A Simple "Hello"

Which came first the chicken or the egg?

I don't have that answer, but I do have a similar question.

Which comes first the customer or the employee?

Tom Peter's has a recent post titled ???????? (that is really the title) about this question with some thought-provoking comments that I suggest you take a few minutes to read.

Whether we have a staff or not we must take care of those that take care of our customers. I've been around the business world and have had the joy and the tears of working for people who care about their employees. As many of you know, I worked in the corporate world before starting my own business. During my time there, the management went from individual offices to cubicle nation. My cube face the entrance so whenever my boss, Mr. L (I'll protect his identity) went to his office (he ranked non-cubicle space) he would have to pass by my cube and 3 fellow colleague's cubes before reaching his cocoon.

Well, Mr. L would walk by every morning without acknowledging my existence, which I would usually shrug off as his vagrant disregard for women in the business world. But one morning after Mr. L's pass by, my neighboring colleague, Mr. B., came into my cube. Mr. B was well known and respected in the industry and the company and was someone I looked to for guidance and business advice. He was a calm and levelheaded guy, but this morning he was visually frustrated and down. He told me he had started to track (he was very analytical) how many times Mr. L would acknowledge him as he walked by his cube.

Twenty-Seven Days

Twenty-seven days had passed without a single "hello" from Mr. L. I could not believe what I was hearing. How could a manger walk by the people who worked with him for twenty-seven days and not stop once? I could rationalize Mr. L's on-going dismissal of my existence, but not Mr. B's. We, Mr. B and I, talked for a long while about this and never really came to any resolution, but Mr. B continued to track the non-communicating manager.

What would you do in this situation? What do you do to keep your employees happy? Do you think the customer or the employee comes first?

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Image by Cyklista Dalibor at Creative Commons