Rolando Rosas 7:51
social obligation. So is this something the company can initiate? Do they are there programs, or it’s just something that happens organically.
Ellen Frank-Miller 8:02
So it has to be very intentional, because really, what we’re talking about is, how does the company behave, and then how do employees behave in return? So if the company offers the employee some kind of equity stake in the business, the employee will respond by behaving in a way that you know it makes them more like an Ownership mindset. But what we know from the research is that just providing that equity stake isn’t enough. The different kinds of managerial practices and operational practices that companies use or don’t use, there’s a set of them that are known to ignite an Ownership mindset, and it’s that mindset that creates the ownership behaviors, those above and beyond behaviors that are what creates the operational and financial outcomes. So things like making suggestions about how to save money, bringing new solutions to problems, looking for places where they can help and mentor their coworkers, because we’re all owners in this together. So if we use those types of managerial and operational practices, then we know that ignites the mindset, which creates the behavior, and that’s like a chain reaction that sets off the financial improvements. Does
Rolando Rosas 9:13
this require a top down approach or bottom up approach to actually get there? Because they’re going to be some folks that are probably going to be resistant, say, Ellen, I kind of get it, but you know, you don’t know the industry we’re in. You don’t know how competitive the landscape is. You don’t know how cutthroat the investors are. You don’t know the shareholders. What do you say to these objections when it comes to this?
Ellen Frank-Miller 9:38
Well, I would say that the folks who are down on the front line. They are the ones who interact with your customer, your product, your quality every single day. And those are the things that determine the success of your business, not the number of supervisors that you know you have in a particular business unit. It’s the folks on the ground. So it’s all about creating that kind of ought. Economy in the jobs and the kind of collaborative management with frontline supervisors that enables people to do the job the best way they know how, and to both believe in and engage in a relationship with the company where they feel that what they bring to the table matters. So does my company want to hear my ideas? If I talk to my supervisor about better ways to do my job, are they interested in that? Are they going to try it out with me? Are they going to help it so it does come from the bottom up in terms of the execution, right? But the company from the top down, has to empower supervisors and employees to actually take those steps.
Rolando Rosas 10:39
Hold on, I got something for you. Let’s imagine you were able to summon a round table of topic sex. What would you say to them?
Ellen Frank-Miller 10:53
I guess I would first say, What is your biggest business problem? Because the answer to your biggest business problem is always going to boil down to the people who are doing the job for you. So what is your biggest business problem? What is the role of your workforce in solving that problem? Now, a lot of times they’re going to say, Well, the problem is, you know, we have high turnover. I’m like, well, that’s not your biggest business problem. What’s your biggest business problem? Well, we aren’t getting on time deliveries. Okay, who’s actually doing your deliveries? Guy in the truck. Okay, is the guy in the truck driving too slowly? No, no, we’re getting them out the door late. Okay, so who’s loading the truck? So you back it up, and when you ever you drive back to first cause, you will inevitably find that it’s workers who are doing the job, and if they are not being empowered to do the job the best way they can, if there are barriers in front of them, that’s where you will have an opportunity as a business to say, we got to do things differently.
Rolando Rosas 11:55
Now you set the stage, you set the table, you put some of the accoutrement hypertiefe Now at this table. Who would you invite? Because those are some really interesting things. You said delivery package, I would imagine, to all the CEOs of the courier packages delivering company. But who would you invite that would have the most impact right now, in our current environment,
Ellen Frank-Miller 12:23
you mean broadly speaking, or within a single conference,
Rolando Rosas 12:25
just broadly speaking, you got a table here of execs that you would bring to the table. Now you’ve delivered a message. Who would you want sitting at this table that could deliver this message and have the greatest amount of impact on workers right now?
