CHAPTER 7

When Times Get Tough

If you take care of your employees, they’ll take care of your customers and the customers will keep coming back.

—J. Willard Marriott Sr., founder, Marriott International

If You Care, You’re There

Perhaps more than anything else they can do, organizations and their leaders can demonstrate that they care by their willingness to go the extra mile when times get tough. Very often, that demonstration occurs simply by being physically present when their workers, customers, or communities are experiencing difficulty.

In our view, there is something of a quid pro quo involved here. Recall from the first chapter that discretionary effort is, by definition, a contribution people can make if—but only if—they want to. The conscious decision to part with some of that discretionary effort is based, at least in part, on the individual’s perception of how things would go if the shoe were on the other foot. In other words, “You’re asking me to walk through fire for you? Would you—or have you—done the same for me?”

One of the reasons that Marriott International is able to capture so much of their staff members’ “spirit to serve” is that they have demonstrated time and again that the company will pull out all the stops in times of need.

Marriott’s Response to Hurricane Katrina: Quick, Compelling, Sustained

When Hurricane Katrina struck the central Gulf Coast region and unleashed its fury on August 29, 2005, more than 1,800 people lost their lives and many thousands more were cast into misery. This most debilitating and paralyzing natural disaster in U.S. history caused an estimated $81 billion in damage and, according to estimates from the U.S. Department of Labor, cost the short-term loss of more than 230,000 jobs.1 Although valuable help poured in from countless national and global organizations, few responded with more compassion and practical help than Marriott.

With 21 properties in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi closed by the storm, and more than 2,800 employees impacted, Marriott mobilized quickly to meet its people’s—and their communities’—short-term and continuing needs. They worked vigorously to restore area operations and their employees’ jobs. Just a few days after the storm clouds cleared, the company established the Marriott and Ritz-Carlton Disaster Relief Fund to care for affected Marriott associates’ immediate and longer-term needs.

Many of the company’s property owners, guests, and suppliers joined the Marriott family in building the fund, which eventually raised $5.6 million for Katrina victims and remains in place today to benefit those touched by future disasters. Marriott associates from around the world supported fellow workers by donating vacation time and cash to the relief fund.

To their credit, Marriott management realized that there was no time for a committee to study “best practices” or to worry about what was procedurally correct with respect to providing help. Within days of Katrina’s landfall, each affected associate received a $500 check to help meet their immediate needs. As many had no habitable place to stay, associates and their families were moved into Marriott hotels and fed in their restaurants. Everyone continued to receive their pay and benefits through the month of September, and the donated vacation time was converted to cash and used to further extend associate benefits coverage from October to December. Suspending its rules designed for ordinary times, the company also provided immediate cash payouts for all qualifying associates with accrued paid time off balances.

Once the company had fed and sheltered employees and their families, they focused on providing longer-term housing assistance. More than $3 million was distributed to 1,749 associates to help pay for rent, mortgages, and home repair expenses.

The rehabilitation and recovery of New Orleans was to be a long and difficult process, punctuated by periods both of success and of frustration. Marriott decided to further invest in the community by partnering with Habitat for Humanity International to build homes throughout New Orleans, and then with KaBOOM! to build playgrounds in particularly hard-hit areas where many of the company’s associates lived.

Although Marriott management acted the way they did because it was the right thing to do, there can be little doubt that it will be a long time before their 150,000 worldwide employees forget how the company treated some of their own in a time of need.

When a team member is enduring a personal hardship, we want you to go above and beyond for that person. When you do, you will have their full attention when you talk about going above and beyond for our customers.

—Dan Cathy, President and chief operating officer, Chick-fil-A, addressing a group of new store operators and managers

Hanmer MSL’s Response to the Mumbai Bombings

The evening rush hour in Mumbai, India, on July 13, 2011, was shattered by a terrorist act that included three successive bomb blasts that claimed an estimated 27 lives and left more than 130 injured. The city’s initial shock and paralysis quickly gave way to frenetic action by those trying to calm the area’s 20 million inhabitants—including about 300 employees of Hanmer MSL, a major public relations and social media marketing company headquartered in the subcontinent’s largest metropolis. The company that had built a name, in part, on helping organizations communicate in times of crisis was now eating its own cooking.

