I think it should be the goal of every organization that the next hire always be better than the last. They should get there by making sure that they train and build up every previous hire to be better than they were and making their teams be attractive to higher caliber recruits. A business really doing well should elevate all the employees - wages, skills, lifestyle - and that is what lets them hire well. But boy is it hard to communicate that scheme in two sentences at an all-hands pep talk.
As a wage slave, even spelled out like that it doesn’t sound great to me. I don’t care about how impressive the company is beyond it’s ability to pay me. “Hey, you did a good job of making my company look good enough to hire people better than you.” I’m not sure exactly how to put my discomfort with it into words, but being told I did a good job of improving the company’s image just feels like a pat on the head and a “good boy.” My goal here isn’t to help you, it’s to get you to give me money. Compliment me with a raise, not telling me how much more money you’re making because of me. Bragging to employees about quarterly profits only actually cheers up the ones who drink the company koolaid at every job they ever work at. For the rest of us it means that we won’t be out of a job because the company went under. I got an extra 2 hundred dollars from my salary this year from that and the guy announcing it got a hundred thousand dollar bonus. Great.
That’s what makes the communication so difficult to do well - when the boss comes in and says “We’re doing great,” the workers all assume he means corporate profits, but corporate profits don’t attract good workers. Salary, benefits, and working conditions do. If the boss wants to make that point at a pep talk, he’s got to go on a long tangent about how competitive salaries are, how much vacation everyone gets, yada yada, and by the end of that, saying “and we can hire really good entry-level workers,” is kind of anticlimactic. I mean, who cares if this year’s new hires graduated with median 3.2 GPA vs just 3.0 5 years ago? Better just not to phrase it that way, even if it is a positive metric for both new and established workers.
I think it should be the goal of every organization that the next hire always be better than the last. They should get there by making sure that they train and build up every previous hire to be better than they were and making their teams be attractive to higher caliber recruits. A business really doing well should elevate all the employees - wages, skills, lifestyle - and that is what lets them hire well. But boy is it hard to communicate that scheme in two sentences at an all-hands pep talk.
As a wage slave, even spelled out like that it doesn’t sound great to me. I don’t care about how impressive the company is beyond it’s ability to pay me. “Hey, you did a good job of making my company look good enough to hire people better than you.” I’m not sure exactly how to put my discomfort with it into words, but being told I did a good job of improving the company’s image just feels like a pat on the head and a “good boy.” My goal here isn’t to help you, it’s to get you to give me money. Compliment me with a raise, not telling me how much more money you’re making because of me. Bragging to employees about quarterly profits only actually cheers up the ones who drink the company koolaid at every job they ever work at. For the rest of us it means that we won’t be out of a job because the company went under. I got an extra 2 hundred dollars from my salary this year from that and the guy announcing it got a hundred thousand dollar bonus. Great.
That’s what makes the communication so difficult to do well - when the boss comes in and says “We’re doing great,” the workers all assume he means corporate profits, but corporate profits don’t attract good workers. Salary, benefits, and working conditions do. If the boss wants to make that point at a pep talk, he’s got to go on a long tangent about how competitive salaries are, how much vacation everyone gets, yada yada, and by the end of that, saying “and we can hire really good entry-level workers,” is kind of anticlimactic. I mean, who cares if this year’s new hires graduated with median 3.2 GPA vs just 3.0 5 years ago? Better just not to phrase it that way, even if it is a positive metric for both new and established workers.