Ellen Frank-Miller 12:38
Well, if I could pick three people from any company, it would be the CEO, the CHRO and the COO, because it’s not a human resource problem, it’s an operational problem. It’s how you design the jobs. It’s how you empower your supervisors. So it can’t just be a problem for Human Resources alone, but at the same time, your CHRO is the one who’s most familiar with the levers that may be working and may not be working. But in addition to those three folks, I would want to see frontline supervisors at that table as well, because we know from research that, of course, if you’re a large company, you can’t have 100 employees at the table, but maybe you can have 20 frontline supervisors. Those supervisors, based on our research, are likely to have a reasonable idea of how their employees are thinking and feeling. Now there won’t be 100% alignment, but the lower down you go in the org chart, the better the ability of management to understand what employees really think. So there’s a huge gap. This is research by McKinsey, a huge gap between the perceptions of senior leadership, the CEO, and the perceptions of front line supervisors and the perceptions of employees. So the higher up you are, the less likely you are to be able to predict what your employees say is important. So those front line supervisors should be at that table, and I promise you, in most organizations, they’re going to sit down and go. Why am I here? I never see these guys. What do they want from me?
Rolando Rosas 14:06
You’ve been German to the 50th floor, and nobody goes up there unless you’re invited, right? Yep, and
Ellen Frank-Miller 14:13
that’s a problem, right? That disconnect is part of what creates inefficiency and ineffectiveness in organizations,
Rolando Rosas 14:21
would you say that’s also what? Is there a link there between that disconnect when it comes to other things? I would imagine that what you’re talking about is also a symptom of like when people wanted to go home and then return to the office. Upper managers once one things, workers have a completely different idea of what they want to get the work done. You think that also leads to that, some of that?
Ellen Frank-Miller 14:46
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think you know, when we all kind of go through our day to day, folks who look like us are in jobs like us, are in LinkedIn like us, we have a really different world view than folks who are in very. Different jobs, right? The folks who are on the factory floor, on the retail floor, in the restaurants, providing service to customers, the day to day life of someone who works a job like that versus someone who works a job like me is very different. So when we try to solve problems without adequate business intelligence, those of us who sit in this world maybe creating solutions we think are great that absolutely don’t work on the ground, and when we don’t bring work or voice into the process, we can make huge mistakes that are expensive and that set us back as a company. And this is part of why various structures that give employees a stake in the business where you now have shared ownership, this is why they can be so effective, because it’s not just the employees who we want to start thinking and acting like owners. It’s leadership who has to start thinking differently and saying, This isn’t just my company. My workforce now also has an ownership stake. I have to think about them and treat them differently. They’re partners now in the success of this business in a way that maybe I didn’t think about them as previously.
Rolando Rosas 16:05
No, you talk about success, and you have a recent article where you went really deep into this about employee ownership and how it can, I think somewhere in there, I’m paraphrasing, you can get superior financial results when you have this. I want to know what inspired you to write about this, because it was a pretty nice, lengthy article, and then you had some research to back it up. But what inspired you to write about this?
Ellen Frank-Miller 16:36
So I have to give a ton of credit to the folks at impact alpha, who have been covering the beats both on employee ownership and on quality jobs in the conversation that I was having, yes, there we are in private equity. Pairing employee ownership with good jobs can unlock wealth for all. So really, you know, the conversations about quality jobs and about employee ownership, you know, have been kind of happening within different conversations, and bringing those two together is where the power happens. Because, as I said, providing an ownership stake, a financial stake, is not enough to maximize the impact of employee ownership schemes. We know this from the research. So if you bring in these different ways of managing and running a business that really leverage better jobs for frontline workers, giving them more autonomy in their roles, more supportive and collaborative managers, more knowledge that will help them make decisions about what they do in their jobs every day. All of those things ignite this Ownership mindset and allow employees to really contribute and add value in ways that they’re generally not given the opportunity to and not asked to do in their jobs every day. So when we bring those practices in, when the business starts behaving differently, not behaving differently just by giving a financial stake, but behaving differently on the ground, in the way that they work with their workers, when they behave differently, their employees behave differently, and it’s those behaviors that make all the difference in the success of companies that are employee owned. And the research demonstrates that employee owned companies have better business outcomes than those that are not employee owned.
