Making the Case for Good Jobs

Zeynep Ton is the author of the Good Jobs Strategy – which holds the honour of being the book I refer to the most when it comes to talking about work. The book is explicitly about supermarket jobs, but the discipline of reflecting on job design had a relevance to the rest of us. ‘The number one reason people stay at QuikTrip,’ said a senior leader at the business, ‘is not the pay. [The firm pays substantially above market averages.] It’s because their boss will do the same jobs they do’. That sense of cohesion is a vital lesson of successful cultures.

In that book Ton set about making the case for firms to create good jobs for their employees, not just for the moral reason but because it was a route to faster growth.

Now she returns with a new book, The Case for Good Jobs, which not only explains the reasoning for creating better working conditions for workers, but also how any firm can set about doing it. At the heart of the discussion is a recognition that workers want to do a good job – and often find obstacles in their way.

MIT Sloan Review: When Doing Less Adds Up to More

The Obstacles to Creating Good Jobs

Transcript

Bruce Daisley (00:05)

This is Eat Sleep Work Repeat, a podcast about workplace culture, psychology and life. Today’s episode is a return visit of a former guest. Zeynep Ton is a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I published the book, The Good Job Strategy, about nine years ago. The book was a really deep exploration of an interesting trend that she’d observed while effectively studying supply chains and logistics. She’d observed the

The most profitable organizations that she was witnessing seemed to be the ones that put employee experience and creating good jobs right at the heart of their strategy. The book proved to be incredibly influential. She had a whole load of different retail stores contacting her. And in fact, she set up the Good Jobs Institute as a means of trying to scale it, of trying to bring this approach to impact 10 million jobs.

Her new book, The Case for Good Jobs, goes a stage further. She confesses in the book that someone came to her after she’d published The Good Job Strategy and asked how they would set about implementing it. And she said, I don’t know. She knew that the end state of being in a good job strategy was effective, but how do you get from where you are now to where you’re trying to be? She didn’t know. Well, the new book answers that, but it goes a lot further than that.

because it effectively sets about trying to explain how job design can fundamentally transform our experience at work. There’s a paradox at the heart of Zeynep Ton’s research. She talks a lot about failing mediocre firms and how they were frequently overtly claiming to be customer focused. But even though they talked about being customer focused or customer centered, it was a ruse. It was a line that felt…

No one was going to argue with it. The firms that genuinely were customer focused did fundamentally different things. They set about having a genuine customer focus that requires investing in employees and trying to retain them for as long as possible. In fact, that’s one of the big details that comes out of this. If you’ve been following the news over the last few weeks, there’s been no shortage of headlines about a crisis in productivity. There’s been headlines saying that The US economy has been in five quarters of productivity decline. And that’s been used as an indication really that around the world that we’re experiencing a productivity problem. In the UK, we have a perennial challenge that productivity seems not to be going up. One of the things that she is incredibly helpful for is contributing to this debate. Zeynep Ton says that frequently productivity is a sign of high turnover.

when you’ve got high employee turnover, a lot of employees leaving. In fact, we can immediately associate that that requires other employees to cover for them or for new employees to come along and have to be trained up. Of course, new employees or leaving employees has a consequence of making productivity decline. And so when we’re looking at productivity figures that falling right now, that’s largely a reflection that a whole load of people are quitting their jobs because they’re not right for them.

Rather than suggesting that this is a need for us to get back to the office, actually it’s a need for us to think about how we can make jobs more satisfying. I really enjoyed this discussion. It’s for good reason that Zaynep Ton has become one of the most influential people in the world of work and how we can make work better. If you enjoy this, please do let me know or share it with someone else. Here’s my discussion with Professor Zaynep Ton.

INTERVIEW

Zeynep, thank you so much. We chatted a few years ago when the Good Jobs strategy came out. And actually, it’s one of the books that I quote most often to people when I’m talking. In no matter what field, I think the phrase by the senior vice president of Quick Trip saying that the number one reason people stay here isn’t the money, it’s the fact that their managers will do the same job they will do. And the quotation that goes on to talk about that, I always talk about that because…

It’s got a relevance for team cohesion. It’s got relevance for everyone in understanding great cultures. So I’m sort of delighted that you’ve written up this follow-up book.

