Is kindness includedin the fare?

There is a curious paradox in business. We are all consumers. We know instinctively the difference a person’s attitude makes to an experience. We can walk into two nearly identical hotels, pay the same price, sleep in equally comfortable beds and leave one feeling quite differently about the entire stay. The difference may have been nothing more than someone remembering our name, noticing we needed help or treating an inconvenience as though it actually mattered.

We are remarkably good at detecting genuine care. We are equally good at detecting its absence.

Then we go to work, put on our management hats and start treating the very people responsible for creating these experiences as costs to be controlled.

How extraordinary is that?

The customer and the employee are, after all, the same species. Indeed, the same person can be a valued customer on Saturday and an inconvenient labor expense on Monday. Yet somehow we have built entire management systems that seem to forget this rather obvious fact.

Which raises a question I think deserves far more attention: Does it really cost more to have happy employees?

I don’t mean employees who are permanently cheerful, enjoy unlimited vacation or expect a standing ovation every time they answer the telephone. I mean people who enjoy their work, feel respected, have the tools and authority to do it well, and take genuine satisfaction in helping someone.

We routinely talk about the cost of providing those conditions. We are considerably less curious about the cost of not providing them.

An unhappy employee can look wonderfully inexpensive on a spreadsheet. Until you consider the customer who never returns, the colleague who resigns, the error that needs correcting or the problem that takes three conversations to resolve because nobody had the time or inclination to understand it properly the first time.

The accounting is rather peculiar. We record the cost of the extra minute spent helping a customer with impressive precision. The value of the relationship saved by that minute is considerably harder to enter into a cell.

This is where the economics of human experience become interesting.

Consider Ryanair, an airline with the extraordinary audacity to make advertising out of the very things its customers complain about.

Most companies would bury unpopular policies in the small print and instruct the marketing department to produce something involving smiling families and a beautiful sunset. Ryanair takes the complaint, puts it on a billboard and gives the unfortunate passenger a name.

Meet John and Barbara.

They are travelling to Portugal for two weeks together. Unfortunately, they have not paid to select their seats, so they have been seated apart for the two-hour journey. Ryanair expresses the hope that they will somehow reconnect after landing. Perhaps Barbara will enjoy the peace and quiet.

Poor John!

The campaign is called “That’s What You Pay For,” and I think it is gloriously cheeky. Ryanair has taken the indignities of budget travel, given them a supporting cast and turned the airline’s operational choices into entertainment.

It is almost an act of commercial defiance.

You can dislike the fees, the seat allocation or the lack of complimentary comforts. Ryanair’s answer is essentially that these are the choices that make the fare possible. Its proposition is not that everyone receives the same amenities as a premium airline for a fraction of the price. It is that passengers can choose which extras matter to them.

I am not suggesting that Ryanair is the model for every business, or that low fares excuse discourtesy. Its own efforts to improve the passenger experience suggest that even an uncompromising cost model benefits from better service.

What interests me is that Ryanair has the nerve to own its proposition.

It knows what it is selling. It makes operational decisions around that choice. And rather than pretend every inconvenience is a regrettable accident, it explains why some of them exist.

Now compare that clarity with a company that promises extraordinary care to customers while rewarding its employees for doing as little caring as possible.

I know a true story from inside a very large travel management company that captures this contradiction rather beautifully.

The company had two important performance measures. One was customer satisfaction. The other was call handling time, where shorter calls were considered better.

Unfortunately, the customer satisfaction feedback was atrocious.

You might imagine that this would produce a thoughtful examination of the service. Were consultants under too much pressure to finish calls? Were travelers getting their problems resolved? Did employees have the authority to make decisions?

There was another solution. One that required considerably less soul-searching.

Make the survey harder to find.

The opportunity to provide feedback ended up buried behind three links. Unless you were sufficiently furious, armed with the unstoppable determination required to spend another fifteen minutes hunting for somewhere to complain, you simply gave up and went on with your life.

And voilà! Fewer surveys.

Apparently, customer satisfaction had improved.

Except nothing had necessarily changed for the customer. The company had made it harder to hear from people who were unhappy.

It is a marvelous example of what happens when the measurement becomes more important than the thing it was designed to measure.

And here is the uncomfortable part. Such behavior does not require an organization full of bad people. It requires a system in which achieving the target gradually becomes more important than questioning whether the target represents success.

I think we have misunderstood something fundamental about culture.

