Why Is Learning and Growing A Secret Key To A Happy Future?
We can’t depend on others, yet the more we help ourselves, the more others can depend on us
Bruce and I were talking about our job experiences. Both us us experienced difficult job circumstances which caused us to ask ourselves some deep moral, ethical, and personal questions. We talked about our motivations and why we had wanted to do well and achieve at our jobs.
Bruce worked for Deluxe Corporation as a Lean Continuous Improvement expert and built up their facility in Pennsylvania saving the company millions of dollars … until they closed the plant. After laying off hundreds, week by week, he ultimately was forced to lay himself off via telephone with a company witness.
I raised millions of dollars for housing and community initiatives with Beyond Shelter until entrenched management problems led to its dissolution. I laid myself off — but for me, there was no witness.
“I used to be so proud of my double-digit fundraising efforts,” I said, meaning I wanted to grow every segment of the development program and achieved this goal much more often than not.
Bruce was proud of many of his initiatives at Deluxe and the other places he worked: few to none of them related to laying employees off. This is the primary reason a lot of companies hire continuous improvement experts.
“We cared about our jobs,” I said. “But our jobs not only did not care about us, we got jettisoned no matter what.”
To be fair, in my case, I knew I was laying myself off so I could preserve the jobs of 100 others who wouldn’t have as easy a time as I did transitioning to self-employment.
Bruce comes from the perspective of “It’s always the bottom line,” but may be rethinking this opinion, as I mentioned the “salary issue” and he agreed, even though Lean and Continuous Improvement are all about reducing waste, most companies just want Lean experts to come in and tell them who they can lay off.
Side note: Store Self Checkouts
According to Forbes Business Insights, the Self Checkout Market size was valued at $4.23 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow to $13.98 billion by 2030. According to Salary.com, the average retail clerk salary is $29,626. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that there are over 4.6 million retail clerks in the U.S.
Using the average pay, this represents $136.2 billion a year.
Overall revenue for the retail industry in the U.S. will top $7.1 trillion this year.
You who talk about how raising anyone’s salary/wage will result in $500 sweatshirts? If these companies are running that slim margins, they have no business employing anyone at all. Do the math.
I do head math all the time, maybe a bit different than others.
The salaries of all those millions of clerks, all together, is less than 2% of the industry’s total revenue.
Putting aside the fact that these clerks themselves shop and buy items at retail stores, this is not a “savings” of $136.2 billion for the businesses that hire the clerks. Our local department store is installing self-checkouts and I have yet to talk to a single person who wants to use them in preference to being assisted by an actual living person. I won’t be shopping much, if at all, at that store in the future.
Robots have been tried for decades at fast food establishments. It turns out that people do not want to eat, or receive, food that’s prepared in front of their face by a machine or that’s provided to them by mechanical means.
This game isn’t about prices and “cut backs” it’s pure, simple, evil greed and disregard for customer desires, convenience, or quality. That is money these companies who are making these decisions will deliver to their owners/shareholders. It will never be put back into the store or re-invested beyond the purchase of these machines. It won’t lower the price of any item by a single penny.
It’s About People and Power
“Bruce, I’ve done probably 500 financial projections for businesses and comped out hundreds more. Salaries and wages are never the primary expense area for any for-profit business I’ve ever been involved with.”
For organizations like school districts and many types of government agencies, salaries can be the highest expense category. But even among these organizations, they rarely total more than 50% of expenditures.
But Bruce — and I — found that many businesses look only at salaries and wages when they try to cut costs. Some are hardline opposed to paying any employee a decent wage.
When working for years at a job without an increase, it’s hard to see how people stay motivated and continue to do a good job.
Surprisingly, more often than not, many people do. Our culture emphasizes work to such an extent that having a job and going to work becomes the biggest source of identity, socialization, and personal pride for many people.
Work is changing. But workers may be changing the most.
I can’t see many of my former students, my daughter, or her boyfriend, or any of their friends that I got to know having the same type of work-related motivation and pride that Bruce and I had.