Rolando Rosas 18:13
That’s terrific. So then, when you talk about companies like KKR, these are not, you know, fluffy, you know, sit around a room and meditate companies, right? They’re looking at spreadsheets and saying, Where is the bottom line? How much money can we make? What’s motivating companies like KKR to do it? Is it just financial results, or is there some feel good reason that’s motivate them to get behind this?
Ellen Frank-Miller 18:40
You know, I always say that I don’t care why someone is doing something that’s good for workers, I just care that they do it. Now, I think that Pete Stavros at KKR is a really wonderful advocate for the power of shared ownership to benefit businesses, investors and workers, and I’ve had the opportunity to meet with him several times. I believe he’s completely genuine in this, and I think that he’s right on target, right? Because when we do what’s good for workers, it’s also good for business. You know, there is an opportunity to do well by doing good. And when we look at, you know, why do private equity firms do anything? Well, they’re in the business of creating returns for their investors. So that’s their reason for being, and if this is a strategy that helps them achieve that, and the side effect is that workers will, you know, build wealth and companies are better places to work. Terrific. I don’t care if it’s the goal or a side effect, as long as it’s happening,
Rolando Rosas 19:37
it sounds like a win. Win. Win for workers, win for the C suite and the win for the investors. That doesn’t always happen. I remember talking to Professor Nick bloom. He said that if you look at the economy and you look at history, there are very few things that create a win, win, win, a trifecta of that. Is there something else? Underlying this that really makes it a dynamic proposition for companies.
Ellen Frank-Miller 20:05
So I think the concept of stakeholder capitalism is really at the foundation here. When, you know, for the last well, pretty much most of my life, the last 50 years, you know, we’ve had this idea of shareholder primacy. The purpose of a corporation is to make money for shareholders. That was never the case until 50 years ago. Everyone understood, you know, even in the era the, you know, of the Gilded Age, where you had the robber barons who recognized that they were the ones who are going to benefit the most from their businesses. And unions sprung up because the treatment of workers was so appalling and the imbalance in wealth was so oppressive that that was how changes, you know, happened in this country. You know, if you like your weekends, you can thank organized labor. That’s where all of this came from. So when we look at the circumstances today and we say, well, we have a similar imbalance, you know? Well, the pitchforks are coming out if we don’t look at ways to focus on stakeholder capitalism. And Roy Swan, at the Ford Foundation, has done an excellent job of really articulating why stakeholder capitalism will return more benefits to the economy as well as to our society than a shareholder primacy mindset.
Rolando Rosas 21:22
You know, it feels like, and I’d love to know what you think about this. I mean, obviously so you’re saying the pitch works are coming, so the folks that are front line are feeling it the most right. Prices are higher. Inflation since COVID has caused all sorts of goods to rise, and at the same time, you have this gap that has just been happening and just getting greater, even before COVID. So if I’m some enterprising manager and I say, hey, you know I like what Dr. Ellen says, How can I as a manager, if I’m picking I’m not a C suite, I’m not one of the CHRO CEO or COO, but I love what you’re saying, because I think it could have a positive influence on the company and the bottom line, how is somebody like that that’s a manager or a frontline supervisor going to get that message across? Or how would they sell it? Give me, give me a way for a frontline manager to sell it. So upper management is part of the solution here. Rather than just throw it in the suggestion box, we’ll look at it in a few months.
