The Cost of Just Hitting Numbers

Is your organization truly invested in its people? Really!?

This article was first published by Graham Peelle on Medium, on July 21, 2023

Driving revenue, activity supporting revenue, and key business activities are critical to maintain focus in moving your business forward. This focus promotes growth, performance, and builds the business. But it can’t come at a cost to your people. Your people, or talent, drive your future, your name in the market, and hold the keys to your future.

As companies grow, and even those with some of the best reputations as employers from the Fortune 500, they can miss the opportunity to grow with their people, and struggle with making their people an afterthought, or maybe it’s that some organizations view people as a commodity. People are people, so when you lay thousands off, don’t expect people to come running when you hire again when work gets tough. It goes both ways and after what we saw from 2018–2022 and before, you would think some learning took place. But it’s business — terminate to reduce cost or raise stock prices, restructure cost, etc. and figure out your headcount needs later. Even when six months ago, adding talent was your priority. The hamster wheel is real. Hire like crazy, layoff, hire again, no true plan for doing anything differently, but this churn isn’t sustainable, nor good business.

It’s about the people, stupid, if I dare to play off the infamous 90’s campaign slogan. People are the priority. Happy employees equals happy clients, high performance and a higher level of ownership and accountability. Some companies don’t get it, or maybe even scarier, is when they see it, yet choose to ignore it and prefer to invest in other areas at a cost to their people. Action shows your priorities, not talk. Organizations continue to talk about how people are their priority, but many show that people rank behind a whole slew of corporate priorities, including their customers. If you don’t make your people feel you care and want to advance them, in turn, they will deprioritize their work for you as well.

Companies can understand the bottom line figures, KPIs, OKRs, whatever your flavor, but when it comes to people, organizations can struggle because people change and sometimes numbers don’t tell the full story. Groups of people evolve over time, but more recently with the rapidly changing socially connected world, with a variety of events and movements, the rate of change is starting to rival tech at times. MeToo, social justice, COVID pandemic, climate crisis, inflation, school violence, and so on. Not to mention the individual rate of change with your leaders and teams- people change individually often, but the community change has shifted to a hyper speed.

It’s about the people- I have seen organizations claim people were at the center of everything, but as the companies grip the bat and struggle to meet revenue and profit expectations, that mindset fades away over time. Some companies try, but stopped making the necessary sacrifices to live it, breathe it, and grow it. It is in danger to become just another tagline, not a real mantra to live by. Some organizations abandon their core principle because they weren’t hitting expectations, when really it was a number of other factors impacting that, and not something to hold against its people.

Companies underestimate the cost associated with their actions as seen in a recent common example shared by Cameron Herold…add customer service headcount, or fix the actual problem? Some companies choose an ongoing drain on their margin in the name of short term numbers, instead of doing the right thing for sustainable growth. Or for companies that focus on numbers that aren’t controllable, rather than working with their teams and holding them to activity-based metrics.

People leadership will continue to be a hot topic, and some companies will excel, while others fall further behind. Be a positive part of the labor movement and make it about taking care of your people, and not realizing too late that your employees win for you, so be a winner for them.

Here are five things you can do to prioritize people in your organization:

1. Measure engagement and related metrics through Officevibe or a similar platform- identify what your team really thinks, don’t just assume it

2. Develop and empower People and Talent teams that actually focus on, people and talent

3. Consider your associates as your number one asset, and you shift your mindset on how to empower, allocate, manage, maintain and reward them.

4. Executive leadership must practice what they preach and show they care with action and not just talk about it.

5. Make it about people’s careers and align with how the firm can support them on their career journey- your people will appreciate it and reward you accordingly.

It’s time to align your people with driving results and not sacrifice your people for the bottom line at every sign of stress. The market will continue to reward companies that make this happen and bring their people along for the ride. Your results will have peaks and valleys, you already know that, so let’s plan for it with solutions focused on scalability and flexibility, not survival and shred when the market gets unstable.

Hopefully, this added a little value to your business or your career. Thank you for reading.

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