Chief executive officer Jaideep Shergill and senior manager Prashanti Mikayla told us that their top priorities were to first protect their employees’ safety and then to quickly communicate clear, accurate information to all of their workers and their families, in Mumbai and elsewhere. “There was so much confusion in the initial hours,” Mikayla told us. “Nobody knew who was responsible for the bombings or where the next blast might occur.” A number of the company’s managers and employees were in the office when the blasts occurred toward the end of the workday; however, others were scattered among various parts of the city, on their way home, or with clients. “The first thing that we, as the leadership team, communicated among ourselves was that everyone who could, needed to come to the office to ‘be physically present’ where the employees could see and talk to us,” Mikayla told us. “Next, it was important to be able to source the most dependable information about the on-ground reality so that [we could take] the right course of action on behalf of the employees and the organization. Being in the media and communications industry worked well for us, as we were able to effectively leverage the network we’d built over the years.”

After efforts to account for every employee (eventually, all were found safe), Hanmer’s leaders urgently wanted to give employees’ families assurance that their loved ones were okay. However, central Mumbai’s jammed phone lines posed a major obstacle. Mikayla shared with us the following account:

The [jammed] telephone lines made communication extremely difficult. But the phones outside the city and in other locations where we have offices were working fine. Our employees wanted to tell their families—who were of course extremely worried—that they were okay. [Their relatives] kept seeing all of this on the news, but no one could get in touch, so many could only assume the worst. So we turned to e-mail and social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to communicate with our employees in other cities, who in turn called our Mumbai employees’ families. This worked remarkably well!

The emphasis on leaders being there, in person, and the urgency and sensitivity with which they handled the communication of reassurance sent an unmistakable message to Hanmer MSL’s employees that they worked for a company that cares—and one that demonstrates that caring, especially in times of crisis. In Mikayla’s words, “I feel that great workplaces are painstakingly created through trust and engagement between organizations and their employees, and that results in greater loyalty and retention.”

Caring Means Going the Extra Mile

Mitchel MacNair joined the U.S. Navy straight out of high school and married his childhood sweetheart after his first year of service. The day after the wedding, the Navy packed and moved the MacNairs’ belongings (unopened wedding gifts and all) to MacNair’s next duty station in upstate New York. Shortly after the newlyweds arrived in their new home, they were notified that the moving van with all their worldly goods had been broken into and that everything had been stolen. Tough way to start a marriage. As if that weren’t enough, the Navy’s processes at the time meant that the couple had to wait six months before being reimbursed for the monetary value of their loss.

Fast-forward to 1998, when MacNair was hired by the Dow Chemical Company in Houston for his first post-Navy job as an instrumentation engineer. Their first child was only a few months old when the MacNairs arrived in Houston. The Navy had placed all of their belongings in storage in San Antonio until they were able to find a permanent residence. Again, the Navy bureaucracy ground slowly and MacNair learned that it would take three weeks for his stuff to make the 200-mile trip from San Antonio to Houston.

When MacNair’s boss learned that his new employee’s family was going to have to sleep on the floor and stand up a lot for a few weeks, he decided to intervene. The manager immediately called a furniture rental company and arranged to have everything the MacNairs needed delivered to their home the next day. MacNair told us, “When I say everything, I mean EVERYTHING,” including plants and pictures of people the MacNairs didn’t even know, to hang on the walls.

MacNair and his wife were completely overwhelmed, and both instantly became, as he put it, “The number one fans of Dow Chemical.” “I’ve been with Dow for over 13 years now,” MacNair says, “and I would never think of leaving. Dow has just been too good to my family and me, and that experience with my first boss left an indelible impression on us.”

So indelible an impression, in fact, that MacNair has told the story to lots of people over the years, and he eagerly shares it when recruiting highly sought after candidates for Dow.