Ellen Frank-Miller 21:22
Well, what I love about that question is that before the front line manager goes up and sells it to leadership, there’s an opportunity for them to live it on the ground and produce results. So one of the most powerful interventions that a frontline supervisor can do is to establish an enhanced level of communication with workers, listening to workers and bringing them in as partners in problem solving is the key to better outcomes. So when folks are become a supervisor or manager for the first time, there’s this responsibility in the sense, well, I now have to have the answers. So when someone brings me a problem, it’s like, okay, well, I have to solve that problem. But a really impactful way to solve problems is to say to the person who brought you the problem like, that’s a tough issue. What are your thoughts about how we should address that? Now there’s a good chance that that person has an answer. Now they probably felt like they couldn’t come to the supervisor and say, well, here’s a problem, here’s what I think you should do about it. Not all relationships are like that when there’s a hierarchy. So if you’re the supervisor who turns that around and says, Well, what do you think we should do? You’re the one doing the work every day. You’re going to get a lot of creativity brought to your work group, and as you start to then implement that and ask your workers for ideas and bring them into the process of creating better results for your work team. Now you have evidence to go to senior leadership and say, You know what, I’ve been doing something differently. Don’t have to say it’s because of me. I was doing something differently. And I want to, I want you to know the changes that I saw. And there’s an opportunity to say, you know, our scrap rate on the floor decreased by 13% after I started asking the team what they thought we could do to bring our scrap rates down. That’s just one example. But collect that data and then go to leadership and say, you know, I saw this happening in this different way I’m working. I wonder what else we could do as a company to bring more of that to our success. And by the way, if my work team continues this type of improvement, I really hope there’ll be some rewards for the extra effort that they put in and the value that they’ve created for the company. That’s where an ownership structure can also be a huge motivator for those supervisors on the ground to learn how to do things differently and bring their employees into the process.
Rolando Rosas 24:45
I like that. I really like that. And I’ve read that article that you wrote, and in there, it reminds me of a passage where you talk about command and control management style, how that’s kind of counterproductive, and from what you’re. Saying you’ve got a frontline work you’re taking upon themselves to actually collect some data, and that then opens the channel for that discussion. Why is the command and control type of management so detrimental to the goals of a company where you’re looking at something like
Ellen Frank-Miller 25:17
this? So when you’re an organizational researcher like me, you always remember that the root of that word organization is organism. Organisms are in this case, they’re made up of not just a leader and drones. They’re made up of people. And people bring enormous resources and the potential to bring creativity and really wonderful talents to their jobs every day. So when you look at command and control, the model is the person at the top has the 30,000 foot view and can create strategy to create success. Now, you know these TV shows, I wish I could remember the name of it, where the CEO, like, does the job of a frontline worker for a day. I don’t even think it’s a week. Undercover Boss, Undercover Boss. Okay, so the boss goes undercover. There was an article I read recently. The boss of the CEO works as a flight attendant. Okay, works as a flight attendant, and and comes back and says, My gosh, this is a really hard job. You know, it would be better for our workers if they could do X, Y and Z, and the flight attendants watching this are going really, is that? So, you know, if you had asked me, I could have told you that it wouldn’t have taken you a day in the air for us to tell you like you could make this job and therefore service to our customers better by doing X, Y or Z. So we know that if you sit at the very top and you don’t have that hands on experience day to day, there’s missed opportunity. Now I’m not saying that every CEO you know who’s for example, in a TDL company goes down and spends a day working on the warehouse floor, although I would love to see that on a monthly basis. Right? Get that face down there and really talk to workers. But it’s the talking to workers. It’s getting input from work. It’s creating channels for worker voice and making it clear that we don’t just want your input. We expect your input. This is part of what it’s like to be successful in this company. There’s an expectation that you’re going to bring your creativity. You’re going to make suggestions. Sometimes, when companies create programs to incentivize employee suggestions, they do things like saying, if you make a suggestion and we choose to use it and it creates financial benefit for the company, then you’ll get a piece of that pie.
