Invest in People
Good Jobs companies invest in people in a way that creates a virtuous cycle with operations to improve performance. This means investments in recruiting, training, career paths, high performance standards, fair wages. and predictable schedules.
Assess Your Company
Our Good Jobs Strategy diagnostic has 28 questions to assess how well your company embraces Invest in People, including:
- Hiring & Onboarding: Do the people responsible for hiring have time to recruit and hire the best people?
- Predictable Work: Do most employees consistently work for more than 15 hours a week and receive their schedules at least two weeks in advance?
- Performance: Do employees know what the three most important performance measures are?
- Pay & Growth: Is frontline employee pay above the industry average? Are almost all managers promoted from within?
Invest in People Enables Operational Excellence
The four operational choices that drive performance and continuous improvement require a capable and motivated workforce. Focus & Simplify requires a good understanding of what customers want. Knowledgeable employees can contribute to that understanding and can offer substitutes when the company doesn't carry exactly what a customer wants. Empowerment also requires investment in people. Hiring the right people, setting high performance expectations, and monitoring and teaching ensure that empowered employees make good decisions.
Cross-Train requires multiple skills and Operate with Slack requires a motivated workforce and high performance expectations. When employees have extra time, they need to be motivated to work on other tasks, to find opportunities for improvement, and to learn more about customer needs.
Case Study: QuikTrip
QuikTrip is a convenience store chain headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that provides good jobs and meaningful work:
- Good benefits: Paid time off, profit sharing, 401k, vacation, healthcare, scholarship programs.
- Above-average pay: High pay for new full-time entry-level employees. (In some markets, new hire pay is over $40,000 annually.)
- High-performance work environment: QuikTrip only hires 1% of the people it interviews, has extensive training for new hires, and rewards workers who meet its high standards.
- Performance pay: Workers are eligible for performance bonuses, even in the first year.
Learn more about some of QuikTrip’s benefits here.
Case Study: Mercadona
Mercadona has continually invested in people while outperforming its competitors. Its labor policies have been praised by the International Labour Organization. Some of those investments are:
- Full-time employment for over 79,000 people
- Above average industry pay
- 11% average annual raises for the first three years on the job
- Extended maternity and paternity leave
- Training programs
- A high level of internal promotion
- 98% of employees given performance bonuses in 2016