Jacques deCock
Sep 3, 2018 · 2 min read

Lolly,

You are right we need to get away from treating employees as one more factor of production to treating them as valued partners. One of the reasons I did not stay in the US is that too many companies still treat employees as totally variable costs (except for CEOs of course who have strong reward for failure clauses in their contracts). The economy should serve humanity not the other way around.

Being totally individual relationship focused however also has disadvantages as employees also want to SEE that the system is fair as it is important to grow and retain average employees as well as reward the best as it takes a whole motivated and supportive team to succeed. Any hint, real or assumed, of favouritism destroys team spirit. You also have to ensure you identify and manage the good “upward manager” but poor “downward manager”.

What I have noticed as a CEO is that although employees criticise a lot of the things you do, if you stop doing it they are even more unhappy and frustrated.

Key I believe is to create systems where trust, mutual respect and true care for the welfare of all irrespective of performance is central. It is not the systems that are the failure it is the disconnect between the words and ALL of the actions.

One of my proudest achievement is that in one of the companies I lead was that some, of course not all, employees I had to fire still came to the annual company events and had only good things to say about the company. That is not to say that firing people is ever easy or problem free both for the person being fired as well as for the people remaining.