He and I are 9 years apart: I’m one of the youngest Boomers and he’s a middle Boomer. He saw Cream, Bowie, and Zeppelin.
I saw Van Halen, X, and the Psychedelic Furs.
Different times.
But each of us were raised to believe truisms:
1) Work hard and you’ll be successful
2) You will find a good job and be able to have a lifelong career
3) Invest in retirement funds and you will be able to take trips and cruises in your …
…. BBBBZZZZZT ….
Yeah right. Not so much.
That doesn’t mean we’re not happy: we are. Both of us have made personal changes in our lives which have made us happy and fulfilled.
We made it. We are not the “bad Boomers” ruining the lives of younger generations with our greed, blindness, and selfishness.
We know that we were sold a bill of goods about our country, the nature of work, and “capitalism” as it is practiced in our state and nation.
There’s a lot of fear out there, especially in business and investment publications. Big companies are ordering formerly remote workers back to work. As noted, the “self-checkout” phenomenon is rapidly rising, with over 50% of retail businesses either using them already or converting to them.
There’s a lot of turmoil in government organizations, schools, and colleges and universities, too. I continue to receive the same set of four themed sales emails from the Chronicle of Higher Education to get the reports on:
1) Student engagement
2) Declining enrollment
3) Survival of small colleges
4) Improve your career — as in “get a paying job”
At what point do larger percentages of people start making the choices that Bruce and I came to? The ones to improve our physical health, our mental and emotional health, our relationship with ourselves, family and friends and put the job/work on the back burner except to make ends meet?
It Is About The Motivation
I started looking for articles about employee motivation, expecting to find at least a small number of recent studies, but discovered nothing but the typical platitudes and Forbes Expert SHRM spewage — and a gem of an 1973 article from Harvard Business Review that helpfully categorized some motivational factors among low-wage workers by race.
I am the author of Business Psychology (2022), which is a book for high school classrooms and libraries.
There are companies today, and more than a few, which have the same attitude as Frederick Winslow Taylor, who instituted time-motion studies in an effort to quantify human work like the production of a machine or an engine. Today, I signed the Authors Guild open letter to AI CEOs and leaders on Artificial Intelligence’s use of fraudulently obtained, pirated books (yes, mine are in the databases) to “train” generative AI like that used by Open AI’s ChatGPT program and others.
It all sounds like so much horrible news. Terrible news.
Wonderful news.
Did people really want to spend 40 years checking people out at WalMart anyway? Right now, their replacements are going to be anti-theft “helpers” because heaven forbid the Walton family would miss a single penny of profit.
I’m pretty sure that every person who quit during the “Great Resignation” may have more financial need right now than they did when they were working a job they disliked or even hated. But I’m equally certain that they are more likely to have happier, healthier, more fulfilled, and better-rounded lives.
For the overwhelming majority of us, our quality of life is not our job. We do not owe our loyalty or an excessive amount of time to any employer who has no concern for our health, well-being, and quality of life.
When I wrote Business Psychology, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of studies that showed how many positive activities and policies could improve employee satisfaction, work relationships, and job performance.
And I was like, “They do study after study, and make proposal after proposal” and …
The overwhelming majority of businesses (and managers — yes, I did whitelabel Forbes content about Gallup’s It’s The Manager) don’t follow any recommendation of I/O psychologists. I/O psychologists are usually asked to do the same type of thing Bruce was: figure out how to reduce workforces and gain a percentage point or two more of “profit.”
It’s a shell game of wickedness, disregard, short-sightedness and a ballpark for sociopathic middle managers to practice their skills of abuse.
And the sooner everyone figures this out and takes action to help themselves to live better, healthier, happier lives — the sooner this game is going to come to an end and a new, better game will begin.
Fight me, those of you who are addicted to this heinous and evil game that destroys lives for the profit of an unhappy, deeply disturbed few.
You know just doing what all those business psychology studies and the “leadership” articles in Forbes say businesses and managers should do would work things out, don’t you?
If you hate your job, go for a better work-life balance. If you can, figure out how to quit.