The Case for Good Jobs: How Great Companies Bring Dignity, Pay, and Meaning to Everyone’s Work

all right well good afternoon everybody and welcome my name is Maureen Conway I'm vice president at the Aspen Institute and the executive director of the economic opportunities program and I'm just thrilled to welcome you to today's event uh the case for good jobs how great companies bring dignity pay and meaning to everybody's work a book talk uh with uh with my friend zainab tan um and uh this conversation is part of the economic opportunities program ongoing opportunity in America discussion Series in which we explore the changing landscape of Economic Opportunity in the U.S the implications for individuals families and communities across the country and ideas for change um thanks to everybody for for joining us today both in person and virtually if this is your first time joining one of our events you can find recordings of previous events in the series on our website at as.pn slash EOP events and if you look at those events and you go all the way back to 2014 you'll find one in which I'm talking to zainab about her first book The Good job strategies how the smartest companies invest in employees to lower costs and boost profits so I'm so honored and delighted to welcome zaina back to talk about her new book um and for those of you who don't know zainab uh Dr Tan I'll call her Dr ton once um is a professor of the practice and in operations Management Group at MIT Sloan School of Management she's also the co-founder and president of the non-profit good jobs Institute where she works with I will get these companies to improve their operations in a way that satisfies employees customers and investors alike before joining MIT Sloan zainab spent several years on the faculty at Harvard Business School she's received teaching awards at both institutions for excellence in teaching and that's not really surprising because um Xena penuel here she has a real Keen Eye for practical details and and a real understanding of the pressures of modern business but she really brings that together with um with this just foundational commitment to purpose and to human dignity and principles and so she really inspires her students to believe that they too can build careers of meaning as they build careers in business um and and I know that because I've met many of her students and they're great and I'm there's Sarah Sarah who is also the head of the good jobs Institute and um and was one of zainab students is a is a shining example of um Zain of amazing students but um but uh but I and I also know how inspirational is because uh zainab you inspire me um so really thank you so much for being here today um and it's great to have folks in the room I love having folks in the room again um but I know we have many more folks joining us online so if you'll bear with me for a moment while I just give a little technical details um so all of the online attendees are muted but we welcome questions please use the Q a box on your screen and thank you to those of you who 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the screen um okay um I also want to say that I'm super thrilled that this is a a pre-launch for this event your actual publication date is June 6th is that right so uh so we get to be first yay um uh and uh but we do actually even though it's not published until June 6 we do have some copies here for sale so if you're in the room uh you can pick up a copy we'll do a little signing afterwards and apparently my colleagues tell me we're also going to have a raffle so a couple of you lucky folks may get a free copy so um so stick around at the end of our our session today um okay um so I'm done great now now incentives for people to hang out afterwards uh now over to you so you know a lot has happened in nine nine-ish years since you wrote the original book um looking at the operational strategies and you've expanded your lens to include a lot of different kinds of Industries um and and and you started on profit and you've worked with a bunch of of different organizations taught hundreds of students and yet you still need to write a book and make the case for a good job so so maybe you know just to start herself why did we want to write this particular book and and why now thank you first of all Maureen thank you so much for inviting me I am so excited that Aspen Institute is the first place where I get to launch my book uh in 2014 we did this together and it was so much fun and we get to do it again and thank you all for for for being here so in 2014 when I wrote a good job strategy I described two different approaches to profitability and I was focusing on low-cost businesses so companies that are providing the lowest prices to their customers and there were two different approaches to profitably compete on low cost one approach was to see workers as a cost to be minimized uh pay as little as possible in my cinema as little as possible and then consequently operate with high turnover and all the problems that come with high turnover right so operational problems customer service problems that and that that ended up reducing sales and profits for companies uh but there are a bunch of companies that's a dominant approach they operate that way they've been profitable for years but they live in this vicious cycle of high turnover and poor performance so that was a dominant approach but then I saw another approach that fewer companies took and that was to see their employees as human beings real human beings who can drive prophets who can drive customer satisfaction who can drive growth and investing heavily in their employees paying them a lot more than Market wages investing in more predictable sustainable schedules and health benefits Etc and these companies operated with low turnover and they operated in a virtuous cycle of low turnover and good performance but what I found in that original research was that it wasn't just investment in people that enabled them to achieve those outcomes it was also specific operational choices so so that was the first book and it was the what of the good job strategy what what are the principles what are some of the operational practices that you need to to use after the book was published I started getting requests from leaders of companies from you know the largest employer in the United States to dog walking businesses uh smaller companies and many leader just came and said we are in that vicious cycle and if you feel trapped in that vicious cycle and they wanted to get out of that