Question

What is a “good job”? Research Zeynop Ton's Good Jobs Institute and "good jobs strategy." Then apply her theories to answer: Where are “good jobs” emerging for women and persons of color? What is the significance of the growth of huge corporations such as Wal-Mart and McDonalds to good jobs? Is such growth beneficial to persons of color and women?

Answer 1

Ton's big idea is that companies that provide employees a decent living, which includes not just pay but also a sense of purpose and empowerment at work, can be every bit as profitable as companies that strive to keep their labor costs low by paying the minimum wage with no benefits. Maybe even more profitable. Getting there requires companies to adopt what Ton calls “human-centered operations strategies,” which she acknowledges is “neither quick nor easy.” But it’s worth it, she says, both for the companies and for the country. Surely, she’s right.

while most companies were very good at getting products from, say, China to their stores, it was a different story once the merchandise arrived. Sometimes a product stayed in the back room instead of making it to a shelf where a customer could buy it. Or it was in the wrong place. Special in-store promotions weren’t being executed a surprisingly high percentage of the time.

The problem was that these companies viewed their employees “as a cost that they tried to minimize.” Workers were not just poorly paid, but poorly trained. They often didn’t know their schedule until the last moment. Morale was low and turnover was high. Customer service was largely nonexistent.

What first struck her about Mercadona is that the annual turnover was an almost unheard-of 4 percent. Why do employees stay? “They get decent salaries, four weeks of training that costs the company $5,000, stable schedules and the opportunity to thrive in front of their customers every day.” The grocery business is low margin, where every penny counts. If Mercadona couldn’t keep prices low with this strategy, it would have abandoned it long ago.

QuikTrip, an $11 billion company with 722 stores, is a prime example of what Ton means by “human-centered operations strategies.” Paying employees middle-class wages allows the company to get the most out of them. Employees are cross-trained so they can do different jobs. They can solve problems by themselves. They make merchandising decisions for their own stores. The ultimate result of the higher wages QuikTrip pays is that costs everywhere else in the operation go down. At QuikTrip, says Ton, products don’t remain in the back room, and in-store promotions always take place, as they’re supposed to.

Walmart and McDonald's, two of the biggest and oldest brands in the US, have for years faced widespread complaints about poor customer service.

Now both companies are investing billions of dollars in wage increases and training for their workers, following in the footsteps of companies like Chick-fil-A, and they are already seeing positive results. The training and wage investments have had a significant impact on customer service. Customer satisfaction scores were up 6% in the first quarter, compared to the same period last year for McDonalds.

For women and persons of color:

Consider a young woman named Linda. Linda is 24 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of inequality and social justice and also participated in the Occupy movement.

Now ask yourself: Which of two alternatives is more likely?

a) Linda is a bank teller

b) Linda is a bank teller who is active in the Occupy movement

Most people answer (b), even though a moment’s thought reveals that this cannot possibly be the better response: The set of politically engaged bank tellers is a subset of the world’s bank tellers!

This little test illustrates a fundamental feature of human cognition that psychologists have brought to light in the past four decades. Human thought comprises two sorts of mental operations that Daniel Kahneman calls “thinking fast” (System 1) and “thinking slow” (System 2). Thinking fast is automatic and effortless, valuing stories that possess narrative coherence. Thinking slow is controlled and effortful, valuing analyses with logical coherence. The bulk of our mental operations are System 1, and most of the time this serves us well—after all, we would be paralyzed if we had to logically analyze each of the thousands of decisions we make every day.

But there’s a rub: System 1 is terrible at statistics, and comes with dangerous unconscious biases. We humans are natural storytellers but poor natural statisticians. We are so far from being rational Econs that Kahneman calls the mind “a machine for jumping to conclusions.” Often without even realizing it, we tend to:

• Overgeneralize from small samples of personal experience: The last two interns I recruited from the University of X were great—let’s focus our recruiting there.
• Assume that the evidence before our eyes is all that’s relevant: The résumé looks good, and she came across well in the interview—what more do we need to know?
• Overweight factors that readily come to mind: That candidate was able to give a smart answer to the question of how many golf balls would fit in a school bus.
• Assume that people’s observed behaviors—such as earning a high GPA or appearing distracted at a job interview—are manifestations of abiding character traits rather than situational factors, like having gone to a school with grade inflation or dealing with a family crisis at home.
• Form an overall impression (“halo”) of a person based on specific factors that we like or dislike: Let’s promote Bill to manage the new team, since he looks manager-ready, always gets to the office on time, and does what he is asked.
• Let the emotional tail wag the rational dog: We selectively process information about a person depending on whether we basically like or dislike the person. Did we simply “feel good” about the job candidate we just met? Yes, let’s just hire him. (But we forgot to test him to even see if he has the skills to do the job! Oops.)

As if this were not bad enough, our susceptibility to cognitive biases is strongly tied to our physical energy level. For example, a study of eight judges making a total of more than 1,000 parole decisions over a 10-month span found that first thing in the morning, the judges granted parole to over 60 percent of the cases presented to them. This rate shrank steadily to zero just before the judges’ first meal break, after which it spiked back up to 60 percent and so on throughout the day. This phenomenon, called “decision fatigue,” is useful to keep in mind when scheduling full days interviewing job candidates or making year-end rating decisions.