I started out work in a shop with a terrible, toxic work environment. Micromanaging, power-hungry, abusive management begat gossiping, uncaring, deceptive, and selfish labor... you learned to just keep your head down and let the shit slide off your shoulders like water off a duck's back. Keep your wits about you when something went behind schedule, though, because the blame game was about to get serious. I took to taking long walks on my lunch break - 28 minutes out, plan for 28 minutes back for some breathing room, because you were entitled to a 1-hour lunch break and would get shouted at for punching in and out with a 61-minute lunch hour - just to clear my head.
Now I'm at a shop that's miles better than the first. Management probably cares too much, treating labor better than a lot of parents treat their own children. Honesty and transparency are the defaults, a problem doesn't result in blame being passed around, the 5 whys are extended to 6 whys if they seem to point to "this trusted human made a human mistake." We're our vendors' favorite customer - we just got a valued salesman/apps engineer back who'd had his territory switched, he covers most of the region starting 30 minutes south of us but also negotiated a key account exception to keep us on his account. We're also one of our customers' favorite suppliers, they'll happily pay extra because they know we'll build them the Cadillac of machine tools with integrity and quality at each step of the build, and not nickel-and-dime them for support after the fact or ignore them when the machine is out of warranty.
The scary part about this, though, is that the accumulation of loyalty, trust, and social capital that's been very slowly built up over decades could be quite effectively and profitably plundered in an acquisition or by a change in the board or management. They could probably turn the screws and push profit into the stratosphere for 4-8 quarters before our abnormally low turnover turned into abnormally high turnover and customers realized that our culture had changed.
Yep, unfortunately it’s incredibly hard to put value on those intangibles.
And what’s worse, being a hard nosed asshole is expected behaviour from executives, even if it’s uncalled for or actively harmful to the company.
I knew a guy fresh out of MBA school who proudly told everyone I worked with that if they didn’t like what he asked them to do, he’d sack them. Despite the fact that these people had specific training, were good at what they did, and understood how best to do their jobs.
His attitude really made me think about the value of individuals in a company - and showed me exactly how not to do things in the future.
Now I'm at a shop that's miles better than the first. Management probably cares too much, treating labor better than a lot of parents treat their own children. Honesty and transparency are the defaults, a problem doesn't result in blame being passed around, the 5 whys are extended to 6 whys if they seem to point to "this trusted human made a human mistake." We're our vendors' favorite customer - we just got a valued salesman/apps engineer back who'd had his territory switched, he covers most of the region starting 30 minutes south of us but also negotiated a key account exception to keep us on his account. We're also one of our customers' favorite suppliers, they'll happily pay extra because they know we'll build them the Cadillac of machine tools with integrity and quality at each step of the build, and not nickel-and-dime them for support after the fact or ignore them when the machine is out of warranty.
The scary part about this, though, is that the accumulation of loyalty, trust, and social capital that's been very slowly built up over decades could be quite effectively and profitably plundered in an acquisition or by a change in the board or management. They could probably turn the screws and push profit into the stratosphere for 4-8 quarters before our abnormally low turnover turned into abnormally high turnover and customers realized that our culture had changed.