trap and they didn't know how and at the time I didn't know how to help them either luckily uh Sarah Kalik was my student and with Sarah and and Roger Martin we started this non-profit good jobs Institute and during the last six seven years we learned how to make the case inside your organization outside your organization and how to adapt a good job strategy because it's a system and making system changes not easy so I wrote this book to be able to share what we have learned and get those leaders who feel stuck to be unstuck or trapped to be untrapped great that's fantastic let's hope many of them are getting unstuck um and so for folks who haven't read the first book can you just do a quick quick recap of sort of what are some of the key operational choices that that you see are you know integral to the good job strategy yeah and I'll mention the companies that I studied for the first book so you you'll get a sense by being customers these were low-cost businesses Costco how many of you know Costco they've been you've been there Trader Joe's Quick Trip anyone who has been to Quick Trip uh what what is it like wonderful I mean it's uh on but I mean maybe I have the wrong answer but it's a CO it's owned by its work our own it's what is it wonderful though as a customer like what why is it wonderful experience with this because my wife is from Milwaukee and she's a huge quick fan fan and so I've become indoctrinated because of her okay is moving in the right direction versus great that's my main thing there [Laughter] any customers of Quick Trip like actual customers of quick trip here mark what was what what is it from the customer experience it's great that they're owned partly by their employees the person at the counter is if not Overjoyed to see you I mean it's a place where you're willing to positive customers yeah I asked this from the customer's perspective because I get the same answer no matter where I go it's clean it's stuck people are friendly you get in and out and this company prints money I mean they they they they they they they are quite profitable um Costco similar they win with their customers they make a lot of money and they offer good jobs if you look at quick trips employee turnover it's not 10 15 better than industry average it's a quarter of Industry average Costco is similar Trader Joe's is similar so I looked at these companies what is their secret like what do they do to be able to create these great outcomes for customers employees and investors and I found that they all in addition to investing in their people had this operational design with four specific choices and these choices made their employee investment worthwhile because they increase the productivity and contribution of their workers let me give you an example if you go to a typical supermarket you might see go in front of the jam aisle you might see 150 different types of gems and their prices are probably changing all the time there are little coupons that employees put in right so what do the employees of those stores do they take so much time shelving those merchandise they take so much time changing the price stickers all the time if you go to Trader Joe's maybe you'll see 10 types of gems but and the prices will be stable what that means is that now the Trader Joe's employee can shell those much faster now that employee can know about the jam so they can tell the customer about it now that employee is able to do their tests more efficiently and as a result of that Trader Joe's can pay them more so the operational choices like this you know simplification empowering your workers cross-training them those are the types of choices that I see that I saw among the companies that were able to create these outcomes yeah great um so I think that that well I don't know if you wanted to say anything more about like um one I just it's always amazing to see how interesting she makes operations I just have to say um I mean I tell my students operations is where spreadsheets meet humans and natural resources like I used to teach Inventory management your inventory management decisions determine how we use natural resources we make decisions you know we teach our students how to do scheduling how to do Staffing those decisions change the lives of people so so these are not numbers they are human beings or natural resources that of course operations is exciting that's of course it is exciting but I will when I say one thing so in 2014 when I came here and I was so excited about all these operational decisions and somebody in the audience in this book talk asked me what role does leadership play in the good job strategy and then I said you know it's all about operations it's all about operational choices and I apologize I would like to give a different answer now because since that time I've interacted with lots of Business Leaders some of the founders of these companies and what I learned was that they have a very different value system and they have a very different mental model in their minds is not acceptable to operate with high turnover in their minds it's not acceptable that their employees are not making enough to put food on the table so they are mental models and they and they focus so much on their customers to be able to create value for their customers and they realize if we don't have an empowered motivated capable Workforce we can't deliver to our customers so so leadership plays a huge role and I take that answer back from from nine years ago we'll go at it um great so you know so you talked in the beginning about sort of these these Business Leaders that are stuck though like in this in this bad um system right and and trying to get them unstuck but talk but in your book you sort of describe a little bit of what they're stuck with right you describe these sort of five corporate disabilities can you sort of say sort of what is the what is the disability what are the dysfunctions that they're kind of stuck with so in my initial research when I looked at the Vicious Cycle that companies were operating in the course that that I considered and my colleagues this was a group effort were you know lost sales lost productivity um higher product costs Etc all the costs associated with Pro operational execution but then once we started learning working with companies and spending so much time inside them we realized and Sarah and I learned this together that when you operate with high employee turnover there are so many things as a business that you cannot do there are so many good practices that you can't Implement