Profit at the Bottom of the Ladder

In her book Profit at the Bottom of the Ladder: Creating Value by Investing in Your Workforce, Canadian researcher Jody Heymann analyzes hundreds of interviews with front line employees to C-suite executives and concludes that your company can profit more from improving worker conditions than cutting wages, benefits, and other workforce expenses.

As an example of that theory Heymann gives the example of a small manufacturing company in Europe that used flexible policies and a team approach in production. The team approach rewarded the team for performance and gave everyone an incentive not to take time off if they didn’t need to, while flexible policies made it possible to take time off if needed. After three years with the two factors in place, absenteeism dropped by 28 percent in the summer and 39 percent in the winter, Heymann reported.