Culture is not the values displayed in the reception area. Nor is it the inspirational speech delivered at the annual meeting. Those things can express an aspiration, but they do not determine what happens when an employee faces a difficult choice on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon.

Culture is behavior. And behavior is shaped by what leaders choose to measure, reward, promote and tolerate.

Imagine a travel consultant taking a call from someone whose flight has been cancelled. The next available flight is found, the booking is changed and the call is closed.

Excellent handling time.

Except the traveler was supposed to arrive in time for a nine o’clock presentation to a prospective customer. The replacement flight lands at ten thirty.

The transaction has been completed. The purpose of the journey has been defeated.

A thoughtful consultant would have asked a different question: “What are you travelling for, and when do you need to be there?”

That question changes everything. Perhaps another airport would work. Perhaps a different routing would preserve the meeting. Perhaps a train for the final portion would save the day.

The consultant has moved from processing a ticket to understanding what the customer is trying to accomplish.

It is also going to take longer.

Now imagine that this consultant is a genuinely caring person, someone who joined the profession because they enjoy solving problems and helping people. Every time they exercise that instinct, their performance numbers suffer.

Eventually, even the most conscientious employee learns what the organization really wants.

We should not be surprised when they stop asking the extra question.

And then we wonder why service has become so transactional.

We often hear that culture is what people do when nobody is watching. I would suggest something else.

Culture is also what people do when everybody is watching the numbers.

What gets measured attracts attention. What gets rewarded attracts effort. What gets promoted becomes an example for everyone else. And what leaders tolerate establishes the boundaries of acceptable behavior.

Repeat those signals often enough and they become the way things are done.

This is why I believe leaders should examine their performance measures with as much care as their financial statements. A metric is not simply a way to observe behavior. It can change behavior.

If I reward salespeople entirely on revenue, I should not be astonished when they pursue business we are poorly equipped to serve. If I reward managers exclusively for labor efficiency, I should not be surprised when developing people takes second place. If I judge a corporate travel program only by the average price of an airline ticket, I have made the traveler’s time virtually invisible.

Consider the last example. A travel manager saves money by choosing a cheaper connection that adds several hours to an employee’s journey. The saving appears neatly in a report. The lost time appears nowhere in the travel budget.

We call this efficiency because the cost has disappeared from one spreadsheet. In reality, it has simply moved to another part of the business.

The organization may have saved on airfare while spending far more of something valuable: the employee’s time and energy.

That is the danger of confusing what is easy to measure with what is important.

Of course, I am not arguing against targets. Efficiency, profitability and financial discipline matter enormously. I have spent nearly forty years building a business, and I can assure you that good intentions do not pay the bills.

There are boards to answer to, markets to compete in, budgets to manage and customers who quite reasonably expect value for their money.

But this is exactly why values matter.

A values led organization does not ignore economics. It recognizes that economics involves more than the costs conveniently visible on a dashboard. It also understands that certain principles must survive the pressure of a difficult quarter.

The question is not simply whether a decision improves the number. It is what behavior that decision encourages and what it does to the relationships on which the business depends.

Consider Four Seasons, whose service philosophy has long emphasized the dignity of employees as well as guests. It is a particularly interesting idea in luxury hospitality because so much of what a guest remembers comes from people, not possessions. The furniture can be magnificent. The flowers can be extravagant. The sheets can be exquisite. Yet a guest who feels dismissed will remember that feeling long after forgetting the thread count.

Conversely, an employee who feels respected and trusted has something valuable to offer that cannot be scripted into a service manual.

But surely this principle cannot be reserved for luxury businesses?

A Bentley and a Hyundai are different products, with different prices and different promises. The person buying the Hyundai is not a lesser human being. Someone flying Ryanair today may be staying at a Four Seasons next month. Their choices reflect what they value on a particular occasion, not how much dignity they deserve.

Prices can differ. Amenities can differ. The basic respect we owe one another should not.

And that brings me back to happy employees.

We sometimes speak about employee happiness as though it were an expensive indulgence, something to consider once all the serious business objectives have been met. But what if the ability to create an excellent customer experience depends on the conditions in which employees work?

What if the more expensive choice is to make good people miserable?

I am not suggesting that happy employees cost nothing. Fair compensation costs money. Training costs money. Giving people enough time to do difficult work requires resources. Trusting employees with authority means accepting that they will sometimes make mistakes.

But there are costs associated with the alternative too. Turnover, recruitment, rework, disengagement, repeated customer contacts and lost relationships do not come free. They simply appear in different places, often long after the original decision was made.