you can't adopt in your in your organization and I call these corporate disabilities so I'll give you an example the first corporate disability that I talk about is you can't hire the right people and you can't train them well so a background if you operate with high turnover there are all sorts of operational problems the managers who are managing these units are constantly finding fires they are they are in a retail store they are checking out customers they are shelving merchandise they're trying to figure out oh who didn't show up today I'm gonna I'm gonna find out who can come in so they're constantly firefighting and they have no time to hire the right person and even if the company has great hiring practices on paper they don't Implement them Sarah when we started working together um one of the first things that Sarah did was to work as a Frontline employee at a large company and this was not an undercover operation the CEO knew about it uh Sarah spent nine ten weeks working at this retailer and she had just graduated from MIT Sloan she applied with her real resume the hiring person never asked like why does somebody who just graduated from MIT want to work shelving merchandise and they never did reference check you did you had a drug test and you were hired um so I mean she's very capable she's very capable but but that's the and and once she she got hired on the training you know she had 41 hours of training 23 of those 41 hours were wasted because there were six hires but only four computers so there was enough computers for on the you know computer training for all the new hires that were constantly glitches the managers were not there to answer questions she Shadows somebody um in the checkout the problem was Sarah was not going to work at the cash register um and the person only speaks spoke Spanish and Sarah doesn't speak Spanish so again you can have great training on paper but on the job training but those don't get implemented if you have that type of instability so what happens when you don't hire the right person you don't train them well your employees are by Design not very capable right they don't know like it's not because of you know it's not because they're not themselves are not capable but they just don't know so from the leaders perspective now I'll get to the second corporate disability if you see your Workforce and you realize that they don't know much do you want to empower them do you want them to make decisions for your customers or for your do you want them to use their judgment it's not right so so then corporate leaders start taking away more control right more decisions from from the units and put more controls more controls and then of course some of their decisions are bad decisions um like selling B chairs in New England in September right like the weather is not that great in New England in September so so those decisions are not good decisions then the Frontline employees lose trust in corporate they say you know those corporate people they ask us to do things they have no idea and and then they decide they're not going to follow the rules because the rules don't make sense and then when they don't follow the rules the corporate people say oh those people you know we can't trust them even to perform simple tasks so then there's that distrust Loop that continues so this is another corporate disability I can go on but these are the type of things you know we know empowerment is great for companies we know hiring the right people and training them well is good for companies but when you operate with high tunnel hour you just can't Implement these good practices yeah well I just love how you sort of always frame this in sort of The Human Experience of this and actually just a little aside my daughter within a retail job over the last summer and you know again she wasn't trained properly and I remember you talking about this before like people don't want to be standing in front of a customer not being able to serve them right like she wasn't trained and how to take cash and it's really embarrassing to say like I don't know how to let you pay for what you want to pay for so you know so so she doesn't go back there and so to the turnover thing and the you know anyway and the worst thing about this is more what you said she doesn't want to fail in front of the customer most people almost all people go to work to be able to do a good job right but but we have designed a system where first of all millions of workers are in a vicious cycle of poverty their pay is so low that they can't make ends meet they can't meet their budgets and as a result of that they have all sorts of physical you know physical mental cognitive difficulties and that means they can't perform well on the job right they they make more mistakes they can focus on the job they have more attendance problems if you if you have you know a little emergency you can't take care of that emergency when when you're you're poor so so all of those things affect your performance on the job and you don't get promoted so you end up in this vicious cycle of poverty so what happens from the executive's point of view is they see workers and they say you know what that person they can't do anything right they they can't even show up on time they can't even do the most you know basic thing right and then they lose faith in the people and not recognizing so so they they lose faith in in in the human being and that I think is a huge driver of why we have these jobs markadona one of the companies that I studied they have a bunch of principles the number one principle is everyone is reliable so they design everything assuming that everyone is reliable and then they make sure that everyone is reliable so yeah yeah no that's great what I love also about how you describe these things is that you think in systems right and you keep saying like and you say this several times in the book like it says it's a system it's a good job system it's not it's not just wages it's not just schedules it's not just crosstaining right like thinking in terms of investing and Building Systems for success and so I was just um wondering if you could you could talk about that and also talk about sort of some of the the do's and don'ts you know and I I certainly see of raising wages right and I I see similar parallels in the social sector as well in terms of needs for system thinking both in terms of Employment Practices in the social sector but also how the social sector thinks about creating change so anyway that's sort of a complicated question