Zeynep Ton (04:35)

Thank you so much, Bruce. And it’s so nice to be with you. I remember enjoying our conversation many five, six years ago, and I’m looking forward to the conversation today. ⁓

Bruce Daisley (04:45)

Before we start, you could introduce yourself and explain your work and what you do.

Zeynep Ton (04:50)

Yes, so my name is Zeynep Ton. I’m a professor of the practice at MIT Sloan School of Management. And I’m also the president of the nonprofit Good Jobs Institute. So I teach MBA students, I teach executives. And more recently, during the last six, seven years, I have also been working directly with companies to help them adopt what I call the good job strategy in their organizations, in retail and outside retail as well.

Bruce Daisley (05:20)

The way that I understand this, so correct me, but the way I understand this is that a professor of operations typically would be looking at supply chain elements and wouldn’t necessarily be looking at the idea of creating a good job. And as I understand it, it was your research that led you to believe that actually this was a fundamental part of the final delivery of good service. Is that right?

Zeynep Ton (05:43)

Yes, that is so right. I teach operations management. ⁓ I used to teach supply chain management. What I’ve learned early on in my research when I was studying supply chain management was, and I was studying supply chain management in the retail context, so many of the problems related to inventory happened in the last ten yards of the supply chain, which is retail stores. Products were in the wrong location. Inventory data were inaccurate.

So many plans were not executed and customers were experiencing stock outs. Companies were having problems with their merchandise planning because their data were inaccurate. I started looking at so many inventory related problems that were big, that were very expensive. And when I looked into why do these problems happen all the time is when I met the human side of operations, because in the stores that had more understaffing, there were more problems in the stores that had more employee turnover, there were more problems. And this is how an operations professor got introduced to the human side. And you realize, you know, we divide the world into silos, operations, marketing, finance, et cetera. But the business problems are business problems and at the intersection of multiple disciplines.

Bruce Daisley (07:03)

And so you came to the conclusion that organisations that set about creating good jobs and good working conditions for their employees seems to be faster growing and better performing. And that’s fundamentally how we’re having this discussion.

Zeynep Ton (07:18)

Yeah, I mean, if you ask any leader, Bruce, I think most of them would say and would believe that for them to be able to win and those of them who really want to win, winning requires having a great team that’s set up to succeed. Right. I mean, I think most people would come to that conclusion. But the problem is. So many executives, especially in settings like retail that have low profit margins and labor costs represent a huge percentage of their overall costs, think that they can’t afford to pay their employees enough to be able to have that team. What I found was that companies that really want recognize that we need to have a great team, so we need to invest in our people.

And they made a set of operational choices that enabled that people investment and that set their team up for success. And the secret source of the good job strategy was operational decisions that increase productivity and increase performance of contribution of employees.

Bruce Daisley (08:24)

It’s really interesting because instinctively you’re saying, I guess what most people would understand that actually when the team feels like it’s set up well, when the team’s set up to succeed, it seems to thrive and these are great conditions. But this seems to be the legacy of some heroic figures in business in the past who have maybe shifted that and invited people rather than to follow their own instincts that this seems to be the right thing to do or to follow the lead of being led by customers. They’ve sort of followed an ethos that’s been passed down. And I’m thinking specifically of the general electric philosophy and old school business philosophies. wonder in your perspective, what impact these old school philosophies have had in terms of shaping the framework that a lot of people consider business decisions and as a result, culture decisions.

Zeynep Ton (09:20)

Yeah, I think for decades business leaders have been taught that humans, people are just like any other input to production. Pay market wages, even if market wages are unlivable wages. Lean and mean is what drives efficiency. Make all your decisions using data, which oftentimes means looking at history to determine what you’re going to do in the future.