Employee Engagement in a Headwind

Workers, jobs, and economic output weren’t the only victims of the 2007–2009 great recession. Employee engagement fared poorly too. Workers felt squeezed by organizations struggling to survive, and leaders too often failed to realize that the only way to survive a tough economy is by attaining every employee’s full, willing engagement.

A 2009 study by nonprofit business research group the Conference Board reported that only 45 percent of workers surveyed claimed to be satisfied in their jobs, down from 61 percent in 1987.2 Unlike the economy, this downward trend has been constant, not cyclical. Just like gravity, job satisfaction has gone but one way of late: down.

Global consulting firm Mercer conducted a 2011 study whose report carried the headline “Post Recession Environment Yields Increasingly Disengaged Workforce.” The study reported that 32 percent of employees polled were “seriously considering leaving” their jobs, up from 23 percent in 2005. An additional 21 percent said they had a negative view of their employer and had largely checked out of their job, even if they weren’t looking for another one.3 Simple math yields the discomforting revelation that, based on this study, more than half the workforce has unplugged and taken their game home, while still taking up space, precious oxygen . . . and a paycheck. British consultancy Reabur.com reported in the same year that 31 percent of U.K. workers were “unhappy” in their jobs, and 7 percent went so far as to say they “hated” them.4

Westport, Connecticu–based psychologist Hendrie Weisinger offers the following list of what gets the American worker hot under the proverbial collar, be it of the white or blue variety. We suspect that these items (listed in no particular order) needn’t be confined to the American workforce:

Although aggrieved employees may appear to do nothing about the situation on the surface, the fact remains that people really don’t forget about their perceived injustices. Rather, they file them away and accumulate others until they reach a breaking point—at which time they escalate their demand for justice.

All too often, an employee who has moved on to a more overt plan of action will find someone else to help them with the problem. Although the number of people turning to unions to accomplish this has steadily declined over the past 30 years, we can’t count organized labor out.

A 2011 attempt by Wisconsin’s newly inaugurated governor Scott Walker to sharply curtail the collective bargaining rights of most of the state’s public sector unions drew thousands of protesters to the capitol in Madison for weeks. The fury over this issue, along with other state employee concessions and budget actions, was not about to go away. Eleven months later, 1 million Wisconsinites (nearly one-third of the state’s registered voters) signed petitions in favor of a recall election to “deselect” the governor.

It should be clear by now that we’re not big fans of unions. In fact, much of our work over the past 30 years has focused on helping organizations obviate unions by maintaining a positive employee relations culture in which both the individual and the organization can do their best work and gain the most from it. That said, we respect every worker’s right to make a choice as to whether or not they are willing to enter into a direct, cooperative, mutually beneficial relationship with their management. That choice is most often based on whether or not management has earned the benefit of the doubt. If the answer is yes, workers feel no need to reach out and seek (let alone pay for) the protection of organized labor.

Meanwhile, it has become increasingly popular for people to involve other outside advocates such as agents, lawyers, or state or federal agencies to get what they want. According to the American Bar Association, there were more than 1.2 million “resident and active” lawyers in the United States in 2010 (32,000 of them on federal payrolls alone). That’s one lawyer for every 260 persons. And if statistics released by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission are any indication, all those attorneys have been working overtime; the years 2008 through 2010 saw a period of sharp and steady increases in the number of suits filed for unlawful discrimination and harassment, with the figure in 2010 being the highest in the agency’s 45-year history.

Stay away from the courthouse; you’ll never make any money there.

—J.E. Davis, founder, Winn-Dixie Stores

Give Us Some Recourse

Contented Cow organizations realize that whenever you’ve got two or more people working in some common endeavor, perceived injustices and serious problems will arise from time to time. They realize too that most people really don’t want to sue their employer, join a labor union, or involve an outside agency, let alone quit their job. So rather than waiting to be victimized by one or another of the self-prescribed remedies, these companies proactively install a system that tolerates and even encourages the airing and resolution of the problem so that people can get on with the business at hand.

