The Case for Good Jobs: How Great Companies Bring Dignity, Pay, and Meaning to Everyone’s Work

Investing in workers is good for them and for business, according to this impassioned outing by Ton (The Good Jobs Strategy), a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She contends that prioritizing customer-facing workers boosts profits because it reduces turnover while increasing productivity and customer satisfaction. To that end, she outlines the five tenets of her “good jobs system”: invest in workers (generous hourly rates and consistent schedules), simplify workflow, give employees a voice in how to best serve customers, train employees to perform “both customer-facing and non–customer-facing tasks” (ensuring they can be productive during periods of low traffic), and staff “more hours of labor than the expected workload so that employees can do their jobs without rushing.” Examining companies that have followed this advice, she notes that Costco’s $25 median hourly wage for salespeople boosted employee retention and helped the company increase its annual revenue. Ton also details her work improving employee productivity at Quest Diagnostics’ call center by embracing feedback from reps on how to improve workflow. Persuasively argued and bolstered by astute case studies, this will be a boon to business leaders. (June)