And I think this type of mentality drove a lot of decisions that are not great decisions for companies. I mean, what I have found was so many leaders came to me and said, we read your book and it’s so obvious. Like when they read it, they see that it’s so obvious, but that obvious thing doesn’t get done because of how leaders have been told and experienced for decades.

Bruce Daisley (10:15)

And that’s things, as far as I can tell it, that’s things sort of pulling out of certain areas saying that’s not our core competence or the idea of cutting your way to profitability rather than investing in people. There seems to be a lot of instinctive behaviors or actually an obsession with shareholder value rather than thinking about customers. I was really struck by one of the things she said was that almost every mediocre company we’ve worked with. has had customer first or customer focused as a value. I’m really struck by that. Do you want to sort of articulate what you mean? Because I guess most people would say, ⁓ yeah, but that’s an important value to have. It often wasn’t a reflection of what they were doing. Is that right?

Zeynep Ton (10:56)

Yeah, what struck me, Bruce, after starting to work with a lot of companies in lots of different industries, from financial services to call centers to retail to healthcare was so many companies claimed to be customer focused and customer being customer focused is like is good for business. But so many companies where you mentioned GE in your previous question, where in fact financially focused. You might ask, isn’t customer focus and financial focus, aren’t they similar things? They’re not because there are so many things that one can do to increase sales without increasing customer satisfaction. You can buy other companies, you can add more products, you can add more services, you can grow more quickly. Without satisfying your customers, you can still grow your sales and your business.

And that is being financial centricity versus customer centricity. And that was a huge surprise to me. In fact, those companies that pursued the good job strategy, I realized the biggest differentiator for them was they really wanted to win with their customers. Like that was their priority. And once winning with your customers, being customer focused is your priority, then it’s unacceptable not to be frontline focused. Right? If you want to like, If you’re a service business and your priority is your customers, how can you operate with high employee turnover? How can you operate with people who don’t make enough money that they can focus on the job and be able to serve the customer well? So for them, not paying their employees well, not empowering them to make decisions was unacceptable. And that’s why they ended up choosing, you know, the good job strategy and, creating that team and setting them up for success. But it started with customers and wanting to win in business.

Bruce Daisley (13:00)

And it strikes me that reading through everything that you do, there’s a real dissonance between what superficially people claim, organizations claim to be doing, trying to serve customers when they’re not really trying to serve customers. the approach they’re taking, which is often sort of cutting costs or trying to keep costs lean, trying to run organizations lean as well, having no slack in the system.

And all of these things seem to be in service of a couple of things. Firstly, creating a pervasive mediocrity, creating a sense that actually service levels are really poor. And that secondly, most organizations don’t recognize how poorly their customers are being serviced. And they struck me as two fundamental truths. There’s a few examples in your work where people are invited to go and work on the front line or more works for six weeks on the front line. And actually what they experience is very different to what the organization thinks it’s delivering. And all of those things seem to sort of serve to create a dissonance where an organization is kind of deluding itself a little bit, that it’s delivering something that it really isn’t. And it just struck me that actually to succeed, needed to be a process of opening their eyes, opening their eyes to employee experience, opening their eyes to, you know, can they survive on these wages, opening their eyes to customer experience. Are customers really having a bad experience? It seems to be actually the reason why most people seem to say your stuff feels ⁓ obvious in hindsight. Yeah, it’s because actually you’re just asking people to open their eyes and see you’re fresh.

Zeynep Ton (14:45)

obvious.

Yeah, in one of the workshops recently, the CEO of a company said, Zeynep helps us see the truth. ⁓ the first part of my book is the whole section is called awareness. I wanted to explain how expensive low pay and high turnover is and a system that’s built on high turnover is, how much more expensive it is than what executives, managers typically assume that to be.