Atlanta-area human resources pro Kim Scholes, who now works in the private sector, gained the bulk of her experience in alternative dispute resolution (ADR) while she was with a heavily unionized department of the federal government. As Scholes explains, “We used a ‘Win-Win Bargaining’ model an as alternative to the more formal union grievance procedure every time it was appropriate. Not only did most employees like it better, but it gave everyone a much faster way to get things resolved. We found that, before very long, the number of grievances and even Unfair Labor Practice filings went way down.”

Mike Field is the employee and labor relations manager for Dopaco, a Philadelphia-area company that manufactures packaging for quick-service restaurants, through a network of six plants, three of which have union representation and three that do not. Several years ago, while one of the company’s nonunion plants was in the midst of a union-organizing campaign, Field was speaking with a worker who was supporting the union’s potential involvement at the plant.

“You know what the problem is here, Mike,” the worker said. “We have no recourse. When you guys want to discipline somebody, we have nowhere to turn, and that’s why I think we need the union.”

This man’s comment put the wheels in motion. It wasn’t so much the union that the workers wanted, but a system of justice and some means of recourse. Soon after a majority of the plant’s workers voted not to seek union representation, he assembled a team comprised of members of both rank-and-file and management to research, develop, and implement what was to become a highly successful peer review process known as EAAAS (Employee Adverse Action Appeal System).

Dopaco’s process was designed principally to adjudicate disciplinary action vis-à-vis the company’s policies and procedures. According to Field, “This was one of the most rewarding activities I’ve ever been involved in, because it [allowed] management and the employees [to work] together on a project that was aimed at helping everyone.”

Apparently the process is working. Not only did the atmosphere in the plant improve after EAAAS, because, in Field’s view, “the employees felt we’d listened to them and provided a fair means of recourse to them,” but there was never any more union-organizing activity in the facility. And there were significant side benefits as well. Because the process involved renewed training of managers on the company’s disciplinary policies, there were far fewer incidents in which an employee felt the need to question the actions that were taken. And because managers would naturally rather avoid the process in the first place, they’ve taken a proactive stand to do a better job when correcting performance and behavior issues. And finally, EAAAS lets employees know that their managers have given due consideration to disciplinary issues before actions are taken.

“One really good piece of advice we got,” Field told us, “[which is advice] I’d give to anyone considering something like this: you can’t make this a cookie-cutter plan. You’ve got to customize it to fit your specific set of circumstances.”

Whether you decide to implement something like Dopaco’s peer review process or some other form of alternative dispute resolution in your organization, keep in mind that people will always seek an advocate or “some recourse,” as the Dopaco worker put it. As leaders, we can help design that recourse, or let others do it for themselves. It’s our call.

Don’t Expect Employees to Pay for Your Mistakes

Another way that companies demonstrate whether or not they care is how much they expect people to pay for managers’ mistakes. Sometimes employees are asked to give up perks they once enjoyed, and this isn’t always a bad thing to do, especially in light of the alternatives. But people take an understandably dim view of the matter when that sacrifice is caused by (or occurs in the face of) managerial indiscretions or extravagances.

Consider, for example, the case of a large southern hospital. When faced with the prospect of having to lay off more than 100 full-time employees, they decided instead on an ambitious cost-cutting program, which is detailed in the following excerpt from a message conveyed to all hospital staff (our editorial comments appear in brackets):

On the surface, the message doesn’t sound too unreasonable. It’s kind of the old “let’s all pull together to keep this boat afloat” idea, one which we support. Yet it mysteriously left out information about the $4.1 million capital expenditure in the same year for such health-improving hospital features as a new marble entranceway, expanded lobby complete with a $1 million aquarium and attendant staff, and new china for executive functions.

