The Case for Good Jobs with Zeynep Ton

Your Working Life with Caroline Dowd-Higgins

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Zeynep Ton is a Practice in the Operations Management group at MIT Sloan School of Management. She is also president of the nonprofit Good Jobs Institute, where she works with companies to improve their operations in a way that satisfies employees, customers, and investors alike. Before joining MIT Sloan, Ton spent seven years on the faculty at Harvard Business School. She is the author of The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits and The Case for Good Jobs: How Great Companies Bring Dignity, Pay and Meaning to Everyone’s Work.

From healthcare facilities to call centers, fulfillment centers to factories, and restaurants to retail stores, companies are struggling to find or keep workers, because the jobs they offer are low-paying, stressful, and provide little chance for growth and success.

In THE CASE FOR GOOD JOBS: How Great Companies Bring Dignity, Pay, and Meaning to Everyone’s Work, Zeynep Ton, MIT professor and pre-eminent voice on the good jobs strategy and co- founder of the nonprofit, Good Jobs Institute, lays out plainly what most companies and leaders are doing wrong—and provides a blueprint for how to get it right.

While many leaders want to provide good jobs—that pay more, provide dignity and meaning in people’s work, and offer opportunities for growth—most don’t know how to start, or they don’t think it can be done without hurting the bottom line. Most want to win with customers but are hobbled by a host of service and operational problems largely driven by high employee turnover—which is partly driven by the low pay.

It is indeed a vicious cycle. In THE CASE FOR GOOD JOBS, Ton provides a way out: why good jobs

combined with strong operations lead to higher productivity and increased competitiveness for the business, positioning organizations for future success.

In this follow-up to her previous book, The Good Jobs Strategy, Ton examines the “why” and “how” of the good jobs system—to help leaders and managers overcome the disconnect between recognizing a better model, and having the courage to implement it. Now more than ever— in a post-pandemic world, where baby boomers are retiring, people are having fewer children, and immigration is on the decline— employees and job seekers may have the cards in their favor for a while, a trend that will lead to rising wages.

· Why market wages aren’t enough and the case for raising frontline worker pay

· Employee turnover: what drives it and how it costs companies more than most executives

think. Various aspects of a high-turnover system including lack of trust between workers and

executives, work overload and understaffing, lack of autonomy, and low expectations

· Why higher pay for workers doesn’t mean higher prices for customers. How H-E-B, Costco,

Sam’s Club, Quest Diagnostics and others have embraced the good jobs system to drive

competitiveness.

· The good jobs system with two mutually dependent components: (1) heavy investment in

people, (2) an operational model that helps workers be more productive and serve customer

better

· Differences in mindsets between good jobs and bad jobs systems

· Why involvement of upstream functions such as product design, marketing, and logistics are

necessary to adopting a good jobs system

· The biggest obstacles to adopting a good jobs system and how courageous leaders have

overcome them

· How to make large investments in labor in stages so that they begin to pay for themselves

· Why system change is less risky than what company leaders think

· Why automation and trends in labor markets including rising minimum wage, fair scheduling,

an aging workforce, rise of employee voice make the good jobs system more attractive _____________________________________________________________________________

Given this, organizations that stay with the status quo—which is expensive financially, competitively, and ethically— will see labor costs rise with the market, but employee turnover won’t improve, and employees output will remain the same, since the job is the same.

With practical advice and case studies from companies that are doing this right, THE CASE FOR GOOD JOBS provides leaders with the blueprint they need to choose excellence by providing good jobs that offer a living wage, dignity, and opportunities for growth both for their employees and their organization.