but really if you could if you could just lean in a little more on sort of like the the systems aspect of this and sort of particularly you know there's a lot of conversation around wages so particularly thinking about the do's and don'ts of wages and how that can't be just the singular Focus yeah so first of all pay is extremely important to make the job a good job if you can't get paid enough to have agency in your life nothing else really matters right so so pay is extremely important but it's one component of the system so when it comes to pay when we work with companies that are stuck in this vicious cycle we encourage them to raise pay as much as possible as early as possible in their journey and then we because that's how you get out of the vicious like that's how employees get out of their vicious cycle of poverty and that's how as an organization you get out of the Vicious Cycle of mediocrity and and so so pay is extremely important but then pay alone is not going to drive great outcomes for workers they will but not for companies immediately it doesn't even drive turnover immediately it takes some time so so so what are some of the things on the workspace on the four operational choices of the good job strategy that you can use to reduce the workload to to make pay work for you and and we encourage companies to find ways to reduce workload in a way that benefits their customers uh so so raise pay as early as possible but don't think about paying isolation make other changes so that the pay pays off and some of the do's and don'ts of pay raises I haven't yet seen a context where the pay increase was perfect like no one complained it was so easy to to to do it I mean there are also we are humans we care about fairness right we all care about fairness and compression is a real issue so I can guarantee that when you raise paid you will make mistakes um but the the the the the big recommendation is always explain the why and involve the people in making decisions so so those are some of the things related to pay but things outside pay and the system perspective is really important for example we know that one of the other issues for workers especially in service Industries like retail is scheduling workers tend to get their schedules one or two weeks in advance and their schedules their hours change all the time so creating consistency creating predictability giving them enough hours is a very important thing for workers but creating those schedules require the workload to be stable and that is not possible if the deliveries into your store are coming in very unpredictable times and the times when there are so many customers in the store so when we say systems um usually we'll do a workshop and we'll have everyone good jobs Institute we do two-day workshops with companies we will have people from Logistics from merchandising from from Finance from store operations all together and we say okay let's focus on deliveries what does the logistics function care about oftentimes Logistics cares about minimizing their transportation costs right they work in their silos and they say I want to minimize my Transportation costs so if the deliveries are unpredictable if they vary all the time so be it the stores should just deal with it but a system you will say look if we just focus on the transportation cost our customers are not going to get the right merchandise because we might not have the right people to shelve them right think in terms of customers our workers will have unstable schedules it means that the turnover is going to be so much higher so that we won't be able to serve our customers and this will have an effect on our business so the system view is thinking about how does this affect the customer how this is affect the worker and the work that they do and how does it affect the financial performance and and and considering all three of those yeah that's great and one of the things you just started to point to is sort of and you talk about this in the in the book sort of this over Reliance on metrics right like the transportation people are just like focused on their metric right and so I'm wondering you know um uh what you think about sort of um this over Reliance on metrics and if you could talk about that a little bit more but what are the metrics kind of myths and and are there better metrics that that people should be should be using and thinking about yeah what is that not everything that counts is counted and not everything that's counted counts right um and and we teach our students to make decisions relying on numbers uh increasingly at all the Business Schools uh mine included and and that could lead to some wrong decisions and of course there are good metrics and bad metrics uh for example you know metrics related to employees employee turnover what percentage of your Workforce is making a living uh what percentage of your employees are managers are hired promoted from within those are great metrics on the employee side on the customer side there are metrics too so you can use non-financial metrics that would be better but still there's so much Reliance on data and historical data in particular to make decisions that can be very dangerous I'll give you one example Sam's Club is one of the companies that that adopted this good job system and there's a terrific interview with the chief product officer of Sam's Club Tim Simmons in Harvard Business Review in this last Edition and Tim Simon says you know previously when we looked at what we were able to do with efficiencies with different changes we were able to move efficiency maybe one or two percentage but during the last four years we were able to increase the efficiency by 20 percent so all those decisions that you made to improve efficiency by 20 you would not have made them if you looked at historical data past data because the past doesn't tell you what is possible the past doesn't tell you what you can imagine it just have tells you what happened in the past yeah yeah one of my favorite examples um from the book was uh speaking of Sam's Club was uh talking about John ferner explaining like I could look at this spreadsheet and I can like use this spreadsheet analysis to tell me my wages are just fine or I can use it to tell me I need to double my wages um which was kind of sounded kind of crazy to me but I'm wondering if you could say a little bit about what did he do when he realized that like yeah I mean one of the things that they did was okay for us we want to win with our customers to be able to win with our customers we