Interview
MIT's Zeynep Ton explains how caring deeply for workers pays off for companies
- Zainab Khan aims to provide Greg Schell's fund and the global economy with a deeper understanding of how operational management principles apply to people-centric issues, driven by over twenty years of observing high human costs and business inefficiencies in retail and supermarket settings.
- The Good Jobs Institute intends to quantify direct turnover costs for client companies, noting that hiring, recruiting, onboarding, and training can consume 10 to 25 percent of total payroll dollars in frontline settings, while indirect operational execution costs—such as lower sales, higher product costs, waste, and reduced productivity—are projected to be significantly larger.
- Khan anticipates that many leaders in call centers, nursing homes, and restaurants will continue to erroneously view low pay and high turnover as necessary competitive necessities or equipment maintenance costs rather than recognizing them as expensive strategic errors.
- Without the implementation of deep care defined by high pay, stable schedules, and human-centric work design, Kahn projects that high turnover will prevent basic management practices, creating low-trust, high-anxiety systems that lead to managerial burnout and turnover.
- To facilitate transformation, Khan plans to utilize two-day workshops to generate urgency and align decision-makers across all functions, helping companies build a case for boards and investors by linking C-level, leadership, and frontline strategies around a customer-centered operational system.
- Khan expects that a shift away from "lean and mean" mindsets and reliance on historical data toward systems that prioritize customer value over spreadsheets will increase worker productivity, whereas variable systems without slack risk mistakes, inventory issues, burnout, and firefighting management.
- The Good Jobs Institute projects that by 2027, it will have converted 10 million bad or low-wage jobs into good jobs, aiming to reach an inflection point in the next couple of years where evidence from success stories encourages widespread corporate adoption of this strategy.
- Khan predicts that the risk of change for company leaders has diminished as the system becomes more transparent, offering a virtuous cycle of higher pay, lower turnover, and improved performance compared to the barriers created by treating labor solely as a cost.