Rolando Rosas 27:37
Premium does something like that. I know they used to you come up with a suggestion, you put it in the idea box, essentially, and 3am uses it, you’re going to collect checks on that idea that now became an actual product. That’s
Ellen Frank-Miller 27:50
terrific. It’s also a bit like having profit sharing at the end of the year, right? Okay, if things go well, all year long, I’m going to get my payout, all right. But what if the incentive is to make the suggestions. Anybody who makes a suggestion once a month for six months gets a goodie, whatever it might be. Now what you’ve incentivized is the creativity. Maybe the suggestion is a good one, maybe it’s a bad one, maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t, but you’re activating the creativity of the workforce and saying what we care about is that you’re engaged in ideas about how to make this company better, if you only incentivize the outcome at the end of the year, profit sharing, sure. Well, a company like optimx systems, which is a precision optical manufacturer in upstate New York, which recently became an employee owned trust, and employee ownership. Trust. The way they handle this is they don’t pay profit sharing at the end of the year. They pay profit sharing at the end of every month.
Rolando Rosas 28:49
So what? What every month? Every month you mean there’s a nice little extra butter and cheddar coming in in
Ellen Frank-Miller 28:58
every paycheck at the end of the month, there’s either a nice little chunk of change, or else there isn’t. And Rick Plimpton, who’s the CEO of Optimax and one of our advisory board members at work, he tells a story about the day after the monthly profit sharing paycheck comes out, you look on the manufacturing floor on the day after, and the place is a buzz. Either people are like, Yeah, we did great. Did you see how much we made? This is awesome, and it’s very motivating, right? Let’s do really well this month too. Or, uh oh, that was not good. What happened? Why? Why didn’t we do as well this month? What do we need to do differently? And the whole Buzz is about, how do we make things better? That kind of energy at the front line of people solving problems and finding ways to make the business better. That’s gold. Optomax systems is an incredibly successful and profitable business that has made huge contributions to the community in the Finger Lakes region. What do they do? So they prioritize the quality of those jobs, and they give their employees the opportunity to think and act like owners, because they have a stake in the success of the business. You
Rolando Rosas 30:10
know, there’s a word that you’ve said several times here, and I want to circle back on this is employees, and you and I had a chance to talk before this. And there’s something that just like sticks in my brain. Here is the word employees. Because, you know, I had talked about how incentives are right now in the US structured in a way that they work against employees and the interest of employees and more on hard investments, like, you know, things you know, computers and equipment and technology, because the incentives are set up for that explain what that whole thing? Because I think people don’t are missing that little. Why is this all like this to begin with? This
Ellen Frank-Miller 30:57
is such an important point, and it goes along with what we were talking about earlier, about what are structural barriers? Right? We were talking about structural barriers to creating more employee ownership opportunities. In this case, we’re talking about, how do we make these jobs better? How do we create more opportunities for employees? A lot of what we’re describing is investing in our workforce, whether that’s investing in training and coaching for supervisors, or that’s investing in opportunities for advancement for our workers, right? That kind of investment for a business is crucial to success. But if we look at financial accounting standards and we look at tax laws in this country, there’s a significant incentive for companies to invest in plant and capital. Right? A generation ago, the majority of the value of a company was in its physical capital, so real estate, machinery, fleets, whatever it might be, that was the bulk of the value of the company. Well, these days, that’s not the case anymore. A huge proportion of the value of most companies is in the intangibles, like, for example, human capital. So what the workers bring to the table, but our tax laws and our financial accounting standards are lagging that right. So if I say I’m going to bring robots into my TDL operation, that’s going to allow me to be more productive. I get a really nice tax advantage for that. I can amortize that investment. I can use it to alter my financial results in ways that look very positive, and that’s great if we want to incentivize robots, or if the majority of the value of the company is coming from materials. But if I want to invest in my employees, let’s say that in what I’m doing, I look around and say, Actually, automation is really not what I need here. I know that I need to figure out a different workflow. I know that I need to pay my workers more. I’ve got to find ways to bring in more revenue to create that. I want to bring in someone to work with me to improve my workforce, I can’t write that expense off. There’s no tax deduction available for me. If I take all of those steps and I make all of those investments, it’s just a cost. So if we want to have an incentive for folks to invest in the workforce and invest in the kinds of practices that are beneficial to the business, really, we have to align those incentives, and there’s interesting research going on about how we can take another look at how our incentive structures are designed in this country to bring it up to date and really enable companies to take advantage of their most valuable asset, which is their people. So