need employee to run over to be low for our employee turnover to be low we need to pay our people better so first they had that logical conclusion and and then they say Okay um how do we become the employer of choice right how how let's not Benchmark ourselves to other mediocre companies let's Benchmark ourselves to the best and we want to be like the best and that was uh what they concluded and you can look at spreadsheets make very different conclusions for example you could be operating as Senior Living organization and we work with different Senior Living organizations and this is where you know our parents grandparents are cared for most vulnerable population perhaps and you could look at spreadsheets and you could decide looking at spreadsheets that hey last time we raised Staffing levels it didn't improve our profitability right so you could come to that conclusion looking at the numbers but what you don't see is what happened to mistakes what happened to that resident who wanted to go to the bathroom but for 45 minutes she couldn't because there was no one who could take her to the bathroom and now she soiled herself and her dignity is crushed it doesn't tell you all the caregivers who are already working multiple jobs and they're not shining in front of their residents that they care so much about so so these are the things that data don't tell us metrics don't tell us and and if you realize too much on it we can start cutting ethical corners yeah yeah no that's really great I mean it kind of reminds me a little bit you know like like you just need to get closer to the work yeah um so one of the pressures I think that also comes up a lot is you know the role of investors and um you know certainly uh CEOs and many other people are mindful of the views of Wall Street um so what is your view of sort of the we would but Wall Street won't let us kind of argument and and and have you seen that sort of have you seen Wall Street and investors actually change over the past decade in terms of how they think about these things yeah I think after spending some time with leaders like Jim Senegal the co-founder of Costco um my view is investors don't run companies they invest in companies but company leaders run companies right they have agency at the same time though investors can influence what matters to them so think about a company that recently went through a merger or they invested in technology and what the investor reaction might have been to those types of decisions and then think about instances where a company says I'm going to raise pay for my Frontline workers and what the investor reaction is that reaction is usually negative right there's a there's a small period where the stock price is not it's not long but there's a small period where your stock price declines right after you you you say I'm going to raise pay or I'm going to during covid I'm going to invest in safety of my employees and customers right so so for Business Leaders then you you look at this and you say what is legitimate in the eyes of investors clearly investing in people is not legitimate but there are so many other things that are more legitimate and some of those other things are much easier and faster to do so then leaders tend to direct their energy and their effort into those things that are easier and faster they have legitimacy and these leaders you know they I mean they're under a ton of pressure they have competition they have I mean they're under constant pressure so they take that easier out um yeah I guess that's still the that is still the issue um I appreciated your call to Business Leaders to really summon their courage again like sort of back to the human qualities and and but you also kind of note that they don't really need to be that courageous there's um you know there's a good case for for good jobs and there's both a positive Financial return but also this sort of positive ethical or moral return in some sense Business Leaders you know not only are showing sort of proper stewardship for shareholders by investing in people but they'll also be often acting in a way that sort of feels better for them and is aligned with their with their values um and you know it's interesting I feel like especially in our social sector we try to be very hard-headed and say we're just going to talk about the ROI and just gonna um focus on that but how do you think about sort of making that kind of ethical case in conversation with Business Leaders how does that come up I think first it's nice for us to remind ourselves that CEOs the executives running these companies they're humans too and and they care about similar issues so when we run workshops with companies we oftentimes have the company present an analysis of what percentage of their full-time employees are making a living wage and there are all the executives in the room and when those data are presented there's usually silence in the room and there is somebody says I had no idea but I've never been in a room where Executives CEOs were proud of their employees not making a living wage right there they don't want that they they don't want that to happen now in certain contexts where companies profit margins are very high and they're low-wage employees represent a smaller portion of their overall cost think about financial services for example if you are faced with that scenario of finding that so many of your employees are not making it even though you're paying Market or able Market raising pay so that everyone can have a living wage is is not that difficult right it's it's you can you can completely use your ethical drive and and change it now let's move to another scenario let's move to an organization um Mud Bay this is this is a retail chain pet stores pets products um products for dogs and cats and their owners not for product um but but they when they started their good jobs Journey their profit margins were two percent their labor costs as a percentage of sales was nearly 15 percent now if they raise pay by 30 percent they wipe out their profitability right so so in that particular context this is this is seen at least as a riskier decision and you have your competition you are making this decision under uncertainty so so of course it's not that easy and in those contexts what we have found is companies that adapted this this system was they made the competitive case they cared about the ethics but they said you know what we must do this because it's not only the right thing to do but it's the smart thing to do right in those contexts the ethical case