B Lab Forces For Good Podcast — Episode 1: What makes a job “good”?
In the first episode of season 3 of B Lab’s original podcast, Forces For Good, we lay the foundation for a series exploring what it takes to create thriving workplaces in today’s world.
As the employment landscape evolves, so does our understanding of how businesses can support their employees. From fair pay to flexible hours to fostering a sense of purpose, this episode delves into the mechanisms that enable workers not just to survive, but to thrive.
Featuring insights from Sarah Kalloch, Executive Director of the Good Jobs Institute, and Joachim Krapels, Head of Strategy & Global B Corp Movement at B Lab Global, this episode explores the following questions:
What does it mean to create a “good job”?
How are B Corps supporting employees to thrive?
What role can businesses play in shaping a more equitable and fulfilling future for work?
Listen to Forces For Good Episode 1 and join us in reimagining what work can—and should—be: https://lnk.to/forces-for-good-good-jobs
TRANSCRIPT: Episode 1 — What makes a job “good”?
This is Forces For Good, a podcast from B Lab, the nonprofit network powering the global B Corp movement. I’m your host Irving Chan-Gomez. Forces For Good takes a hard look at how businesses are helping to solve the biggest social and environmental challenges of our time.
We're excited to be back with season 3 to dive deep into what makes a good job. Across this 10-episode series, we'll use examples, anecdotes, and data from experts and the B Corp community to explore how workers can,(and should,) demand more from their employers.
We'll make the business case for good jobs, look at how society and economic systems are contributing to rising inequality, and we’ll hear what businesses are doing to improve.
In this episode, we start with the basics - understanding what a good job is. Take a deep breath. The air in the Amazon Rainforest is so clean. We're surrounded by towering trees, the green canopy is so vast you can't see the sky. We can hear the hum of insects. Feel the cool dirt beneath our feet. But wait! There's another sound. Something more sinister - could it be illegal loggers? As a conservationist, your job is to help stop this harmful practice. To gather data about the air, the soil, and the vegetation and learn how to best protect this beautiful natural resource.
I'm enjoying this little field trip so let's hear about some other interesting employment options…
Each day thousands of people toss coins into the Trevi Fountain in Rome. But if those coins aren't cleaned out of the fountain, soon tourists would be looking at piles of euros and random other currencies rather than the towering landmark. Twice a week, workers use brushes and long hoses to remove the coins from the fountain and donate them to charity. More than a million euros are gathered each year.
Now to Tokyo where the trains can be so crowded that professional ‘people pushers,’ are employed. Otherwise known as passenger arrangement staff, this post requires one to wear white gloves and a uniform to help pack the city's trains during rush hour. Videos of these pushers at work frequently go viral.
So, are these good jobs? They sound interesting, sure! But what other factors are at play here? Pay? Community? Purpose? When we go to work we're offering one of our most precious resources: our time, along with our skills and abilities. What should we get in exchange? What is a 'good job?'
Sarah Kalloch, Executive Director, Good Jobs Institute: A good job is one that provides stability for workers. We look at wages, living wages, schedules—stability, adequacy, predictability. We look at career pathing, safety, and security at work. All of those factors are incredibly important and fairly measurable.
That's Sarah Kalloch, Executive Director of the Good Jobs Institute at MIT. Sarah helps organizations move from providing bad jobs to providing good ones.
Sarah: One of the biggest surprises for me is how many companies don't measure these things or don't deeply understand what their front-line workers make or how unstable their schedules are across the organization.
Many companies don't strive to understand how their employees feel. They prioritize profits above all else. However, B Lab, and our community of B Corp companies, see another way, where stakeholder needs, including the needs of workers, are at the forefront of decision-making. Joining Sarah is Joachim Krapels, Head of Strategy and Global B Corp Movement at B Lab Global. For the past 18 years, the B Corp movement has demonstrated that when workers share in the prosperity they help create, it strengthens businesses.
Joachim Krapels, Head of Strategy & Global B Corp Movement, B Lab Global: A lot of value is created through workers, the labor force, natural resources, community resources, and other places. But the system is not quite well set up today to return that value to those who have created the value to begin with. The value gets taken by a small group.
The current global economic system focuses heavily on profits and generating wealth for shareholders. This can lead to poor pay and benefits. Many workers are understandably frustrated.