And, you know, I start with low pay because those of us who make more than enough oftentimes aren’t aware of how much low pay hurts employees’ wellbeing and ability to do a good job. When you don’t make enough to be able to put food on the table, you don’t have agency in your life. No purpose, meaning nothing else really matters because

You can’t make enough to take care of your family. You have multiple jobs. You can’t sleep. You’re constantly stressed about, I going to pay this bill or that bill? So I wanted executives to see how much low pay hurts employees and their ability to a good job. And low pay, we have found working with organization after organization after organization. If the pay is low, high turnover is guaranteed.

Now, high pay enough doesn’t make a job a good job. Let me be very clear. We all know that you have to be treated like a human with respect, with dignity. You have to be set up for success. But the absence of sufficient pay guaranteed employee turnover. And once companies have high employee turnover, in my work originally, I found that, when there is turnover, there are operational problems, like products are not in the right location. There are all sorts of customer service problems.

that reduce sales and that prevents companies from investing in their people. But once we started working with companies and once some of our team members started having this experience working in the front lines with these companies, we realized, high turnover hurts companies a lot more because when you operate with high employee turnover, then you end up creating an entire system that’s very vulnerable.

and difficult to thrive in front of your customers. Let me give you a few examples. I call this all the corporate disabilities that companies have because once they have high turnover, there are so many things that they can’t do. Those of your listeners who are in middle management positions will probably really identify with this. If you have a high turnover in your system, you’re constantly having problems, customer service problems, operational problems.

Managers have no time. They’re firefighters. They’re constantly fighting fires. They have no time to hire the right people, even if they have great hiring practices on paper. They have no time to train them. One of my colleagues, Sarah Callick, she worked in the front lines at an organization and she was my student. She graduated from MIT Sloan and she applied for a job stocking shelves and no one asked during her interview.

Why does somebody who just graduated from MIT want to stock shelves? Because they have no time to even go through the resume. So they just hired her. Her training, she was supposed to be working in this one particular area of the store and on the shelf stocking department. But instead, her on the job training was at the cash register, even though Sarah wasn’t going to be a cash register. But that’s the only person they had who could do training. And by the way,

The trainer didn’t speak any English. She only spoke Spanish and the problem is Tara doesn’t speak Spanish. So this just gives you a sense for how broken the hiring and training is. And of course, if you haven’t hired the right person, if you haven’t trained them well, then do you want to trust them to make decisions on your behalf? Do you want them to solve problems for customers? Of course you don’t. So now you can’t empower people.

And we know how important empowerment is for employees to be motivated to do a good job. We know how important empowerment is for them to be able to serve the customer, to be able to contribute to company success. But when you operate with high turnover, you can’t empower people. ⁓ You also can’t manage capacity. You also can’t develop strong managers. You also can’t set high expectations. So what I found was when companies operate with high employee turnover,

There are so many things they can’t do. It’s like business malpractice. And that’s a very vulnerable system. And it ends up being a pretty inhumane system.

Bruce Daisley (19:53)

Two, I guess, related spirals. One, both related to trust. The organizations that do trust their employees end up in these positive feedback loops. There’s a lovely example, think it’s a quest at the end, where they get into a cycle where every Friday they’re making tweaks and adjustments. And when there is trust, empowerment seems to follow. But many organizations find themselves

maybe as a consequence of what you’re saying of high employee turnover, not trusting their employees. And so as a consequence, creating more rules or the corporate desire for standardization means that they get rid of some of the autonomy that people have. And I get the sense that this book is an attempt to try to show people how to get onto this virtuous path.

Zeynep Ton (20:48)

Yes, exactly. So I want first the leaders, the managers to read this and realize how ruinous turnover is to their setting and trust. mean, yes, there’s a distrust loop that happens because headquarters don’t trust the front lines to make decisions. Then they centralize everything. Of course, when you centralize everything and when you make rules, some of those rules don’t make sense for the front lines. So now the front lines don’t trust them either. there’s the lack of trust goes both ways. So I want them to first see the system, but then give them the courage that you can get out. You can get out. You don’t have to be a superhero to leave the system based on high employee turnover because there are a bunch of companies in the last five, six years that have done so. Large companies, small companies, public companies, private companies.