And happiness is not something we can buy with a fruit bowl or an inspirational poster.

People need meaningful work, capable colleagues, fair treatment, clear expectations and the satisfaction of knowing that their contribution matters. They need leaders who do not ask them to choose between doing the right thing and achieving a good performance review.

I am particularly conscious of this in corporate travel because the reason our business exists is so easily obscured by the transactions we process.

People do not travel for the pleasure of generating an airline ticket.

They travel to do business.

They travel to meet customers, open offices, integrate acquisitions, train colleagues, negotiate contracts, inspect facilities, solve problems and build relationships. They travel because an organization needs their expertise somewhere other than where they happen to live.

Helping companies manage that movement is important work. It requires technology, policies, supplier relationships, risk management and reliable support. But these are the means, not the purpose.

Underneath every itinerary is a human being. Someone has left home to accomplish something on behalf of their employer. Their time matters. Their energy matters. The purpose of their journey matters.

And when something goes wrong, the story they bring home is frequently about how they were treated.

The flight was cancelled, but someone took responsibility and found a solution.

Or the flight was cancelled, and nobody seemed particularly interested in what happened next.

Same cancellation. Entirely different experience.

That difference is created by people. And those people operate within cultures that either help or hinder their willingness and ability to care.

And this question of what we value in people is about to become even more important.

We are entering a period in which an increasing amount of routine work can be handled by technology. Information retrieval, administration, monitoring, coding and straightforward transactions are becoming easier to automate or assist.

This is an extraordinary opportunity. But I think leaders are at risk of making a familiar mistake.

We will automate the repetitive work, give employees more complicated problems to solve and continue measuring them with the productivity targets we designed when their work was largely transactional.

Imagine technology handling simple travel changes in seconds. Excellent. The human consultant now spends more time with the difficult situations, the anxious travelers, the unusual requests and the problems requiring genuine judgment.

If we continue rewarding that consultant primarily for short calls, we have created a rather absurd contradiction.

We have freed people to do more valuable work while preserving incentives that discourage them from doing it.

This is the thinking behind my 90/10 ambition. I want technology to take on much more of the administration so people have more opportunity to use their human superpowers.

Curiosity. Empathy. Judgment. Creativity. The ability to reassure another person, recognize what has not been said or find a solution that no automated process anticipated.

Not everyone possesses the same strengths. Some people are natural relationship builders. Others can untangle a complex problem, notice a pattern or bring an anxious customer back to a place of confidence.

What a remarkable waste to hire people for those qualities and then organize their work so that they rarely get to use them.

But giving people more room to exercise judgment is not enough. We also have to recognize and reward the judgment itself.

Otherwise AI will change the tools without changing the culture.

I think this is one of the most important responsibilities leaders face as technology transforms work. We must decide not only what machines should do, but what we want people to become better at doing.

Sometimes the kindest experience is to complete a simple task in thirty seconds without talking to anyone. Sometimes it is having a knowledgeable person spend fifteen minutes understanding why the obvious solution is the wrong one.

The intelligence lies in knowing the difference.

And that brings me back to the question of cost.

We know that a caring attitude makes a difference because we have all experienced it as customers. We know that feeling respected makes a difference because we have all experienced it as employees. Yet we continue to construct systems that sometimes treat those qualities as luxuries.

Perhaps we should stop asking whether happy employees cost more and start asking what it costs to create an organization in which good people find it difficult to do good work.

I have always believed that building a business is an infinite game. The point is not merely to win the next quarter. It is to build something worth continuing, a business people love working for and customers genuinely value. One capable of enduring beyond the people who created it.

That requires financial discipline. It also requires values strong enough to influence decisions when the easy answer conflicts with the right one.

And it requires leaders to examine what they are asking people to do, how they are rewarding them and what they are willing to tolerate.

Because culture is not what we say matters.

It is what our people learn matters through the decisions we make.

Ryanair has the audacity to tell customers exactly why John and Barbara have been separated for two hours. There is something refreshing about that honesty. The customer understands the bargain and is free to accept it or choose another.

What concerns me more are the businesses that promise one experience, reward behavior that produces another and then act mystified when customers notice the difference.

We are all consumers. We know what care feels like. We also know when it is missing.

As leaders, surely we should be able to remember that when we get to work.

By all means, charge extra for the baggage, the legroom or the champagne.

But kindness, respect and the dignity of being taken seriously should never require an upgrade.