Imagine a pyramid. At the bottom are basic needs—food, shelter, water. The next level is safety and security, then love and belonging. I’m describing Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. You might remember it if you took a psychology class. It's the idea that there are levels of needs that have to be met to reach one's full potential. The highest need that one can realize is self-actualization or the opportunity to strive to be the best version of yourself.
If more workers had their basic needs met, would populism be taking up so much space in global politics? What if inequality wasn't so prevalent and people had access to good, well-paid work? Would other issues, such as climate, be front and center? We have to figure out how to return value to the people that create it. We have to ensure that all people have the economic stability and fair, equitable workplaces they deserve.
Sarah says a person can't do purpose-driven work / or aspire to more noble causes / until their basic needs are met.
Sarah: We have an employee pyramid based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. At the bottom are basic needs, such as financial stability. But work can also create belonging, recognition, meaning, and personal growth. Watching people build careers is inspiring. Watching people succeed is fulfilling—for individuals and communities. There’s so much about work that’s positive. It engages people and helps them thrive.
For many of us, work is how we contribute to our families and communities. According to Joachim, that has been true for a very very long time…
Joachim: We know that humans have always lived in social groups, at least for a large part of our evolution. There’s an innate sense of contributing to the common good, which has evolved into jobs and wages. This sense of community contribution could inspire us to rethink what makes work meaningful.
How we think about work is shifting as society evolves. Authors and commentators have long since contemplated the growing need for fulfillment and community contribution. Could meaningful employment fill this void?
Sarah mentions Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam. Published over 20 years ago, its ideas remain true. It traces this ‘collapse of community’ through bowling. People once bowled in leagues and as a social pastime. There’s been a bowling alley in the White House since 1947! But even as more people started bowling, they stopped doing it together. The book calls out this loss of community in American society, but the phenomenon likely shows up globally as well. Are there examples in your community? All this reminds Sarah of a change in our work dynamic.
Sarah: When I was in college, we read Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam and learned about the disintegration of America’s social fabric. We don’t have common places to gather anymore. Work can become that place.
We need community. But if our jobs aren't going to give it to us, we're not going to give our loyalty to them. We've seen a generational shift in attitudes about work.
Sarah: People don’t stay in jobs for 40 or 50 years anymore. Loyalty between workers and corporations has eroded. But some companies are rebuilding this social compact. I want to highlight Costco, a company that has a really beautiful social compact. When you go visit Costco, people have been working there for 20 or 30 years. They find incredible meaning in their job and have incredible relationships with their colleagues.
The CEO knows employees by name, even their partners and kids. It’s a community on a different level. One of their butchers, Todd, refers to the butchery as “his” even though it’s part of Costco. He’s empowered to make decisions, create a wonderful working environment for his team, and deliver awesome experiences for customers. Companies and corporations have the potential to be a really important space. I’m talking from an American perspective, of course, but they can be a really important space to bring back some of that community we’ve lost over time.
As society changes, work changes, and so our idea of what makes a good job needs to change. It’s time to raise the bar. Every single person, no matter their skill, deserves to find economic stability and fair, equitable workplaces. This brings us to the fallacy of “unskilled labor.”
Sarah: Not surprisingly, the origin of the term “low-skill” has deep roots in racism, sexism, and misogyny. In this case, the United States started to classify skilled and, and historically, jobs held by women or people of color were classified as low-skill. For example, typists—a job typically held by women—were coded as having no significant relationship to things, whereas typesetting, a type machine tender, was deemed more complex. The one that upsets me is nursery school teachers and practical nurses were classified as having no significant relationships to data or people, while dog pound attendants, primarily men, were rated as having a higher level of complexity. So all of the care work which, again, was predominantly done by women, and a lot of agricultural work which, at least in the United States, was predominantly done by people of color, and immigrants, were all coded as low-skill work.
If you take just a moment to understand the work that farm workers are balancing on a daily basis, all of the ways that they can contribute to continuous improvement: who's going to see soil challenges first? Farm workers, because they are the first ones to see it. Who's going to see pests coming in first? Who's going to understand what's happening in the fields first? It's your workers. So if you're engaging them, if you're treating them well, they're going to help you grow.