The grumbling over the cost cuts turned to loud shouts and defections when the opulence was installed. And a year after all the selective belt tightening, a hundred more people received “unstable employment”; in other words, they were laid off. All we can say is that we’re glad neither of us lives close enough to this hospital to actually have to depend on it for health care. We imagine there are some pretty Discontented Cows running around the place. And although we’re sure they’re all behaving professionally, we don’t even want to think about the dangerous combination of a Mad Cow with a needle or proctoscope!

While the eventual layoffs at the hospital may seem cruelly handled and only halfheartedly forestalled, “guaranteed employment” is every bit as unjust and unkind—especially in the economic environment in which we’ve been living for the past few years.

Sometimes a change of pasture will make the cow fatter.

—American frontier saying

Layoffs—A Fact of Life

The great recession saw a predictable resurgence in layoff activity all over the United States and abroad. The more than doubling of the U. S. unemployment rate, from 4.6 percent in 2007 to 9.6 percent in 2010, rested largely on the backs of workers who received the dreaded message, “You don’t get to work here anymore. It’s not because of anything you did, but because we can’t afford to keep paying you.” The better leaders in the better-run companies delivered these messages in person. Others took the cowardly way out and shared the news by phone, letter, or e-mail. Real class. And although some of the downsizing was unavoidable, much was not.

Although there’s little evidence that layoffs lead to better performing organizations in the long run, some layoff decisions in the past few years were a matter of survival. In other cases, bloated organizations took advantage of the economic timing to shed some affordable, if not altogether indispensable, weight.

Fueled by general conjecture that society was somewhat more forgiving of tough decisions in periods of economic turmoil, a kind of “everybody else is doing it” mentality took over. This allowed many organizations to feel as though they could downsize without suffering much damage to their corporate reputations. Only time will tell how safe a bet that turns out to be.

Organization development researchers McKinley, Schick, and Sanchez point out that “while downsizing has been viewed primarily as a cost reduction strategy, there is considerable evidence that downsizing does not reduce expenses as much as desired, and that sometimes expenses may actually increase.”5

Although most organizations have a pretty clear picture of the payroll savings they can expect from sending large groups of people home, most substantially underestimate the following cost of such actions—which can wipe out the gains promised by the restructuring:

There are at least two ways to look at the issue of downsizing. First, as the frequency and pace of change in the commercial landscape increase, companies are propelled in and out of business sectors and markets at an ever more rapid rate. It is undeniable that the days when employees could reasonably expect to have a one-company career if they so wished are pretty much over, perhaps forever. From now on, nearly all businesses will continue to find themselves reacting to an oversupply or undersupply of labor as they relentlessly pursue ways to do things better, faster, and cheaper.

No matter how great the hue and cry is over management’s obsession with the short-term outlook, market forces have spoken. In fact, given that nearly everyone these days has money in the market (via a 401(k) or IRA), a Wisconsin schoolteacher is just as inclined as any Wall Street analyst to raise hell when earnings don’t meet or exceed targets every quarter. In an interview during an earlier period of downsizing, Peter Lynch, former manager of Fidelity’s Magellan Fund, pretty much echoed this thought: “All of us are looking for the best deals in clothing, computers, and telephone service—and rewarding the high-quality, low-cost providers with our business,” he observed. “I haven’t met one person who would agree to pay AT&T twice the going rate for phone service if AT&T would promise to stop laying people off.”6

However, it’s also necessary to look at things from the opposite side of the fence. It’s a given that the extent to which employees are concerned about the prospect of losing their jobs mirrors inversely the extent to which they are likely to be concerned with doing their jobs. In short, Worried Cows don’t make very productive (let alone, Contented) Cows. The folks you are counting on to deliver high-quality goods or a fantastic experience to your customers shouldn’t be so busy worrying about their own futures that they can’t care about the business.

