­ver­sal inter­con­nect­ed­ness aside, this is a clear and con­crete exam­ple of inter­con­nect­ed­ness. Yes, it is absolute­ly my busi­ness whether to do busi­ness with some­one who will even­tu­al­ly treat me with that sort of disrespect.