Rolando Rosas 33:40
that’s fascinating when you think about Yeah, 1960 something or another, 50 something or another, right after World War Two, right after, you know, everything’s set up for, yeah, we need more trains and we need more rail. We need more infrastructure. We need more roads. We need more places to put factories, right? Those tax laws, probably for a lot folks, haven’t been updated in any tangible way. Where we’re not in that economy anymore. We’re a service based. We’re in an innovative economy. We’re in a creator economy of some sort, right? Where the brain power is at the tip of the spear, right? That’s what’s driving innovation. Are people, right? You’re going to get robots to do some of that work, some of that repetitive manual labor. But if you had, if you could bring into a room, here’s another one. If you could bring in somebody to a room that could maybe get the ball rolling on this. Who are the folks? Is this more of a regulatory thing, an IRS thing, a legislative thing, or is it a state thing, or is it a federal thing? That need to get some of this going so that the incentives are aligned on the employee side, and they also benefit the organization? You’re
Ellen Frank-Miller 34:58
gonna hate my answer, the answer. Answer is yes, yes. It’s regulatory, it’s legislative. It happens at the state level. It happens at the federal level. I think there’s some really great research that’s going on and a lot of engagement with policy makers to try to turn some of the attention towards these places where our policies and regulations are lagging the reality on the ground for businesses. And, you know, I think that it really takes all of us working together, both practitioners, researchers, policy makers, businesses, to look at what are the things that are in the way of doing the things we know are going to make our businesses and our economy more effective and benefit workers as well as businesses. So, you know, it’s really when you look at the legislative body and you say there’s such gridlock, well, here’s something interesting on employee ownership. There is a bill in Congress right now, and I’m going to tell you the names of the co sponsors, and you’re going to say what Marco Rubio and Bernie Sanders co sponsoring a bill. There you go. Micro Rubio and Bernie Sanders are co sponsoring a bill to help advance employee ownership in this country.
Rolando Rosas 36:08
Those two never sit in a room or at a round table to do anything. I
Ellen Frank-Miller 36:12
always thought they spoke completely different languages. But here it is right. What could be better? We have a silver tsunami coming in this country with baby boomers who are small business owners, and they’re going to be retiring. So what is it? I built this business for the last 40 years, and now I’m done. I want out. What are my choices? Well, I can just close my doors. Okay? My mechanic shop is just going to go away. Jobs lost in the community, a business lost for the community. Well, if I’m really successful, maybe I could sell to a competitor the shop down the store. Okay, that’s a possibility. How’s that going to work out for my workers? Well, I don’t know. How does my competitor treat their workers? Not sure about that. I could sell to private equity. That may or may not be a good thing for my workers, but I’m going to walk away with a check in my hand in both of those situations. Well, what if there was a way for me to sell my business to my employees? What if I could still get my payout, get my exit, as they say in the investing world, what if I could still get my payout, cash myself out of my business, but my employees would be the ones taking over. Now the jobs don’t leave my community. I know that my workers, you know, I’m going to help with that transition, right? I’m going to make sure that they’re ready to be successful in running the business. I know who they are. If that could happen, everybody wins. I make my money as a retiring owner, my employees get control of the business so they don’t lose their jobs, the community doesn’t lose, you know, the jobs. And the benefit of having that business there, my employees now have a stake. They can build wealth, right? They can do things the way that they know will make this business most successful. What’s not to like, it’s supporting businesses. It’s supporting workers. It’s truly bipartisan, and the potential for this to be transformative in this economy is incredible.
