People First, Systems Second... or Not?
Richard Branson is quoted:
Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.
— Richard Branson
I like this people-centric point of view. You can argue which is more important, clients, customers, vendors, employees, shareholders, management, the sales team (which in some companies I've worked for, the sales team seemed like they were treated as most important!), but the overall gist of Branson's quote is that company leadership needs to take care of employees, and from there, a positive cascade effect will occur for the clients and company alike.
I'd add, you can best take care of employees if you take care of the systems they use.
I hate to break it to you, but your employees are all massively flawed. You are too, and the lot of you share a common attribute: you're human. The beauty of being human though is that we can create a set of organized principles to share with each other and, if we agree on said principles, follow them to the great benefit of the whole. The whole, in this case, being the company.
Yet I find companies might go through the gargantuan effort of setting up the 'biggest, baddest, most efficient' system on the planet, only to let entropy and human nature erode its original purpose and the principles behind it. Managers let their systems age without regular checkups — which is not unlike what many humans do. The health of those systems, be it a project management tool, a budgeting spreadsheet, instant messaging software, safety protocols, inventory management, continuous integration (and countless more), is directly correlated to the 'job health' of the employees.
Your employees are hired and trained on your organization's systems. If the system is found wanting and degrades, so does the productivity of your employees, as they try to use workarounds or revert to undesirable habits, or in particularly bad cases, leverage poisonous incentives. And by Richard Branson's logic, your clients will also suffer as the services or products they expect from you also degrade in quality.
And it will happen. No system can resist the entropic force of human nature; but every system can leverage human ingenuity and community, and the desire to do well for one's self, one's peers, and the organization's customers. Regular upkeep has to be a habit. An organizational habit.
Yes, take care of your employees first. A big part of that is to make sure that their tools are functional and well maintained!
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