Quality in hard times

In last week's post, I remarked on the risk that mismanagement can teach employees not to care about the quality of their work: specifically, if employees are penalized for doing good work, they will quickly learn not to repeat the experience. A reader commented that this outcome doesn't even require active mismanagement; the simple failure to reward good work can do damage by itself. She wrote that the absence of any "consistent opportunity for reward can create a 'well, why bother then?' atmosphere." And of course she's right. I suspect many of us have experienced contemporary examples of exactly this dynamic at one point or other. In further discussion, she gave me a concrete historical example from the history of the British Royal Navy, whose officer corps had become so crowded during the nineteenth century that no further promotions were possible. Nor were there a lot of wars for the Navy to fight, once Napoleon was defeated in 1815. So with no chance for fighting and no hope of promotion, many officers stopped caring about their work and the corps began to rot.  

'What comes next? They become careless of themselves; most of them take to drink, more or less, for that is a habit almost impossible to wholly abstain from, while leading that kind of monotonous life; from that they become despised by their seniors in the service'.... The diary of a seaman in the Leander in the Pacific in 1863-5 notes seven officers court-martialed for drinking, not counting the chief engineer who died of it.*

Not officers, but you get the idea.

But this observation raises a further question. What does reward mean? Are rewards always money? If yes, we have a problem, because no company can count on consistent profitability, year in and year out. One year, somehow, times are going to be tough. One year, somehow, there won't be any extra cash on hand to distribute rewards for even the best service. And it would be painful to think that hard times might destroy the incentive for quality work.**

I have worked for companies that hit hard times, and my experience is that we continued to do good work. But everyone's case is a little different. There were a couple of people who were just there for the paycheck, or who had financial obligations that couldn't wait: they left promptly for greener pastures. And there were a couple who were laid off as the company retrenched. But many of us stuck it out, and continued to do the best we knew how.

If I ask myself Why? I see a number of factors. One is that we had already built up an ésprit de corps from working together in better times, so that none of us wanted to let down our colleagues. We weren't supporting The Company (which is more or less an abtraction), but we were supporting Larry in the next office, and Frank down the hall—people with whom we might bicker about little stuff, but whose work we still respected.

A second factor is that management communicated with us openly, and—so far as we could tell—treated us fairly. They rolled out information in All-Hands Meetings, so that everyone got the same message at the same time. And they let us know, "Here's what we can do for you today; here's what we want to do for you but can't right now; here's how we plan to get there." Knowing that we were all in the same boat made a difference. Knowing that we weren't being played for suckers made us willing to do our part.  

We discussed similar points in this blog last year. Mostly people like working together, so they are willing to cut the company some slack when things go wrong. But people can think for themselves, so they want you to tell them the truth. (And they can usually tell if you are lying!) People need you to give them honesty, respect, and simple justice every single day—which is far more often more than they ask for a raise or a bonus. So if you (as manage­ment) are willing to fulfill your obligations to give your people honesty, respect, and justice—even when you can't back those up with more money—they are generally willing to return the favor by continuing to fulfill their obligations to you. 

Thus can you ask for quality work even in hard times. But only thus!

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* From N.A.M. Rodger, The Price of Victory (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2024), p. 75. I thank Terri Williamson for raising the point out of her study of the Royal Navy, and for providing the citation. 

** The point would become even more acute in case the economy as a whole were ever to enter a contraction spiral, because then employees couldn't just jump to a profitable competitor. For explorations of this possibility, see e.g. the research of J.M. Greer, for example here.