Rolando Rosas 38:06
I like it when, when, when workers win, the organization wins, and it sounds like the community wins. Because I think you you’d mentioned this during our pre talk, where you said one of these companies, where it was written into the work employee plan that the company headquarters would stay in the Finger Lakes area. I believe that’s the one you were talking about, right? That’s
Ellen Frank-Miller 38:26
right, when Optimax systems, again, you know owners who are at the point of thinking about retirement, and they are facing the exact questions we were just talking about, they decided to establish what’s called an employee ownership trust. It’s a form of perpetual purpose trust. And what happens is that you create this legal entity, a trust, and the company, the ownership of the company, is transferred to the trust, so now the owners aren’t the owners anymore. The trust owns the business, and you can write a trust in any way that you want, and one of the provisions that Optimax included in their ownership trust is that the business cannot be moved out of the Finger Lakes region that business is staying in that community. You can also write things into ownership trust like our employees must continue to get their monthly profit sharing right. Ownership trusts give the company, the owners of the company the ability to protect the things that matter to them and to protect their employees. It’s an amazing thing. And common trust is an organization, a company that we’re working with, that helps companies transition to employee ownership trust, both in terms of the technical assistance of getting things set up, etc, and they’re raising funds right now to actually help finance those transactions as well. Isn’t
Rolando Rosas 39:43
this what Patagonia did not too long ago, or something like this somewhere? It’s floating in my brain that Patagonia was involved in something like the CEO that sold the company, but it was through a trust. Is that right? That’s
Ellen Frank-Miller 39:55
exactly right. They established a perpetual purpose trust, and they transferred ownership of. Patagonia to that perpetual purpose trust. And the purpose was about protecting the environment. So there are lots of ways to establish a perpetual purpose trust, and the specialized form of it is focused on employee ownership. I want
Rolando Rosas 40:13
to ask you one last thing. This should be an easy one for you. You’re pro Why are good paying jobs for front line workers good for business?
Ellen Frank-Miller 40:28
What we know from decades and decades of organizational and managerial science research is that good jobs are strongly correlated with lower levels of turnover, higher levels of engagement, lower levels of burnout, and if they’re structured in the right ways, they’re also associated with an Ownership mindset. All of these things contribute to the kinds of financial outcomes that businesses are after. And people know this, right? You have lots of companies that conduct employee engagement surveys. There’s a recognition that if we get employees engaged, we will have better business outcomes. Well, how do you get employees engaged? Well, there’s a huge body of literature about that, and it all points back to the quality of the jobs. It’s pay, it’s benefits, it’s the quality of management that people have, it’s the degree to which people feel like the company has their back. It’s whether their work is meaningful. It’s whether jobs are designed in such a way that people can be successful and add value, not just be automatons doing something that a machine could do. So if we look at how high quality jobs are affecting the business outcomes, we know with very strong empirical evidence that the companies who do that, who take those high road business practices, they are more successful. They compete better in the market. They’re more resilient when there’s an economic downturn, they produce better returns for shareholders. They produce better financial outcomes for their workers. It’s again that win, win, win. And when those businesses are small to mid sized businesses that are, you know, really embedded in communities. The communities win as well.
Rolando Rosas 42:08
It sounds like this is not fluff and kumbaya based on what you’re telling me, there’s hard evidence. There’s decades of research. You could walk into a C suite with the evidence that you’ve presented and say, Here’s the evidence, right? Here’s the evidence. Let’s take a look at it, right? Let’s make sure maybe we can improve the bottom line, create superior financial results, and by the way, have better workers that want to come to work
Ellen Frank-Miller 42:34
and do the best job. Yep, and I do think that, you know, you do have folks at that level who are open to ideas? What are the ways I can improve this business? And they are open to ideas, and those are the businesses and the leaders who are going to be most successful. Now, part of that openness is being willing to question your own assumptions, not just your assumptions about how you do business or what your markets look like, but also your assumptions about your workforce, both how you should manage a workforce, but also who your workers are, because when leadership assumes that workers don’t particularly care about doing a good job, that workers don’t necessarily have a lot to contribute, they’re just there to pick up a paycheck, when you start with those assumptions, you create management structures that look very different than if you start from the assumption that nobody gets out of bed in the morning and says, you know, I really want to do a terrible job at work today. I just, I really hope I can be successful in my efforts to add no value to my workplace. I don’t want to support my coworkers. I don’t want to get, you know, praise from my supervisor. I just, I really don’t want to work hard. That’s just not the case. I’m not saying, you know, people are different. I’m not saying there aren’t unmotivated workers. For sure, there are, but it is a vast minority of the workforce. And when we approach the workforce like people don’t want to work hard, we develop structures around that assumption. If we shift that assumption, if we shift our mindset to say, everybody who walks in the door of this business, they have something important to contribute. They can add value if we enable them to do that. When you start with that assumption, you design very different jobs, and that’s the way that you have an incredibly successful business.
