Employees First OR Customers First?
The answer lies in finding a balance — seeing Employees and Customers as Yin & Yang that sustains a business
It’s become fashionable lately to claim that we’re an employee or people first company.
Personally, i do not believe companies can put either their employees or their customers over one another. They both need to go hand-in-hand. It’s like the Yin & Yang or if you look at it from the Indic traditions, then the Shiva-Shakti or Purusha-Prakriti. The conversation can never be about giving a preference to one over the other. They both have to move in a harmony.
Our customers pay our salaries
All the people working for any company (services or products) must always remain cognizant of this fact that our customers pay our salaries. To serve our customers well is the highest duty of any business and the employees of that business.
1. The customer is not dependent upon us — we are dependent upon him.
2. The customer is not an interruption of our work — he is the purpose of it.
3. The customer is not a rank outsider to our business — he is a part of it.
4. The customer is not a statistic — he is a flesh-and-blood human being completely equipped with biases, prejudices, emotions, pulse, blood chemistry and possibly a deficiency of certain vitamins.
https://customersthatstick.com/blog/what-is/what-is-a-customer/
At Srijan and as employees working for Srijan, we do have to do the following:
i) bend backwards for our customers (run our business like a hospitality company)
ii) constantly acquire and continuously improve our skills, knowledge and delivery capability of these skills and knowledge
iii) communicate these unique capabilities in a manner that we are seen as a business and as individuals who are in pursuit of excellence and have unique skills to offer, by employing which businesses (our customers) will profit from
Service not servitude
Let’s review the dictionary meaning of the two words:
Service: the action of helping or doing work for someone.
Servitude : the state of being a slave or completely subject to someone more powerful.
In my experience of building and running Srijan, i have come across customers who right at the outset (at the sales process itself) tend to operate from a position of power — of a giver and a receiver. It’s as if the service provider by virtue of participating in a project RFP is subservient to the giver of the project.
Right at the outset this is cause for alarm. Relationships where a customer’s managers (project sponsors or project managers) and a vendor’s managers (including sales people) begin the relationship from a position of a ‘giver and receiver’ rather than a position of being ‘equals in a fair exchange of value’, will tend to only deteriorate. Vendors, and by extension the vendor’s employees — project managers, software developers, account managers — will tend to be treated as subservient to the customer, their project managers and their business sponsors who pay the invoices.
At Srijan, if relationships reach this point where our people/employees are treated disrespectfully and as a company we’re seen as subservient to the client, we tend to walk out of such clients.
In such cases, we choose our people and our collective self-respect over the customer and profits.
