Workplace culture: being nice isn't enough

Eat Sleep Work Repeat

Bruce Daisley

Management, Workplace Culture, Science, Work, Business, Culture, Social Sciences

4.7 • 989 Ratings

🗓️ 20 December 2021

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How did thinking about workplace culture increase the profitability of firms?

I was doing some thinking for some businesses over the last few weeks and the work of one person sprung to mind. Zeynep Ton is a professor of operation management at MIT Sloan School of Management. She found herself looking at the challenges that some businesses had with high employee turnover.

They were losing a lot of people. It was causing their service to suffer - it was also costing them a lot of money training and recruiting people. Sounds familiar?

From this it lead to another understanding. Some organisations by thinking about and planning the employee experience of work create jobs that were less stressful and more rewarding. It struck her that quite often companies don’t want to make decisions or create limitations for fear of upsetting customers. But in the process they become more muddled for customers and less rewarding for employees.

Zeynep goes on to say that the firms who think about these things and set about creating good culture and good jobs (a) are more profitable and have higher revenue (b) build more sustainable businesses so their stock does better.

Here are her 4 pillars:

operational simplification
standardisation AND empowerment
cross-training
operating with slack

Good more about the Good Jobs Strategy

Read Zeynep's book

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Transcript

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0:00.0	If you run a restaurant in London, you need to know about Square.
0:03.4	The integrated point of sale system built four restaurants.
0:06.7	It's payments, point of sale and reporting all in one.
0:10.1	It also connects your front and back of house, which you nail every order and Square's reporting feature can help you save hours on accounting every week.
0:18.0	Join at Square.com. Square, big in restaurants.
0:22.0	Square Up Europe Limited is authorized by the Financial Conduct Authority under the Electronic
0:26.1	Money Regulations 2011.
0:27.7	Registered reference number 900846. Hello this is in sleep workupy on Bush Day's Licta
0:40.0	podcast about making work better. Now over the last few weeks I've been doing
0:46.4	some work with a couple of different organizations and they've been thinking
0:50.9	about similar things they've been thinking about how've been thinking about how to great positive rewarding culture of their workers
0:55.9	and the work of one person sprung to mind, one academic who's done a lot of work into these
1:02.2	who I think about all the time.
1:04.0	Zaynepton is a professor of operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management
1:11.8	in Boston.
1:14.2	She's Turkish-Americans.
1:15.3	She first came to the US to play college volleyball.
1:18.0	And obviously now is an icon of operations and management.
1:22.5	Anyway, you're going to get a lot from her specific experience
1:25.0	because anyone who's wrestling with the themes of how
1:28.6	to make workplace culture better and how to make work better
1:32.3	is going to be able to draw directly from the
	...

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