Companies that are competing on the basis of low cost and companies that are competing on the basis of differentiation. They have done it and you can do. By the way, if you do it, the result is not just winning with your customers, but the result is offering people jobs with respect, dignity, pay, and that is so meaningful for the leaders that we have worked

Bruce Daisley (22:08)

You say something right at the end of the book. Previously, in 2014, when your first book came out, people came to you and asked, how do I implement this? And you didn’t know. It’s like one of those things where you sort of, what are the steps? And you seem to have laid out these steps now in a far more, in a really clear way that anyone might seek to adopt it. But one of the things that seems to come from that is that this fundamental… change perspective, people need to plan for the long term rather than follow short term imperatives or financial demands. And one of the ways that that for me seems to be articulated is that the organizations that seem to do this well seem to have a completely different ethos. One of the things you say is at Mercadona, reciprocity is considered a universal truth. The idea that they expect reciprocity from employees, but also from customers and it just seems to be to succeed you need to transition to a completely different philosophy that runs through the whole of the business rather than the short-termism that seems to pervade most of business.

Zeynep Ton (23:18)

Yeah, and every business, Bruce, even private companies have short-term pressures. it’s not that I, you know, the companies that follow the good job strategy ignore those pressures, but their philosophy is to be customer centric and customer centric versus financial centric. And also recognizing that companies are a system and making system based decisions versus siloed decisions. So, so I think the distinction is a little bit short-term, long-term because financial-centric oftentimes manifests itself in terms of short-term decisions. But the key thing that I saw from these leaders was how customer-centric they were and how that drove so many of their decisions, which ended up becoming important long-term decisions. ⁓ But they don’t ignore the short-term. mean, these leaders are under tremendous pressure and you have to find ways to have a long-term mindset.

and meet the short-term pressures as well as possible while being customer-centric, while seeing the system, and while sticking to your principles.

Bruce Daisley (24:27)

Outside of the world that you specifically look at here, one of the big headlines that has been in the news in the last week or so is the fact that the US has seen five quarters of declining productivity. One of the things that has characterized that discussion is that in the absence of any data, people have been free to bring along their own opinions, really. It’s been definitely appropriated in the world of work that has had remote working and hybrid working, it’s been appropriated by the people who want to make the case for the return to the office. Reading your work, the thing that really becomes clear to me is that there’s quite often a very obvious cause of productivity declines that has nothing to do with where the work is done, which is more to do with employee turnover.

When you have a high turnover of employees, it has a huge impact on productivity. I just wanted your take on that whole debate and whether your data points to a different finding than those headline-grubbing ⁓ things that we’ve witnessed today.

Zeynep Ton (25:27)

It’s not just yet.

Yeah, I mean the work that I’ve been looking at ⁓ can’t be done in a hybrid way, right? If you’re in healthcare, you have to deliver for your patient. If you’re in nursing homes, you can’t work from home if you’re in retail or restaurants. So I won’t shed much light on that debate, but on the productivity. ⁓ The companies that adopt a good job strategy from the beginning, have always been more productive than their competitors. And more recent examples of companies that adopted the strategy has seen tremendous productivity increases. And the productivity increases didn’t come just from lowering turnover. The productivity increases came because they started designing their employees’ work differently. So the good job strategy is about making, instead of operational choices, that by design increases the productivity and contribution of employees. For example, one of the companies that adopted the good job system is Sam’s Club. Sam’s Club is Walmart’s Costco equivalent, their warehouse club business. And one of the things that they did was they reduced their product variety by a tremendous amount, as much as 25 % at some stores.

Now that decrease in product variety enabled their employees to do their work much faster, enabled them to be in stock, enabled them to drive down their prices, and that created this virtuous cycle where now you can pay employees more. Now you can serve your customers better. Now your performance is so much better. ⁓ Another thing that they did was they reinvested in technology. to simplify the work, take out all those tedious activities so that again, the frontline employees are more productive, so now you can pay them more. Now all the time that they had doing those tedious tasks can be used to serve the customer. So all of these companies that adopted the good job system improved productivity, but that productivity improvement didn’t just come from investment in people, it also came from

designing their work, setting them up for success, and making choices to increase their productivity.

