Nudge Blog & Employee Motivation in Cartoons | Psych at Work »
I just discovered this entry on the Nudge Blog (their tagline is “improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness”). It’s an illustrated/cartoonized version of Dan Pink’s talk on what motivates employees and what doesn’t and I’ve embedded it here (below). It highlights the point that money isn’t always or the only solution. I love to see intelligent research and findings explained in creative ways like this and so I just had to spotlight it here! (The Nudge Blog is also pretty awesome and I definitely recommend it!)
Workforce Blogs - The Business of Management - A fond farewell to the father of employee engagement »
I find myself doing a lot of things differently during this year of the Big, Bad Recession, and here’s one of them—I am buying a lot more from Costco.
Posted by John Hollon on December 21st, 2009 at 11:58am in The Economy, Employee Engagement,Ethics, Talent Management, Management Skills | Permalink | No Comments » | TrackBack
I’ve been a Costco member for many years, but I was always hit or miss about doing much shopping there. This year, however, when things are tough all over, I find that I am appreciating all that Costco has too offer, including great prices on most everything (including gasoline), a Costco-branded American Express card that kicks back a sizable rebate once a year, and, a cheerful and happy workforce that seems genuinely engaged in their jobs.
Part of the reason that Costco workers are so happy is that they are paid a lot more than their peers at other mega-retailers such as Wal-Mart. In fact, Costco workers’ wages are more than 50 percent better than Wal-Mart’s, and other benefits are better too, as we pointed out in a Workforce Management feature back in 2005.
Yes, Costco workers are happy and treated very well, and there is one man you can thank for that—business visionary Sol Price, who died earlier this month in La Jolla, California, at the age of 93.
The New York Times obituary of Price said he “altered both the American landscape and the American way of shopping by founding (in 1976) Price Club, the first nationwide members-only discount warehouse.” Price Club merged with Costco in 1993, and a lot of Sol Price’s business philosophy and innovation not only lives on today, but also has helped to fuel much of Costco’s huge business success under its own visionary CEO, Jim Sinegal.
Costco under Sinegal has embraced, to its everlasting credit, Sol Price’s philosophy of treating—and paying—its workers well.
As columnist Dean Calbreath noted in the San Diego Union-Tribune, “Price Club’s written policy was that workers would be paid at ‘close to the highest prevailing wages in the community. … Even today, Costco pays its workers an average of $19 per hour, compared with less than $11 at Wal-Mart. And Costco provides health care coverage to 90 percent of its workers, compared with about 50 percent at Wal-Mart.”
“Price believed,” as columnist Calbreath points out, “that the corporation’s chief duties were to obey the law, please customers, please employees and satisfy stockholders, in that order. ‘We think the stockholder comes last,’ Price told Wall Street analysts in 1985. ‘But if you do the other three jobs well, [the stockholder] will be taken care of.’ ”
Price also kept his salary fairly low (a practice that Costco’s Jim Sinegal follows), and, “In an age when some of his peers were making 40 or 50 times the median salary of their workers, Price kept his salary at around a 10-1 ratio. (Today, the ratio at America’s top firms is more like 500-1.)”
In my book, this singular concern for his workforce makes Sol Price the father ofemployee engagement. He understood that treating employees fairly by rewarding them well for their hard work would pay big dividends in the long term because happy employees who are treated well and fairly compensated just work harder and give more of their discretionary effort.
And Price’s forward-thinking philosophy continues to this day at Costco under the enlightened leadership of CEO Sinegal.
This may also explain why I can’t stand shopping at Wal-Mart, yet I love to cruise the local Costco. Every Wal-Mart I’ve ever been in has an unappealing feel to it that I just can’t put my finger on. And, every Costco that I have shopped in gives me the exact opposite impression. In my book, it’s more than just the merchandise and the building that makes a great shopping experience. It’s the people.
Treating people well sounds simple enough, but as we have seen in this year of the Big, Bad Recession, even something as simple as that gets ignored by far too many organizations. Workers are angry at how they have been treated this year, and rightly so, but there is not much they can do about it when double-digit unemployment is the order of the day.
Managers and executives everywhere would do well to follow the philosophy of Sol Price and Jim Sinegal, and treat employees well. They are, after all, an organization’s most important asset.
That’s just business BS for all too many executives, but that wasn’t the case with Sol Price. We should all mourn his passing and hope that his outlook on life, and people, becomes something that a lot more of our so-called business leaders in this country take some time to ponder—and embrace.