alone is I think harder to make yeah yeah no that makes sense but I'm glad you raised Mud Bay because when we actually were out in Seattle in 2014 and it was not long after the city council had decided to start phasing in a minimum wage of 15 in in Seattle and madbe being out there was going to have to find a pathway to 15. um they had several years to get there but they were going to have to find their way so you know and I know you're not really a pause person but um but you know how much can sort of like like how do you think about what businesses can do on their own and how do we think about sort of maybe societal choices as reflected through policy like what what do you think about sort of that that balance or so I teach at a business school um and and that's my audience I right and and I have students like Sarah who then go out and who try to change the world um at the same time I don't think that businesses alone can solve our societal big societal problems while I believe that I also believe that we can't solve some of our big societal problems without Business Leaders and um and and these leaders work in a context in a system and I wish that system was better and within that system though they can make choices and what we try to do is within that system how do you choose the good jobs approach and and and when we went to Seattle more in the issue was 15 wage increase now we're talking about Seventeen dollars right so so think about that pay raise the minimum wage raise and think about different reactions that could come from the business community so if your inclination is you're in that vicious cycle and you have the mindset of Labor is just a cost to be minimized then if you're in that world and now the minimum wage is higher some leaders might say hey I'm going to try to figure out what can I automate how do I use fewer people where else do I cut maybe I'll just have worse customer service I'll use fewer people to get more work done right that will that could be one approach I think that would be the wrong approach the good approach will be more enlightened leaders will say hey I have to raise pay anyway what if I raise pay and increase productivity and contribution of my people right so that they can as a human use their talents their abilities their hearts their heads and their hands to to to to help us thrive in front of our customers and be productive that will be the right approach and and I'm hoping that as the demographic changes and and um we will see more more leaders uh choosing that approach having said that I I'm all for policy that makes it easier for companies to choose good jobs and harder to choose bad jobs okay I'm going to ask one more question and then I'm coming to you guys so uh so get ready um I I was struck in the book you know a couple of places that people were sort of saying well this good job strategy it's it's obvious and actually you yourself in the epilogues say that you know in many ways what you're what you're talking about is is old it's just basically principles of good management right um so so is the strategy kind of like a return to to fundamentals and is is Corporate America ready to sort of do that yeah I the the the fundamentals uh one of my favorite reactions to my first book was from the Dan sea of Walmart USA now the CEO of New Zealand Air Greg foreign and he said this is so blindingly obvious and I will say no academic likes there were to be like casinos blindingly obvious but but it I mean what do I say focus on the customer design the work so people are productive so that they can serve the customer about these are like old school management practice hire the right people train them I mean these are old school management principles and they have been hijacked by focus on short-term financial decision making for decades right I mean I in that epilogue I describe uh ge under Jack Walsh and it was you know the focus was so much on deal making mergers you know we fired the bottom 10 percent and it was all on the numbers and he almost made running the core business and doing well operationally uncooled like I told you how cool operations are and now like um so so I hope now there will be more leaders going back to basics of let's create real value for our customers and let's do it decently um I'm hopeful I don't know if that's where Corporate America is going but that's why I do what I do so great that's fantastic I do have more questions but I'd love to take questions from folks here too so um wonderful uh so right here and then here I'm sorry it was a longer walk than I thought so I missed a few minutes of your presentation really important issues my cousin was one of the founders of Mi at MIT of artificial intelligence and so I've come at this for a while now okay so people are getting excited about Ai and how it's applicable now what does this mean in terms of enriching the core job for somebody customer service can be gratifying but what about enhancing the actual content of the job Beyond customer service what ideas do you have there in terms of a future of someone who may enjoy retail would like to move up but doesn't want to be CEO but seize the future but what kind of future yeah I mean I I will um so there are multiple Parts multiple different ways that one can answer the question one of the things that I will start with is you know what does AI to do to work and what does AI do to jobs and my answer there is again we have agency AI doesn't determine what it's going to do to jobs or or to to work it's up to us how we use it that will determine whether it's going to be used for empowering people or is going to be used just for replacing people and and and and that so so so one part of it that we have agency the other part of it is and I will probably stick with the retail or or Frontline context but Ai and Technologies could be presenting wonderful opportunities to augment people and re-enable people to use their whole human talents when I was at marcadona one of the things that they they told me was we never want to ask a person to do what a machine can do that type of you know that type of attitude is a wonderful attitude um one company that has done a fantastic job during the last few years using Ai and Technologies to create better jobs for workers has been against Sam's Club um Sam's Club and I'll give you one example if you went to their uh to replace your tire for your car it used to take maybe 25-30 minutes for the Frontline employee associate to look at different manuals and to figure out you know what's your car and uh what is the