Bruce Daisley (28:03)

Taking hard choices about job design and sometimes limiting range really struck me as a definite lesson that’s applicable outside the world of face-to-face service and retail and care. It struck me that actually job design was something that is often neglected.

Zeynep Ton (28:22)

Yeah, and it’s the job design for every level in the organization. I mean, we have just been struck by how middle managers, unit managers, assistant managers have been buried with so much workload, so many requests from corporate, ⁓ so many requests, sometimes conflicting requests.

And sometimes requests like all of them come on a Monday and Tuesday and there’s nothing on a Wednesday. So their timing is very variable. their workload was so much more and it’s so much more variable than what other when people who drove staffing ⁓ thought. And that was another disconnect. And these poor managers were just stuck in the middle.

Bruce Daisley (29:12)

Just back to that overall productivity figure though. You’re sort of really unequivocal that high staff turnover is the enemy and it destroys your ability to deliver service. It just destroys the job of a manager where managers are often firefighting and you’ve mentioned that. But if we specifically go into those UF’s figures of five quarters of productivity decline, the fact that resignation rates have gone up would, I presume from what you’ve said, be one of the reasons why productivity has declined. So aside from the good job strategy and how you resolve it, an increase in turnover will, by the normal order of things, lead to a reduction in productivity.

Zeynep Ton (29:56)

Yeah, higher turnover creates systems that drive lower productivity. I’m an operations person, so I can tell you what happens within companies. The bigger macro productivity numbers are, I leave my economist friends to comment on those, but within companies, yes, when you have high turnover, you end up designing a system that ends up being a lot less productive than you thought it would be. And by the way, this whole thing about lean and mean,

So I work a lot with my colleagues at Toyota and Toyota production system is called the lean production system. And that whole lean vocabulary came from that. Lean doesn’t mean you don’t invest in people. Lean doesn’t mean you don’t have enough people. That’s such a misinterpretation of lean. In fact, the definition of lean production systems or Toyota production system, it’s a culture of an engaged workforce.

that’s driving improvement, solving problems all the time. So there’s just such a misconception about lean that I wish we could change.

Bruce Daisley (30:58)

Clearly, your work initially started off in retail stores and has expanded to Quest, you’ve mentioned Care Homes. What other sectors have you looked at? I’m interested in the degrees of applicability. Clearly, there’s going to be some professional settings where being on a living wage or not probably is ⁓ an issue that’s been resolved.

But I’m interested, firstly, in what fields that you’ve seen your work applied. And secondly, where you think the scope of it expands to.

Zeynep Ton (31:33)

Yeah, so I started this nonprofit Good Jobs Institute ⁓ and our mission is to improve 10 million jobs in the United States by 2027. And we focus only on low-wage sectors. So the work that we have done during the last six, seven years has been on low-wage sectors. Within that low-wage sector, I can tell you where it has been applicable. ⁓ Healthcare settings, hospitals, nursing homes, financial services, call centers, restaurants, fulfillment centers, retail stores. So these are the settings, factories, these are the settings that we have seen it work. Where else it works, we will see. think my theory is that it would work in any setting where the work that frontline employees do, that work drives performance. So operational execution is an important driver of performance.

and team performance really matters. So, that’s probably the boundary condition for where it applies, but we haven’t worked with professional services and we won’t because we are very, you know, one of the operational choices of the good job strategy is focus and simplify. So, we have very clear focus on who we work with and who we don’t work with and we try to simplify as much as possible. But, you know, I’ve done executive education sessions with consultants and they say it applies to their setting. Though I have never worked with them to say, yes, it really does.

