Professor Zeynep Ton at MIT Sloan School of Management in Cambridge. Ton is on a mission to change how company leaders think, and how they treat their employees.Years ago, I worked at a company where wages were low and turnover was high. Workers were replaceable ― or so it seemed ― and executives must have felt it was silly to pay more than the bare minimum.
Schools can’t get enough teachers. Police and fire departments can’t be fully staffed. Hospitals can’t get enough janitors or chefs. Senior living communities can’t get enough aides.in the Boston area, and it has massive impacts on our lives, our towns, and our competitiveness. Her focus was on numbers, algorithms, and making sure the right products were in the right place at the right time. The answer to making retail more efficient, she thought, was to crunch more data to optimize profits. But when she actually visited retailers, she realized that there were serious problems with that data.
Ton could feel her focus shifting ― away from supply chains and towards people. She noticed that on days when she shadowed retail workers, she often came home with a backache. “The first thing that’s striking is how physical it is,” one employee told her. “We are throwaways who are a dime a dozen. Just human robots.”Ton came to believe that workers aren’t a dime a dozen. Their knowledge of how stores work is extremely valuable, and not easily replaced.
Dewey Hasbrouck ― the owner of two franchises of Moe’s Original BBQ in Maine ― says he always admired the Costco approach. But when Hasbrouck found his business battered by the financial disaster of the pandemic, he didn’t know how to move forward. And then he stumbled on Ton’s first book, and sought out help from the Good Jobs Institute, a nonprofit which she cofounded with Martin.