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It
is disturbing that after so many years of growing
interest in the value and involvement of the employee,
institutional attention has reverted back to economics
and cost reduction. This column is an attempt to
understand this shift and what it means for all of
us.
To understand why employees are being
marginalized, we might look at what is happening to the
customer. For example, have you noticed that:
• The
Verizon cellular phone store in town is no longer open on
Saturday?
• The store
manager at Circuit City gets very grumpy when you return
a new
TV because the
picture was too dark?
• When you
call an airline and want to talk to a person, instead of
answering the phone,
they tell you how long you will have to wait, and how
much better it will
be if you contact them
online?
You can add your own version to these
stories, and then realize how often you run
into consumer-unfriendly practices of bringing a product
to market before it is ready,
and more subtly, the ways companies raise prices by
reducing quantity. Put all of
this together and you conclude that after a decade of
growing supremacy, the
customer is slipping back into the pre-1980s status of
minor inconvenience. As customers, we don’t come
first anymore. We are literally on hold. However, it
would bother me less if each of the above actions were
not presented under the cliché banner
of how important customers are and how everything is
being done for the sake of customer service.
So why has the customer become less
important? And what does this mean for
people who care about employee development and
organizational change?
The End of Competition
I think in many cases the customer is a
victim of disappearing competition. The survivors of the
merge and purge decades of the ‘80s and ‘90s
now find that they
are no longer so worried about competition and therefore
no longer so worried about customers. Most locally owned
stores have been driven out of business and the
national companies have conveniently divided up the
spoils.
We now have fewer choices of banks,
pharmacies, bookstores, gas stations, lumberyards,
grocery stores, department stores, eating establishments,
airlines and
TV cable companies, just for starters. Granted there are
more choices in some areas such as movie theatres, hot
sauce and ways to send a package, but in general, fewer
and fewer institutions have a larger and larger hand in
controlling their industry and ultimately us, the
customer.
There is enough competition to avoid
monopoly, but despite the public rhetoric
about so called “free markets,” the
competition has been reduced enough that the
prior obsession about customers has been shifted to an
obsession about costs—and
the favorite answer to lower costs is to automate
everything. The customer is driven
to an online transaction where the interaction is
electronic, low cost and human
beings are increasingly obsolete.
One effect of this is that businesses no
longer care about or invest in employees.
When businesses were worried about competition, and
therefore customers, it forced them to worry about
employees. The focus on staying ahead of the competition
in the early 1980s gave rise to the empowerment movement,
to employee participation and involvement, the total
quality movement and a generally experimental attitude
that
placed employees at the center. The belief was that a
satisfied employee led to a satisfied customer.
These efforts are now in a recession in most
industries. Since they are less worried about customers,
they treat employees as a cost, and an inconvenient one
at that.
Customers Contribute to the Problem
If organizations are obsessed with costs, this is
mirrored by the mindset of most customers. Customers have
also decided to care more about cost and speed than
quality of human service. As customers, we have flocked
to the large chain stores to save our 10-15 percent and
to the Internet for speed and home delivery. If there
are
fewer people to serve us, and if we are offered a lower
quality product for a lower
price, we don’t mind. We want more.
This focus on cost over service has its
effects. Human interaction is increasingly devalued and
treated as a luxury. In the business of training and
development, there
is a miserliness about time that is a symptom of the
problem. Trainers are now busy transforming the training
experience into a reading experience. They are cutting
back
live, in-person learning events and moving them online
and long distance. The training
is sold as self directed, just-in-time learning,
responsive to the modern pressures of
time and speed.
It is a modern version of programmed
instruction with a new romantic twist because
we have bought the idea that “everything
online” is the wave of the future and therefore
progress.
This might be true, but it is more likely all
about cost and with the effect that
employees are now peripheral and not worth investing in,
just as the levels of
customer service
we were accustomed to, are no longer necessary. We are
willing
to sacrifice the quality that comes from depth,
relationship and live action, for
low-cost experiences. Just as citizens and consumers we
are willing to sacrifice community and a vibrant downtown
for low-cost purchasing.
The feeling that employees are no longer
critical is found in wider circles than just training and
development. For years now, most jobs have been under
scrutiny to be automated, outsourced or exported. The
devaluing of employees is not caused by
a shift in values among management, nor do I think the
obsession with stock price is really driving the cost
cutting. I think the real threat to employee well being
and
customer satisfaction is the growing number of virtual
monopolies in the private
sector. When you dominate your industry or segment, you
stop worrying about customers and employees.
What to do?
The scale of all of this is pretty large, so no
single action on our part is going to
shift things. Plus, since most recessions are cyclical,
even ones of the human spirit,
we can ride it out and wait for the day when people are
important again.
If, however, waiting is not an adequate
action plan, as customers we can address
the larger question of fewer choices from fewer and
larger suppliers. Short of joining
the picket lines at a WTO or Nafta convention, become an
activist consumer. Name exactly what you object to in the
customer transaction and let organizations know
electronic transactions are not the same as good service.
We can also use our buying power as a political act. This
means paying a little more, leaving the house and
shopping at locally owned stores.
In the workplace, we can at least not collude
with the trivialization of employees.
We may have to put our training and development services
online, but we don’t have
to act like it is a good idea. We can choose to reject
the idea that hiring bonuses
and staying bonuses are the answer to employee retention.
We can decide to value
face-to-face relationships and deepen them whenever we
get the chance.
Seeing clearly what is happening around us
will also bring its own resolution. There
is a small opening in the dot-com devolution, which is a
wakeup call about the illusory quality of the collective,
mainstream wisdom about an electronic future. We
can
choose not to believe the version of reality promoted by
the business press. They will
be the last to note the end of competition, the
hollowness of the free market and the irrelevance of the
employee and customer.
Reestablishing the voice of the customer and
the employee are causes we have to
take up once again. A worthwhile crusade, even if, at the
moment, we lack the real means to do so.
Issue Highlight — Back
To The End Of The Line