right tire that fits your car now using technology that takes four or five minutes now that from an employee Academy an advocate for the customer can we help solve customers problems and by the way because the job is more productive they can be paid a lot more and and they can be the next one to be promoted to become a manager assistant manager and then a manager so so I see these types of technological changes to be a great complement to humans and enable humans to do what they do best okay over here one of the things I've noticed over the last 40 or 50 years in terms of good jobs there's many many fewer of them and one of the way that's been accomplished by the employers is the elimination so potentially instead of providing for a defined benefit health insurance plan they'll give you maybe better wages and better benefits are working but once you meet the job is gone so I think that's really crucial in terms of what a good job is to work with some of us for 30 or 40 years and wind up with nothing yeah I I agree and you know during the last 30 40 years we have also seen a decoupling of productivity growth from wage growth and it's not just benefits that are taken out but but but wage growth also hasn't kept up with the productivity growth that we have seen either mark and I I know you teach in a business school where there are a number of people who either now or in the past have been big advocates for unions which is not generally something that's advocated in a business school so in your good jobs approach what is the role of unions or collective bargaining in ensuring and protecting good jobs so again coming back to this decoupling of wage growth from productivity growth there's it's not a coincidence that unionization has declined during that same period right so so so workers not having that much power has contributed to this um what is my opinion on Union so I don't have one opinion again I will come to the system which is it depends on what that Union's relationship is with the company and what that Union does so one example Mark was you know if you go back a couple decades and you look at the auto industry right it was still heavily unionized people had good pay good benefits but the job was not mind mind numbing and degrading right you were just doing the same thing over and over again so it's not that Union was prevented a good job but it's not whether we have a union or not but it's how you use that relationship for prosperity for workers and for companies and value for their customers yes I'd like if you just explain a little more when you in one of the examples you talked about with some company that said everyone is reliable the helped me to understand deeper how what that means the approach yeah so this is Michael Donald the Spanish supermarket chain and they say everyone is reliable which means that when there is a problem in the company we don't blame the person we blame the system we say what is in our system that's preventing us from creating great outcomes oftentimes in many businesses there's a problem and a person is blamed right oh this is their fault here everyone is reliable everybody comes to work wanting to do a good job we can count on them what is preventing them from being doing a good job and let's fix our system and not fix the people versus fixing the people yeah and I think that's so interesting because I know like I've had conversations with a number of economists recently you know an economist like to say like you know invest in education invest in people's skills so that they can be more productive might say well but product isn't productivity really like a function of how the job is designed and then they go oh yeah that's a good point I mean so you know I think it's really um you know I think really thinking about that job design as a driver of productivity is is really important let's think as much about upskilling jobs as we do about upskilling workers okay so you have a question from our art and then we'll go back around there so a couple questions uh from our online audience number one um raising raising wages in Industries substantially controlled by publicly defined reimbursements like Child Care long-term care can be very challenging what are your thoughts about good jobs in those settings and then one more question we recently started profit sharing at our company what are your thoughts on businesses doing this and how it can contribute to good jobs so the first one is about 3 is difficult in child care and those types of settings in in jobs that you know are reimbursed by the government yeah I mean let's think about that this our priorities and our values as a society those of you who have children who go to daycare and I don't know about your children my children were very difficult right one of them is actually sitting in the audience so so the day the the daycare teachers who take care of these kids how difficult their job is and how important their job is and how important that job is to the you know to to to outcomes of our children and the daycare teachers the same day daycare teachers who are so important for our children don't make enough to make ends meet and we're wondering as a society like oh but it's unaffordable like I would love for us to go back to our values and principles and say is this reasonable and how do we fix this we need to figure out a way to fix this so um the second question yes yes I mean so many people in agricultural industry caregiving retail fulfillment centers during the pandemic we call these workers essential workers we call them essential workers because they are so essential to the functioning of our economy and you wouldn't tell that by looking at their wages or how they are treated the second one was about profit sharing profit sharing yes so so there's um one of the four companies that that I studied originally uh Quick Trip which is employee partly employee owned as as you were talking about and they do profit sharing with with their employees and that's fantastic right that's fantastic but if the base level of pay is not high enough you're going to lose people and when I say high enough it's high enough to be able to live and take care of your family and have agency in your life yep in the back I'm sorry big fan of your work I've been following you for a long time thank you I appreciate you being here um so my question is that you mentioned the importance of policies that incentivize businesses to adopt higher Road approaches the good job strategies can you talk a little bit about if that's what that would