Rolando Rosas 44:22
What else is there to add? I can’t add a one iota to that. That was That was beautiful. That was lovely. I think those are awesome words that anybody could take back to their organization. If you’re looking for hard facts, you know, because some people say, Oh, I don’t want to. These are hard facts. If people want to learn more, Ellen, and they want to, you know, I’d love to have some of that research at my fingertips. Where should they go?
Ellen Frank-Miller 44:50
Well, your first stop, of course, is at worcimpact.com that’s Worcimpact.com in our news and Insights section, we have. Links to lots of our research, as well as case studies of organizations that others have done. If you’re looking for information about the business case for employee ownership and the impacts of employee ownership structures. The Rutgers Institute, for the study of employee ownership and profit sharing, I think I got that right, is a terrific resource, as is the National Center for employee ownership. The Good Jobs Institute is a fantastic organization that’s doing incredibly impactful work in making operational changes that make jobs better and make businesses better. The Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program also has a ton of great resources, and there are many others that I’m sure we can add in the comments section of the video. There’s a ton of work out there. And whenever I hear somebody say, Well, it sounds nice, but there just isn’t any, you know, science behind it. I’m like, there’s so much science behind it. Please. Let me talk to you about it. So I hope that those are helpful resources for your your listeners.
Rolando Rosas 45:56
And we’ll, we’ll make sure those are in the links so people could get to those. Dr. Ellen, so smart. So I love your your insights, the curiosity, you know, the, let’s just ask, Why? Why are we doing this? You know, does it make sense? It’s just speaks volumes to who you are. I love talking to you. We have to, you know, we have to do part three, right?
Ellen Frank-Miller 46:19
I can’t wait. I can’t wait
Rolando Rosas 46:21
because there’s so much more to talk about that that you know, we can’t just all cram it in. But I am thrilled to do part three whenever you are so I want to thank you for coming on today and dropping a ton of knowledge, hard facts on why it pays to pay better and have better employees in a company.
Ellen Frank-Miller 46:42
It’s a pleasure to be here, and I so commend you for all of the great work that you do to bring this information and research and all the great insights from your guests to a broader audience. Because these things are not beyond people’s reach. They’re right there to be worked with every day.
Rolando Rosas 46:58
Absolutely, absolutely so thank you, Dr. Ellen. I appreciate that. And if you’ve found this podcast episode insightful, helpful, I want to invite you to hit that like button, subscribe and follow us, because that means the world to us, and it really does help us bring this program to many more folks in different parts of the country and world, and bring guests like Dr. Ellen. And if you want to support us and show us your love in the description, there’ll be links to where you can get involved, both with Dr. Ellen’s organization as well as ours. We solve complex IT problems. We’ve been doing that for 20 years. And if you want to talk to us about your IT problem. Go ahead and check out the links below or up top. I know they’re somewhere, depending on what you’re listening to or the video you’re watching, and somebody on my team will have a chat with you. So thank you for joining us today, and if you want to hear more about company culture like Chick-fil-A. Ellen, did you know that Chick-fil-A does some stuff with their employees to keep them going and motivated? It sounds a lot like what you’ve got in your studies, and there’s a reason why they outsell their competitors, even though their competitors are larger players in the chicken market, Chick-fil-A has some secrets. Dr. Randy Ross, and that episode shared how they’re able to do that. So I’ll join you in that episode with Dr. Randy Ross. See you soon.
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