Bruce Daisley (33:10)

Because those four fundamental pillars, really strongly, know, certainly the majority of this podcast is more about people in professional services. And yet the four pillars of the good jobs ⁓ strategy, you don’t call it strategy anymore, the system, good job system, are ⁓ focus and simplify, standardize and empower, cross train and operate with slack. And certainly, you know,

There’s at least three of them, if not cross-train, but maybe even cross-train, are applicable to almost every business that I encounter.

Zeynep Ton (33:44)

Well, I certainly buy it. mean, so we have my husband and I both work and we have four kids and, we have jobs and we use those four choices and invest in people in our life. So it certainly is applicable to to our family’s tree.

Bruce Daisley (34:04)

Yeah, absolutely. I’m just intrigued how ⁓ cross-training I guess is making sure that everyone can do all the jobs in that.

Zeynep Ton (34:11)

Yeah, we try to smooth the workload as much as possible so we have our peaks in different periods and we’re cross-trained to come in and empower our kids to make certain decisions and we simplify, simplify, simplify. Fewer things, we don’t look at like, oh, so and so is doing that, so we should do that too. So and so is sending their child to that, so we should do that too. And we’re like, okay, not social pressure. What do we want to accomplish as a family and less focus and less simplify and operate with Slack? I mean, that is the choice that has saved us because if you don’t have enough help and for a long time, my father gave us the biggest Slack because he used to be here helping us with our children. But having that time makes all the difference. Right? Having the resources that can help you so that you have time to focus on your family and on your work makes all the difference.

Bruce Daisley (35:06)

because what goes to the heart of your work, and this is why for me it’s applicable everywhere, is a fundamental belief that individuals want to do a good job. And either we don’t put them in a circumstance where they can focus on doing a good job because their immediate financial needs aren’t met or they… ⁓

They’re not given enough hours to work, but people want to do a good job. When you put them in the circumstances where they can do a good job and you give them the opportunity to feedback and improve it, it seems to be enriching for them. And that seems to be a universal truth. That belief that human beings want to do a good job and are capable of doing a good job seems to transcend.

Zeynep Ton (35:52)

Yeah, when I met the founder of Four Seasons Hotels, you know, which is that they set the standard for luxury and they’ve had that set that standard for what, 50 years, 50, 60 years that they’ve been around. So when I interviewed Isadore Sharp, the founder for my book, I asked him, said, you know, Four Seasons is known to empower their workers and you have hotels all over the world.

from Istanbul, Turkey to ⁓ Costa Rica. And I said, how do you trust people to make decisions? And he looked at me and he said, have you ever met anyone who doesn’t want to succeed? And in his mind, humans want to succeed and I’m going to design the work so they can succeed. But what happens when you have, therefore, they operate with low turnover, et cetera. But what happens in high turnover environments and in low

low-pay environments. In the low-pay environment, when workers don’t make enough money, when they are constantly stressed, when they can’t put food on the table, their physical health suffers, their mental health suffers, even their cognitive abilities suffer. mean, there is research that shows that low pay is the stress that it causes, the scarcity.

is equivalent to losing something like 13 IQ points. So these workers, when they have all of these problems, they end up not being able to focus on the job, making more errors, being less productive, having attendance problems because they didn’t have bus money. They had a flat tire and they… Executives look at these workers who are in a vicious cycle of poverty because of their situation and they say,

You know, we don’t trust them because they can’t even do the simplest job well. We don’t trust them because they can’t, they don’t treat our customers well. We don’t trust them because they have all these attendance problems, but it’s not the worker that you can’t trust. It’s the situation that the worker is in, the system that creates that type of outcome. So I think if we could recognize and separate the system from the person and recognize that it’s the system that drives that behavior, versus the person is inherently doesn’t want to do a good job, then we could have faith in people. And this is why I tell my students, get a frontline job, work in the front lines for a couple months. And that will provide you more faith in human beings. And you also see lots of other things too.

