The
Age of Individuals
In
the Taylorist averagarian system of standardization and hierarchies where the
system prevails and the average employee is expendable, a 2013 Gallup Study
found that 70% of employees felt disengaged from their job. Google and Costco
have turned away from this system of Taylorization and have now been named to
the list of “Top Places to Work” due to their new philosophy toward the
individual. If you hire great people, give them good wages, treat them with
dignity, and give them an honest path for a career, great things will happen.
Costco
truly believes in finding a good fit. One of Costco’s strategies to finding
good fits is by identifying students from local colleges who are already
working part-time for them who are a good fit. They hire these people for
fulltime work when they graduate. Costco finds this strategy much more
beneficial than actively seeking out and hiring graduates from prestigious
universities. Costco also gives their employees great benefits and pays them
75% more than Walmart does and has still been profitable every single year
since they went public. A lot of Costco’s success has to do with employee
loyalty and low employee turnover costs. This is helping them beat Walmart at
their own game of low costs and efficiency. Walmart has any extremely high
employee turnover costs due to its Taylorization system.
Another
interesting case is Zoho Technology Corporation of India who took on the
behemoth Microsoft. In the beginning Zoho couldn’t afford to hire the kind of talent
that Microsoft could, so Zoho had to look for talent in different ways and in
different places. Amazingly, even against all these odds, Zoho quickly became
known for creating great stuff with a talent pool that none of their
competitors would have hired.
Zoho’s
founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu found that there was little or no correlation
between grades and perceived quality of diploma and on-the-job performance as
computer programmers. This made him wonder why all the Big Boys were wearing
blinders and made the narrow pathway of college a pre-condition to be hired in
their companies. Zembu decided to cultivate talent himself by creating his own
Zoho University where he would not only give raw, unproven kids a shot, but he
would even pay them to go to his school. His school was self-paced, had no
grades and used feedback based on projects. And guess what? It’s working! Vembu
has hired some amazing unknowns from some of the poorest neighborhoods in India
from his university program who have gone off to do great things.
Since
Vembu doesn’t agree with evaluating people based on averages, Zoho doesn’t have
performance reviews. There are no score cards. There are no employee rankings.
If a manager has a concern with an employee, they have a one-on-one discussion
so the manager can address it and help that employee right then and right there
rather than several months later at a nerve-racking performance review.
Zoho
pays fair wages and great benefits. It identifies talent and nurtures it. And
that talent responds by being fully engaged and extremely productive. Zembu
says that if you treat individuals with respect, as individuals, you will get
more out of them than what you put into them. These simple common sense
strategies based on individuals over the system is how Zoho can compete with
the Big Boys while using a talent pool that the Big Boys would never even look
at, let alone consider hiring and working with.
So,
what are you capable of doing with your people?
Dan Blanchard is an
award-winning author, speaker and educator. To learn more about Dan please
visit his website at: www.DanBlanchard.net.
Thanks.
