Valuing Employees Can Improve Morale

This is the fourth part in a series of articles criticizing America's corporate culture for what I have called soul destroying behavior. I know I am not the only person to do this, but the voices have not yet been loud enough and the people do have a forum have largely been ignored because the people responsible believes that it does not apply to them. I have submitted the articles on corporate culture for free and in return I ask that the reader bookmarks them, e-mails them to people who need to read it or in some cases print it out and put it on the desk of a particular troublesome employer.

But one thing employers fail to do or in some case fail to do well is make decisions that actually work for their customers and the people who will be designed to implement them. I'm not so sure this is intentional or anyway related to the Mormon spirituality that has slipped into corporate culture, but rather an aspect of human nature. While the people on the top know they need the average worker to make money for them, they often ignore them when the people working for them who know the customers say that something will not work.

The problem in corporate culture is that of the people who normally make these decisions being a higher class or better educated and assuming because they have more education, they automatically know better than the peons, most of whom only who hold a high school diploma who work for them.

Sadly, those responsible for the current corporate culture look only at the potential bottom line rather than coming up with the solutions that will work. Obviously, it is impractical to poll the employees and find out what does and does not work. Often this is done in a vain attempt to make employees think their opinions matter, about the only way to correct the situation is to promote people from within to the highest positions in the company. To the best of my knowledge, only one restaurant chain, the McDonald's Corporation has over half the corporate staff having started out in a restaurant. You know what? It works, too. McDonald's Employees actually have fewer complaints about their jobs than other companies and strangely, despite the low pay many people who work there do so happily.

In large corporations, valuing each and every opinion that an employee holds is difficult, but corporate culture could improve at least one current soul destroying aspect by looking less to those with MBAs and more to those who have experience in the school of hard knocks in their business field.