Mind Readings: Civil Society and The Great Resignation

In today's episode of Mind Readings, let's talk about civil society and the great resignation. LinkedIn published in their uh economic graph news recently uh a study on what happened to all the frontline workers. So these are folks who worked in hospitality and retail, restaurants, uh, etc. F uh uh with customer-facing uh positions, right? And obviously, there has been a lot of churn in those industries, uh, people leaving for other opportunities.

So the question is, where did they go? Well, LinkedIn understandably has that, and let's look at the information here. We see um number one uh growth from uh frontline workers moving to other positions, real estate 15.2% in two years, construction number two, tech and media number three, transportation logistics number four, ranching, farming, and forestry number five. Now, give some thought to this. People who worked in things like food service, like um the takeout line, like being a brewerist at Starbucks, going to something like farming, ranching, and forestry.

Talk about a completely different uh working environment. Well, why did this happen? Where why did these people go uh to these places? It's not hard to tell figure out why. When we look at the way people, and I I can only speak for the things that I've seen in the country that I live in, which is the USA.

Um just some incredibly bad behavior by customers, people behaving like toddlers, honestly, but with all the destructive capability of an adult, right? Um breaking stuff, screaming, getting into fist fights with uh other customers and employees, um shooting people. Uh there's been no shortage of really bad behavior on the part of customers. And as no surprise, if you worked in one of those positions, you're like, you know what? This is not what I want to do with my life.

Uh dealing with uh a spoiled brat, uh adult, and all of their issues. So why did this happen? Well, think about what the pandemic did. The pandemic, particularly in the first six months, um, shut down everything. We essentially hit the pause button.

And in many nations, uh, pandemic assistance brought um you know supplemental income to people, both uh at the uh national level in many nations and uh here in the USA at the state and national levels, depending on the state you lived in. What did that allow people to do? It allowed them to take a step back to look at their lives and say, am I happy making $12 an hour serving coffee to people uh who yell at me that I put almond milk instead of soy milk in their latte? And for a lot of folks, they're like, yeah, you know, this is not what I want to do with my life, and the reason for that is that pay is out of alignment with the work being asked, and this is a really important concept. We get paid to do work.

And paying people more, which is important, paying people more is also means paying them proportional to the work that you're being asked to do. So if you're being asked to make coffee, that's worth a certain amount of money. But if you're also being asked to handle unruly customers, um, to traffic control, to deescalate violent confrontations, that's a separate job, right? That's a totally separate line of work. And in a lot of cases, for your average retail employee, they are wholly unqualified to be doing that kind of work.

They should not be an on-the-spot therapist. They should not be an on-the-spot police officer. That's not their job. Their job is to check out people's groceries and stuff like that. And so this rash of uncivil behavior essentially dramatically increased the workload and tasks of frontline workers without the commensurate increase in pay.

And even now, as companies are trying to recruit people, they're running into shortages. They're running into a lot of talent shortages because a bunch of people have decided they would rather go out and manage a forest than deal with a customer. And to be honest, as a misanthrope and an introvert, I totally get that. Construction, transportation, logistics, farming, right? These are not traditionally strong customer-facing positions, how do we get people back into those frontline positions?

You may not be able to. Because the underlying issue is that the work that those positions are being asked to do that is effectively in the job description is not what you're paying people for. Right? You would need to supplement that in order to win those people back. So, for example, suppose you have a line of cashiers.

You also need to have a security guard with a big red button at every cashier station saying, Hey, I got an unruly customer here. Please come get, you know, take care of them. And you've essentially paid for offloading that very critical, very important, very dangerous task from someone who's unqualified to do it to someone that is qualified to do it, having a security guard to deal with that. Um that's how you win those employees back over the long term. One of the great, I think, disservices that we have done to ourselves and our employees is wholeheartedly embracing the term the customer is always right.

No. No, they're not. Um, and an awful lot of time the customer is really wrong, right? Um, when a customer leaves a water bottle filled with their urine on a shelf, that customer is not right. That customer shouldn't even be in the store, right?

And yet these sorts of things happen all the time. So how do you solve for that? Well, I don't know that you can. I don't know that you can change customer behavior except to draw the line in the sand with extra security guards, for example, to say, you know what, there's some behaviors that are simply unacceptable. And if you want to shop here or dine here or get coffee here, you have to go back to living the social contract that we all agree on that says you're not going to be a jerk to other people.

One of the strongest things a company can do is adopt a no-jerks policy, and not just for the employees, but for the customers as well. To say, you know what? If a customer acts like a jerk, we are going to reject that customer's dollars. We're going to say, you may not do business here. Because as companies are finding out, replacing employees is really expensive and really painful.

You lose a lot of institutional knowledge, you lose a lot of culture, and it's a long process to get a new employee. So if you adopt a stringent no-jerks policy across the board, management, line workers, customers, vendors, partners, you say to everyone, this is going to be a better place to do business, right? For those customers who are not jerks, they're going to feel better shopping in your stores or getting coffee, right? Because they're not going to have to cringe and endure a hostile environment when a customer, another customer's behaving badly. When you stand up for your employees, they will stand up for you, right?

They will, you know, the old expression, you take care of your employees and your employees will take care of the customers. And not a lot of companies do that. So is the customer always right? No. What I might rephrase that is the best customers are right.

Right? The jerks are not right. The jerks can go take a long walk off a short pier. And what will remain to be seen is how many companies have the practicality and the intestinal fortitude to make that change to say, yes, we are adopting a no jerks policy. And we are willing to turn away dollars.

We're willing to turn away business from people that we don't want to do business with. And in time, that may affect customer behavior at large, right? Because if you are blacklisted at like three of the four retail stores for groceries in your area and you're not allowed to shop there anymore, it might dawn on you that maybe you're the problem, right? Maybe you're you're not the person that company wants to do business with. And maybe you'll change your behavior.

I'm not saying that you are this person, but I'm saying in general. So we lost a lot of people to other professions, and that's okay because those professions need people too. But if we want to have a functioning frontline economy, we need to have the rules of common decency bolstered for a little while until people are reminded that yeah, you can't be a jerk and still get what you want. Yeah, I mean, you can be a jerk, but there are consequences for being a jerk. So that's what's on my mind uh today.

Hopefully, uh your company, your organization, wherever it is that you are, uh already has a no-jerks policy. And if they don't, please feel free to share this video with them and say, hey, let's adopt a no-jerks policy, because that will make life better for everyone, for customers, for vendors, partners, and especially employees. Thanks for tuning in. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.