Employment is our Other Product
Consider this: Employment should be a company's other product.
…In that how good of a job a company does as an employer, is on the same level of impact as how good of a product it makes for customers
I started a company because I wanted to have a material impact on the world. Will I succeed in that? To the extent that I want? Who knows! But what I do know is that this company has an immediate first order impact on every employee and contractor that we hire. No question. And so that’s our other product.
Employment is an insanely high leverage way to improve someone’s life. The first and maybe largest lever I see is just: don’t be shitty. Have a (functioning) HR department, have fair hiring, compensation, and promotion policies, hire professional managers and train them, provide generous mat/pat leave and benefits, and don't tolerate harassment 🤷 etc.
Beyond that there is the vassssst world of things you can do to help people achieve their professional dreams. Who here has worked a dead end job that set their career back years? Who here has worked at a great company where they were supported to do the best work of their life, build skills, and subsequently earn more money and do more fun work? Some levers: Horizontal mobility, growth plans, managers actively seeking out opportunities for reports, compassion and flexibility when dealing with mental and physical health issues and other big life events… let’s do more of this shit.
Personally, at some jobs I’ve grown a lot as a person, not just as a professional (though Chelsea Troy might reasonably say that’s the same thing). At PagerDuty we had an emotional maturity component to the career ladder (a la: improve what you measure). And it showed. The people there were NICE.
In life, we spend such a huge portion of our lives with coworkers, let’s make it nice. On purpose.
~Lyon