Hey companies! Listen to this if you want happy employees

What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the p w podcast. In this one, I am talking about people, and I am specifically talking to folks who may be responsible for other people. So folks like myself, my engineering manager, but just in general, if you have other people you are responsible for. And I'm talking about the work context here.

Now the reason I'm going in this direction is these days, what with everybody saying, AI can do this, that, and everything, and we need less people and all that shenanigans. Yeah. That's not simply not true is is what I'm gonna say. And I I'm not talking about AI specifically, but it got me to thinking about the whole subject. Right?

Now if you are a company and you are making products and you have people that make those products, whatever they may be, physical or software or services or whatever it is, right, people make and maintain those things. Now, yes, AI can do a certain amount of things for you, but at the end of the day, you still need people. And more importantly, you need to take care of those people. You need to care about those people, and they need to be your number one priority, not the products, not the bottom line of how much money are you making this week and how much extra can you make by doing this or laying people off or whatever it may be. Because at the end of the day, I always believe it's about people.

Right? If you take care of your people, the rest will take care of itself. Now I know you've heard that before, but it's true. Right? If you have products and there's problems with them, guess what?

You need people to figure out what's wrong and fix it. If you are losing revenue, guess what? You need people to figure out why you're losing revenue. Getting rid of people to make up that revenue loss is not the answer. All that's gonna do is recover your bottom line.

But guess what? At some point, it'll go down again because you don't have people there to help figure out what's wrong and make it better or how to improve things or how to expand things, whatever it is. You should not care about the money first. You should care about the people. Right?

Because guess what? Those people, they have friends and family and everything else that they're responsible for. And at the end of the day, if you take care of them, number one, they're gonna want to help Number two, they're gonna wanna come to work, and they're gonna wanna work wherever they're working. They're gonna wanna work for you. They're gonna enjoy their work.

Enjoying work has to be a priority as well. If it feels like, oh, I'm gonna go to work today. I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna make money for somebody else.

I'm gonna be miserable. I'm gonna come home, and then I'm gonna do the same thing tomorrow. I think we all know how that ends. Right? At some point, that person turns around and says, you know what?

Screw it. Enough is enough. And they move on somewhere else. And you have just lost all that time and investment you put in somebody and all the knowledge that they have on your products, the way the company works, the way you like things done, all of this has just walked out the door, and you've gotta start again. Now you might think, great.

They didn't wanna be here. Well, did you ever stop and think, what can I do to make them want to be here? Right? Because at some point, they chose to join your company to begin with. Simple as that.

Whatever it may be. Who knows? It's different for each person. Right? And you need to wonder why they lost that enthusiasm, or what did you do to take away that incentive to want to work there.

Yeah. I know that's harsh. Right? And a lot of people will say, well, screw it. There's always plenty of people who want jobs.

Yeah. That's true. Okay? But guess what? That attitude is just gonna keep you in this cycle forever, and you will be training people, losing people, training people, losing people.

And at the end of the day, you're gonna be no better off for it. It's not gonna help that bottom line that you care about. It's not gonna help keep the company afloat. It's not gonna help with the expansion or the improvement of products, whatever it may be. Because as I say, it comes down to people.

And for me, I always care about the people I work with and especially those that work for me first. Products and everything else, yes, they are very, very important. But without happy people and content people and people who want to do their best and want to be a member of a team, it's all for nothing. Because, like I say, you're just gonna repeating be repeating a horrible cycle over and over again. So I just wanna put that out there this week.

Yeah. It's a targeted audience, but, hey, you know what? Sometimes you gotta remind folks, you know what? People first. That's it.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, by the way. If you wanna talk to me about it or come on here and talk about it or share your thoughts, opinions, maybe you think I'm completely wrong, great. Go to peterwitham.com forward slash contact. Let's talk about that. Speak to you in the next one.