Bruce Daisley (38:36)

I think that’s probably why the ⁓ number of examples is so powerful because you mentioned the power of social proof, the power that when you see other organizations doing something, it gives you deniability, the ability to say, that’s why we’re doing it. And so the fact that, I guess, what your whole system is, is a leap of faith to trust that actually if you do this, there can be a virtuous circle and you can get yourself. out of the way that you’re currently operating. so seeing a series of other companies that have done it and big companies and companies that are worth a lot of money provides social proof in the other direction. It suggests that actually, look, the barrier is the mental model that you’re operating in. It’s not unequivocally true that things need to stay this way forever.

Zeynep Ton (39:29)

Yes, one of the reasons I wrote this book is to provide legitimacy for investing in people and creating this high-performance team. And by showing people that system change is possible, it’s not as risky as you think. Look at all the companies that have done it, and you can do it too. I hope that by seeing others succeed, it will provide the courage and the permission for others to try it in their organization.

Bruce Daisley (39:58)

You mentioned there, in closing really, you mentioned there that you’ve got this August goal of moving 10 million jobs into being good jobs. How are you getting on? In the five or six years that the institute’s been running, how many jobs have you transformed? along the way, you’ve got part of Walmart there, you’ve got big organizations. Are you making a dent in those numbers?

Zeynep Ton (40:22)

In some ways, it’s hard to tell. Pay has increased for low-wage workers, but not enough. And some part of it is due to what happened during COVID. We are seeing progress. ⁓ It’s not fast enough. It’s not enough for us yet. So that’s why we’re working so hard to work with more companies and get this good job system into their organizations. But we are seeing progress. And our theory of change is what they use in the nonprofit world. is that if we can show examples within our first five years, then it will provide motivation for others to do it. And now we have those examples and we see a lot more companies interested in this. So I am hopeful that we will meet our goal and we’ll talk in 2027 again to see how close we got.

Bruce Daisley (41:13)

I’m so inspired by your work and for me, there’s something when you talk about the state of a lot of people in these organizations of mediocrity and that people find themselves in the state that have learned helplessness, a feeling like they can’t change anything. That I think so many people would recognize in their own companies and in their own professions. So I think your work has got an application elsewhere outside of sector as you’ve mentioned but you know even if it only impacts the sector you’ve mentioned and you change those jobs I think it’s an inspiring project I’m blown away by it.

Zeynep Ton (41:51)

And you don’t have to be a big company to do this, by the way. ⁓ I’ll give you one quick story of a restaurant, small, the owner of two units of a restaurant that did this. he sent me an email ⁓ just yesterday and he said, in any case, I want you to know that last fall, one of my employees asked me to step outside and thanked me while crying and added that it was the first time she had ever been able to shop for her kids back to school clothes someplace other than Goodwill. That meant a ton to this business owner, small business owner. And he talked about how this is now his why, is to be able to create these types of jobs and they’re killing it. ⁓

Bruce Daisley (42:34)

Yeah, you mentioned that the Costco owner, think, or the boss of Costco, is often stopped by people saying the same to him. it’s just, it’s so inspiring to hear stories like that, because I think, you know, sometimes we hear stories of Amazon warehouse workers or doing these wretched insecure jobs, and we can’t help but feel, gosh, is this the future that’s destined for all of us? And so, you know, this optimistic and clearly reasoned alternative.

is a really important part. You mentioned along the way that one of your professors had said, maybe one day someone will write a book which disproves all of the Jack Welsh, Gemma Electric stuff. In so many ways, you’ve written that book. So it’s so thrilling to see the journey that you’re going on.

Zeynep Ton (43:23)

Thank you so much, Bruce. Thank you for having me.

Bruce Daisley (43:28)

Thank you to Zeynep Ton. I’m just always so grateful whenever I get the opportunity to speak to her and you’ll find a whole load of detail about what we discussed in the show notes along with a link to the book.

Thank you to Zeynep. Her new book, The Case for Good Jobs, is out any day now and she’s worth following on social media as well. She often shares articles that she writes on these themes. Thank you so much for listening. I’ve got a run of episodes coming up. some fantastic discussions, a conversation about the four day week, a discussion about software that we use in our everyday jobs and how AI will impact it. Whole load of stuff coming up. See you next time.