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How Not To Treat People

November 26, 2007 - Filed under: Information — Tags:

I like to write about companies that treat people well that are seen as “good”. Companies like Starbucks and Zappos that seem to treat everyone well. How their goodwill relates to great free publicity about their companies. Some people call it Social Marketing.

I have also thought about good lessons learned from what not to do.

Recently I spoke to someone who works for a manufacturing company. It’s a small company, but growing pretty fast. Because of their growth they are adding more part time people.

Recently the owner realized that they had a policy already in place that would pay most of these people for the Thanksgiving holiday. Because they were also closed the following day part timers would be paid for two days.

On the day before the holiday they had a notice posted that said in effect that the policy had changed and most of the part time people were no longer eligible for holiday pay. Some of the people who were affected by this policy had left for the day and didn’t even know about it.

I’m not saying that this company didn’t have the right to change their policy. I’m not a lawyer and I’m not sure what the rules are. I am saying that the way they went about it seems very underhanded. I believe that whatever amount of money that was saved from this policy change will be far surpassed in bad will and possibly even bad publicity. My thoughts are that if it wasn’t possible to make this change a month earlier it would have been much better to just bite the bullet and make the change for the next holiday. They could have explained that because there were so many more part time people than before the policy had to be changed and the workers would have some time to plan for it. Doing it the day before the holiday just looks so uncaring and looks are what counts.

The lesson here is to consider what you do in your business as if everyone in the world may know about it. After all I’m writing about this and even though I’m not saying the name of the company it is very possible that someone else may publish it for all to see. Then they may have to defend themselves to more than just their employees. In business today you have to be careful how that you treat people. With the ease of communication your actions may come back to haunt you in ways that you haven’t thought of.

1 Comment »

  1. I enjoyed reading this blog very much. It was very informative and well written. I know of another company who treats it’s employees exceptionally well and the overall success of the company itself has a lot to do with it’s employees.

    I’m sure it is possible that your blog may get posted and passed on. It will hopefully help other employers.

    Keep up the good work!

    Comment by A.C. — November 30, 2007 @ 3:51 am

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