I’m working on a book again. It’s another book on opting out, but this time it’s out of an organizational perspective. More specifically, I’m writing about what organizations need to do to create working environments that people won’t long to leave. Because studies have shown that a lot of people do. A lot of people dream about opting out.

The situation isn’t all bad. There are of course organizations that do great things and there are a lot of people who are happy in their jobs, that’s true. But it’s also true that organizations can be places of profound suffering. In the past 30 years or so, mental ill-health has skyrocketed, the main reason being work-related stress. Main factors include constant cost cutting and reorganizations, as well as work that is dehumanizing and where people are disrespected and not valued. Did you know that there is something known as Blue Monday? Apparently, people are more likely to have what is thought to be stress-related heart attacks on Mondays than any other day of the week. 

So, this book that I’m working on right now is part of my personal mission to change working life as we know it. 

While doing research for my new book, I stumbled across another book that made a really big impression on me. It’s a book by Rob Chapman and Raj Sisodia called Everyone Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family.

Rob Chapman is the CEO of Barry-Wehmiller, a large American industrial company. When he became CEO of the company, he “threw away” traditional management practices like the ones you learn in business school and replaced them with what he calls “a truly human leadership”.

This spoke to me right away because I spend a lot of time telling anyone who will listen that business is personal (contrary to popular belief) simply because it’s about people. And people are personal. Companies love to say that their people are their greatest resource, but honestly, it’s a bit problematic to think of people this way. It’s kind of dehumanizing if you think about. 

Chapman gets this. His thinking is, why do we treat people at work differently than we do people we care about? If we say things at work that we wouldn’t say to our own children, for example, why do we think it’s okay to talk that way to someone else’s child? Chapman’s point is that everyone is someone’s child and everyone should be treated as such. Everyone deserves to be treated with kindness and respect. 

According to Chapman, fostering a people-centric culture is to truly care about every human being whose life the company touches, be it employees, employees’ families, customers, suppliers, business partners… A people-centric culture is about including everyone (not just the very talented, everyone is needed and everyone wants to contribute), keeping them safe and sending them home fulfilled. It’s about respect, it’s about trust, it’s about listening to people, and it’s about treating everyone the same no matter where in the organization they are. 

This people-centric culture was implemented during a financial upswing and things were going well for company. Then when the financial crisis of 2008 hit it was really put to the test. Companies were laying people off everywhere to survive the sudden loss of business, but not Barry-Wehmiller. They were reluctant to do it because layoffs have a profound negative affect on people’s wellbeing. It’s affects them, their lives, their health and their whole families. Not only that, it also really affects the morale of those who don’t lose their jobs, which also affects business. So, they just really didn’t want to have to do that. 

What did they do instead? Well, they thought about what a family would do in a time of crisis. They wouldn’t kick some of the family members out to cut costs. Instead, they would all come together and pitch in in any way that they could so that everyone could make it through the crisis. And this is what they did. They treated the company like a family.

One thing they did was that they decided that everyone had to take a four-week furlough, including members of management. They had a system where everyone was allowed to take the time off when it suited them best. Also, if someone felt they wanted to or could afford it, they could take over some of someone else’s furlough if someone couldn’t afford taking that much time off without pay. When employees realized they weren’t going to lose their jobs, everyone pitched in and people felt committed to do what they could to save the company. They made it through the recession without letting a single person go and they came out of the recession strong, and also faster than the economy as a whole. Already in 2010, they made record earnings and decided to write every employee a check for the salary that they had given up to save the company. 

By the way, did you know that regular restructuring, downsizing and layoffs is a relatively recent phenomenon? It isn’t something companies started doing systematically until1990’s. I’ll leave you with this quote:

“Rightsizing, de-layering, business reengineering, streamlining… these are some of the other euphemisms for the now-routine business practice of eliminating jobs to improve profit. Downsizing has become a reflex response to business adversity…to preserve financial performance, raise investor confidence, and boost share price. We know of one company that deliberately over-hires when times are good so it can let people go and get a bump in the share price when it wants to… Simon Sinek puts it this way: “In the military, they give medals to those who are willing to sacrifice themselves so that other may gain. In business, we give bonuses to those that are willing to sacrifice others so that they may gain.””

                                                               (Chapman & Sisodia, 2015: 95)

If you want to hear Bob Chapman talk about this in his own words, google him. He’s all over the internet.