Our view falls somewhere between these two sides. Although layoffs are indeed necessary at times, there is a big difference between grudgingly accepting them as a final desperate act of corporate survival and engaging in what Springfield Remanufacturing CEO Jack Stack once called corporate insanity—that is, using them as a convenient way to periodically trim a little fat. In either case, however, there’s no getting around the fact that they are a sign of management failure. According to Stack, “You lay people off when you’ve screwed up, when you’ve guessed wrong about the market, [or] when you haven’t anticipated some critical development or created adequate contingency plans. It’s a sign of how badly management has failed, and the people who get hurt are invariably those who had nothing to do with creating the problem in the first place.”7

Some Rules for “Staying Out of the Soup”

Here are some precepts that we believe will help you avoid this unpleasantness altogether, if you’ll only execute them faithfully:

The way in which your workforce (and the buying public) perceives layoffs comes down, in the end, to your corporate mind-set. If your organization considers it acceptable to hire people full-time one day and then send them home a few months or years later—simply because you’ve miscalculated your requirement for labor or ability to profitably sell a product or service—then it’s clear to everyone that you don’t care.

Some organizations are characterized by a sort of binge-and-purge personality—corporate bulimics, if you will. They’re caught up in a capricious cycle of staffing up and laying off to meet labor demands exactly. We are not talking about hiring temps or making a strategic decision to permanently outsource certain noncore activities. Rather, we mean those companies that routinely hire and fire because they erroneously think it’s a good way to do business. Rarely, if ever, do they acknowledge the consequences of the emotional upheaval visited upon the employees involved—not only those who leave, but particularly the ones who stay—and its concomitant impact on the overall health of the organization.

We know that most CEOs agonize a great deal over the decision to send some people home in order to preserve others’ jobs. They must conclude at times—thoughtfully and regretfully—that this is the only (albeit unfortunate) course of action to take. If you do find yourself in the unenviable position of having to send people home, there are some things you can do to make it easier on all concerned:

There’s Got to Be Another Way!

And as it turns out, there are other ways, besides mass layoffs, to stay afloat when labor supply rises above demand. One of our favorite examples comes from Charlotte, North Carolina–based steel manufacturer Nucor, a company with more than 50 U.S. facilities. Despite having come off some of the worst years in its history, including a loss of $294 million in 2009, Nucor is famous for never having laid anyone off. “It’s not a policy; it’s a practice,” says Jerry Richie, a production manager at the company’s plant in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.

Nucor’s ability to (so far) operate without a layoff stems from its unique culture, coupled with a compensation structure that emphasizes pay for performance at all levels, from the manufacturing floor to the executive offices. The “deal,” which all workers understand before day 1, is that their pay will be high when production demand is; when it’s down, compensation follows suit. The recent downturn in business hasn’t been easy on Nucor’s workers, but they’ve kept their jobs as well as their faith in a management that held up their end of the bargain.

“People were severely impacted from a pay standpoint, in terms of hours being cut and our unique bonus structure. But everyone also understood that they kept their jobs and their benefits,” Richie said. And those who were at the plant in 2007 haven’t forgotten the $8,000 profit sharing check they’d received when times were better.

Nucor workers weren’t sitting around twiddling their thumbs. When they weren’t making steel, they attended training, did landscaping, and maintained buildings.

Darrell Sabin, CEO of hosemaker Fluid Connector Products of Portland, Oregon, was searching actively for ways to avoid laying people off when he learned of his state’s Work Share program. Designed during the 1980s recession and revitalized in response to the latest downturn, the plan allows employers like Sabin to cut worker hours and makes up part of the loss through unemployment insurance. In other words, your employer doesn’t have to terminate you, and the state doesn’t wind up paying the entire unemployment bill.

Lots of companies cut wages rather than staff, but FedEx did this a bit differently by starting at the top. Executives took a 10 percent cut, with 5 percent for everyone else. FedEx also announced in 2009 that for the first time, it wouldn’t be advertising on that year’s Super Bowl telecast—another very public effort to save money.

And while shortening the workweek isn’t a terribly novel idea, it works. Investment firm Schwab went from Casual Fridays to no Fridays at all, cutting pay by 20 percent but giving everyone a long weekend. And Reading, Pennsylvania–based custom plastic packaging maker Tray-Pak has instituted a four-day workweek during the typically slow months from February until April for the past two years. Most Tray-Pak workers preferred getting paid 80 percent and keeping their benefits to the alternative. It also paid off for the company, which didn’t have to reinvest in the costly training program for its manufacturing workers.

