I’ve read and heard many starry eyed, wistful, expressions binding employee-centricity to customer-centricity, and the corollary. It’s a warm and fuzzy, feel-good thought. And it ain’t true.
For example, retail shoppers are getting more and more revved up about “Black Friday” (day after Thanksgiving Christmas shopping, for those across the ponds). They’ve even pushed many stores to open at Thursday midnight – technically 12:00 Friday morning). Employees hate it. How would you like to eat a BIG, sleep-inducing dinner and down a LARGE volume of accompanying wine, sleep a couple of hours and then stagger off to work? How the hell can you enjoy the holiday all edgy over having to drag your butt off the couch, climb in your car and head off to work at Target, Best Buy, wherever? Hey, your car may even get so ticked off it won’t start. And when you get there, you get to witness shoppers stomping over dying people (literally) and dousing each other with pepper spray to get the last, latest Apple gadget.
This is classic “customer vs. employee,” and there’s no pleasing both sides. In fact, we can all come up with many examples of opposing interests between customers and employees. We need to wipe the stars out of our eyes and deal with this “unpleasant truth.”
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