Work is a blessing. That is a conviction my parents legacied to my siblings and me, and one that nearly half a century in the staffing industry has only deepened. Yet, a blessing withheld of its dignity is a diminished thing, and far too many people have invested their working lives inside that diminishment.
Growing up in Tarboro, North Carolina, Panola Street was a line that defined everything for me. On one side, our neighborhood. On the other, the world of work that many of our neighbors crossed into every morning. What they left behind when they crossed that street was not always visible on the way out. Coming home, it was.
The people on our side of Panola Street went to work in jobs where dignity was not guarantee once they got there. The work was menial. The hours were kept. On Sundays, the churches filled, and they filled for more than one reason. There was the word of God, yes. For those of us who believe, dignity lives at the heart of that word. Yet there was something else drawing people through those doors: the simple, nourishing experience of being seen. Good morning, Miss So-and-so. How is that new grandchild? You look well today. We are glad you are here. People were going to church, in part, because church was where someone greeted them respectfully by name, and meant it. That hunger does not come from nowhere. It is created by the places that withhold it the other six days of the week.
Nearly half a century in the staffing business has taken me to many corners of this world, and one thing holds constant in every one of them: Dignity is what every person deserves. Am I seen? Am I respected? Does the conversation we are having value me as a full human being? Humiliating people into better performance does not work. It burns through talent, burns through hearts, and burns through communities. In companies where the dignity of EVERY worker is built into the culture, high performance and predictable outcomes are common, and innovation soars. When people are individually let go, or lay-offs occur, there is not the brunt of surprise. Communication has supported expectation.
Once, early in the growth of our company, my brother came to me about the need to exit a staff member. That was a big occasion because very rarely did we have to let people go. Before he got to the details, he stopped.
“We’d better remember,” he said, “what Daddy used to say. It’s not what you’re going to tell someone. It’s how you’re going to tell them. Always create a circumstance for them to keep their dignity.” The truth is, when you deny someone their dignity, you lose yours.
Daddy was real big about that, and his words became a part of his legacy to us. In our family, in our community, on our side of Panola Street, dignity was the floor upon which everything else was built.
During forty-seven years of helping people find jobs and build careers, one thing this work has confirmed over and over is that when people choose to leave a company, especially the ones whose departure surprises you, whose absence lands harder than anyone anticipated, the reason is not always pay. It often is relationship. How were they respected? How did they perceive their value to be seen? How often were they thanked? Where do they see their growth opportunity? The energy a person invests in their work is dynamic, and it often is in response to what the environment gives.
In the early days of company, we put a small mirror in front of every phone. We would go into offices, and if we saw a phone without one, we would ask about it. We had these mirrors made with the brand logo in the corner. The reason was simple: when people see themselves as they speak, they bring a different level of energy, a heightened care for honesty, a different quality of attention to the conversation. They see themselves reflected with clarity and dignity with which we see them. Think about it: With that mirror in front of you, you see yourself for what you are saying. What we think we communicate and what we actually communicate are often two different things. And that mirror belongs in every room where the people who make everything else possible are working. When you walk in to thank the coordinator who arranged everything you did not see being arranged, she or he can see herself/himself reflected in your gratitude. Treating them with dignity is a mirror to how you see them.
We tend to, literally, pay our respect based on how well someone’s brand is known. We’ll pay for shirts to wear with an athlete’s or artist’s face placed across our chest and then, pass that celebrity’s family member who may have been instrumental to renown of that celebrity on the street without a word, because the shirt isn’t there to tell us who they are. We pass by some of the most upstanding human beings every day, people who never got a shirt with their face on it and so never received the appreciation they had long since earned. There was a janitor in one of our client companies who noticed, after eighteen years of cleaning a building, that the boilerplate had turned a shade redder than it should be. He flagged it, and saved the building––he was heroic. We learned of this, and that he received no applause. He didn’t ‘get a shirt’. He made due with a simple hand shake and ‘thank you’. My brother, Carlton, decided to quietly take him to dinner one evening after. He presented him with one of our company tee-shirts and a small financial token of appreciation, while letting him know that we valued him. He was not our employee, but he well may have saved our employees’ lives who were working there on assignments. There are heroic things done every day by heroic people, and the silence around them is a choice we are all making.
We are entering an era in which more and more of what gets done will be done by agentic workers, by technology that does not pause, does not tire, does not need a Sunday morning to feel human again. That is coming more and more rapidly and repeatedly, and some of it is welcome. People are daily adjusting their emotions - something the AI and tech does yet do - to ‘survive’, let alone thrive in this changing world. Executives and managers in companies are as uncertain of their futures as are line workers and administrative professionals. Yet, as this era continues to evolve, the obligation from human beings still in the rooms, grows larger. Faces and hearts cannot disappear from work. The people working alongside new systems, and the people receiving what these systems produce, are still full human beings asking the same question people on each side of Panola Street in my early hometown were asking.
Am I seen, with dignity, when I enter here?
Do the people in this place know my name?
The answer to that question has always resided within a leadership decision that guides the values and the cultures. It still does.