Back to the End of the Line
By Peter Block
 It is disturbing
that after so many years of growing interest the value and involvement
of the employee, institutional attention has reverted back to economics
and cost reduction. Where for a while it was all about the employee,
now it is all about the money. This column is an attempt to understand
this shift and what it means for us all.
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 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 victim of disappearing competition. The survivors
of the merge and purge decades of the 80s and 90s now find 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 “freemarkets,” 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 being 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 we 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 to a reading
experience. We 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 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
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 wake up 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.
This
article appeared in
News for a Change published by AQP in February 2001. |