When networking giant Cisco saw its fortunes plummet after the tech bubble burst around 2001, it instituted an unusual program called Cisco Community Fellows. Eighty Cisco employees opted to work for nonprofits for a year, pulling down a third of their usual wages rather than cutting ties with the company. During that time, they received employee benefits, vesting, and access to training and continuing education. If jobs opened up, the fellows enjoyed an advantage over external candidates.

Doing Well by Doing Good

One of the best ways to get people’s minds off their own situations and provide a little perspective is through a concerted show of support for others less fortunate. And there are plenty of them out there.

Although Hurricane Katrina destroyed many things, it helped strengthen the bonds between Marriott and the international organization Habitat for Humanity, which partners with citizens and organizations to build low-cost homes for new homeowners. Between 2007 and 2010, Marriott associates and managers in the hard-hit Gulf region contributed more than 7,000 labor hours toward building Habitat homes, including six homes for their fellow Marriott workers. One Habitat homeowner, Geraldine Taylor, a housekeeping supervisor at the Ritz-Carlton, New Orleans (a Marriott property), was so appreciative of all that the company had done for her and her son that she now volunteers in the ongoing Marriott Habitat projects.

Working with these kinds of organizations not only is great for the community and aids recipients but can create a powerful team-building opportunity for your employees. I once accompanied my wife to our local Ronald McDonald House when her team had volunteered to feed that night’s residents—families of children undergoing treatment for serious medical conditions in nearby hospitals. All I did was carry the food in, and I still left with a great sense of satisfaction from the appreciation of the families who were there.

Publix Super Markets has been a champion for “rescued food” in the markets it serves. The Lakeland, Florida–based chain that has more than 1,000 stores in five southeastern states pledges as part of its mission statement to be “intolerant of waste.” They try to reconcile the fact that roughly one-quarter of the food produced in the United States is thrown away, with statistics citing the nearly 50 million Americans who live in “food-insecure” households. One initiative is for Publix and its employee-owners to partner with the North Florida nonprofit agency Waste Not Want Not (among others) to distribute tons of food to families in need—food that may be past its “sell by” date but that is still safe and nutritious and would otherwise go into a landfill, uneaten.

We told you in Chapter 4 that one of Toronto’s Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment’s corporate value statements is “Leaders in Our Community.” Demonstrating that those words are more than an idle bullet point on a list of values, the company partners with the area’s Second Harvest Food Bank by donating all perishable food items following each of the more than 250 events at Air Canada Centre every year. Maple Leaf players had 100 percent participation in the team’s 2012 charitable ticket purchase program, which allowed more than 2,300 kids and nearly 150 military troops to attend a Leafs game. And each holiday season, the company’s employees act as bell ringers for the Salvation Army’s famous kettle collection drives. The organization is so committed to helping the community that it has its own TeamingUp blog, and each year it awards a cash prize of C$3,000 to the employee who has done the most to personify its community leadership value.

Chapter Summary

Better Practices:

Notes

1. “Hurricane Katrina Job Losses,” NPR, October 7, 2005.

2. “I Can’t Get No . . . Job Satisfaction, That Is,” The Conference Board, January 2010.

3. “Inside Employees’ Minds: Navigating the New Rules of Engagement,” Mercer, July 2011.

4. Antonia Oprita, “A Third of U.K. Employees Unhappy in Their Jobs,” CNBC, October 25, 2011.

5. William McKinley, Allen G. Schick, Carol M. Sanchez, “Organizational Downsizing: Constraining, Cloning, Learning,” Academy of Management Executive 9, no. 3 (1995).

6. Peter Lynch Interview, Worth, June 1996, 89.

7. Jack Stack, “Mad about Layoffs,” INC magazine, May 1996, 21.