look like in practice yeah I can talk a little bit about it um one thing that comes to mind immediately is tax incentives right when a company uh invests in technology we provide all sorts of Investments tax incentives for investing in technology we don't do that with investing in workers so that might be one you know approach that you can nudge companies toward people investment yeah thank you so um I despite the pandemic and the impact it had on the labor market it seems to me we're still hearing you know what I consider a lot of whining by businesses about Labor shortage and it would seem to me especially in this environment that uh you know a firm that would adopt a good job strategy would have their picking I mean it could be a competitive Advantage so I was wondering in your business school environment if people are aren't seeing things that way as a Competitive Edge to to be the best employer around yes as opposed to making just a moral case yes I will say um for sure it is a competitive case competitive Advantage for them but I will say it within Nuance with some practical real world type of answer which is you know look at retail workers restaurant workers those who have had to work during the pandemic those who risk their health their lives to be able to give us the goods that we buy and and take care of ourselves they worked under those circumstances they went through this whole masking thing do you are you masking are you not masking customers yelled at them because they weren't enforcing masking customers yelled at them because they were enforcing masking they went through a really tough period everywhere in retailer retail no matter what company you're thinking about and then inflation head right now those same workers are blamed for higher prices so I don't want to say a Rosy picture of oh you know things that you know these good jobs companies like Costco Quick Trip they're so wonderful they've all went through we've all went through a very difficult period and they too went through a very difficult period now it is is it easier for them most probably okay we'll take one more question here and then I'll ask you one wrap up I I just wanted to ask are you seeing the emergence of like communities of practice among employers or like groups of employers that are actually sort of committed to this in a sincere way that are leaning on one another to be able to figure out some of the the challenges to making better jobs one of the things that Sarah has been working on is worker Financial Wellness initiative um and PayPal and just Capital have been the leaders in in that initiative and our good jobs Institute with Sarah's leadership has been part of that and this has been a bunch of businesses working together to create awareness about pay uh and and looking at their workers to see what percentage of our workers are making a living wage and how do we learn from each other in terms of how to you know both create awareness and solve the problem so that's probably one of our good examples of companies working together as a group to solve big problems okay so one of the things I loved in your book is the observations you share of like you and Sarah and like the team you work with going around and chopping and observing things and some of them are quite funny so I recommend the book it's actually good for a laugh in some places um yeah I never had this response from well Yankee skier in New England I found hilarious but um anyway um uh but we do have a terrific audience here online they care about good jobs and there are also consumers right so what would you advise them to sort of um pay attention to to look forward to think about as their shopping if they want to be supporting good jobs yeah I'm I guess there's that easy answer which is shop with your you know with your values right you know where you shop reflect your values so shop from companies that provide good jobs that that but that that's a lot of work for consumers because they need to figure out which companies are providing good jobs I think the real thing that we can all do and and I don't want to advise you I mean you probably have advice for me but I'll I'll share with you what I try to remind myself and the advice that I give myself about about this which is if I called because there's a problem with my ticket and the rep on the phone can't help me right or or if I'm at the supermarket and the line is too long or the when I'm waiting the the person won't substitute an item it's just a simple thing I ask as a customer can I substitute this with that and they won't do it and to think I remind myself it's not their fault it's the system that's designed for them to fail in front of me so have more empathy and treat other people with kindness because it makes a difference for Frontline workers I remember asking Todd um who works at Costco like what would you want your customers to do and he said look at us in the eye and once in a while be thankful so those are the things that I try to remind myself when I'm interacting with Frontline workers wonderful well thank you so much thank you thank you yeah so thank you all for being here I want to also thank my colleagues I couldn't they do an amazing job Matt Helmer who is running around back there but does so much more than running around with a microphone let me tell you uh Merit Stevens tuning young Colleen Cunningham many thanks to our Aspen Institute AV colleagues who keep our technology working um really thank you all for joining and sharing your questions and being here today and we do love your feedback so you can send us an email again it's eop.program at aspeninsuit.org or fill out the survey if you're online next up from us we're going to have a special two-day employee ownership ideas Forum June 14th and 15th so if you're interested in employee ownership please keep an eye out for information on that and hopefully you can join us um and thanks again for joining us today and we look forward to seeing you again soon thank you oh yeah Matt are you doing a raffle yeah just a quick announcement um so we're giving away three books so the winners were Carrie Ann Malloy uh Kathleen vickland and Marina matatora [Music] and I'm so glad [Laughter] so if I called your name you could meet us up front we'll give you your book say book sales are available too and I think zainab might have some time to sign as well you you'll find me

Channel: The Aspen Institute

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Id: _zrQFVGvVBw

Length: 61min 6sec (3666 seconds)

Published: Wed May 24 2023