If you are a certified nursing assistant, who's going to see and understand changes in weight, in skin health, which can be really, really harmful for elderly patients? They're going to see them first. And if they're empowered and they're cared for, and if they stay in the role longer than 90 days and they build a relationship with the residents and the people that they care for, they're going to be the first line of defense against so many challenges that elderly people face.
B Lab's goal is to facilitate a move toward a better system for people and the planet: to be a Force for Good. As we said earlier, this system has to return value to the people who create it, the health aides, teachers, and farm workers. Helping people find their purpose is integral to all of this. I work as Strategic Partnerships and Global Expansion Manager at B Lab because the organization's goals align with my own. Joachim tells us a bit about B Lab’s duty as an organization, to share learnings from our data on good business practices. We hope this will drive improvement on a broader scale.
Joachim: I like to think that the B Corp community is one of the great experiments in how the economy and business can be done differently. At B Lab, we have front-row seats to learn from that great global experiment. And we have an obligation to learn from that to share insights—what does it look like when companies do listen when they structure their governance differently when they think about implementing fair wages—and that's where this research comes in.
As many people know, B Corps go through quite a rigorous verification and certification process to get certified. And through that, a lot of data gets generated, and we have some ability to learn from it, and we are keen to partner with labor market specialists, labor market economists, and others, to try and dig into the practices that make, for example, good jobs.
How do they differ from sector to sector? What are the patterns we’ve identified? I think that's a really big learning opportunity, but equally one that can inform how we think about where we want our policymakers to pay attention. B Corps can be front runners that show how things can be done differently within businesses, within still for-profit businesses.
I think the concept of continuous improvement is important to remember. Jochim, you're framing this as an experiment—and even the name of our organization as a lab—which is this idea of learning and continuous improvement. Nobody has it a hundred percent, right? There's always room for improvement. How do we take those lessons and scale them so we can put better practices into place, not just at companies, but more systematically?
Sarah: That's one of the things I love the most about the B Corp community. Part of our mission is to change the definition of what it means to run a good business. And that's so much of what you do, bringing out more of these stories, more of this data, more of this research on all of your company members, what they've done, what's worked, what's challenging, what different industries look like. I just think it's incredibly exciting. I’m very much looking forward to that. It's amazing that you have from small businesses to some of the largest companies in the world who are thinking differently.
Self-evaluation and impact measurement are crucial to our work at B Lab. So I asked Sarah, how can job quality be measured?
Sarah: I think a lot of companies do employee surveys and it'll give you a snapshot, but ultimately the best way to understand if your jobs are providing meaning and purpose is to spend more time with your frontline workers and understand what the work looks like, and understand again how the work is designed.
To go back to Costco, their former CEO would spend 200 days a year in the store. He knows the prices of things, he asks great questions like, why did you merchandise this here? How's your wife? He's deeply engaged in the work and the people. And that helps give him a better sense of how his work is doing. Is the culture working? Turnover is a great indicator of if higher and basic needs are being met. If you're meeting basic needs and you still have high turnover, something's missing. But I think it is challenging for corporate leaders to ask: are our jobs serving a purpose?
B Corps fared well financially during COVID-19 because of the value they were bringing to the table, not just for shareholders but for multiple stakeholders. When times got tough, it was the workers that carried companies through. There's a definite business case for quality jobs! Low wages and low morale do not pay off in the long run.
Joachim: The people kept coming back saying: “Well, we sat down with the company and we figured out how we can all contribute, how we can orient ourselves during this time of crisis, to understand how we can help each other but also help the business because of the mission that we have”, and that may contribute to how you stay in business, but also perform on your mission as a business. So I think there's an element of elevating stakeholders of which workers are such an important element, but also thinking about the environment, thinking about the community that you're in, that also gives you a very rounded view of who you are as a business and who you are interacting with on a day to day basis.
So apart from a need for us to get out of, as we often say, a shareholder primacy economy because of all the environmental and inequality it created, there's something eye-opening to also look at and listen to the various stakeholders that you have around that can help you organize as a business. And I think that's a really exciting space to be exploring and where maybe Sarah, you've also seen things happening.
Sarah: Absolutely. We work with companies as small as 10 employees to some of the largest employers in the world. They come to us for lots of different reasons, but often, partially because they know they are offering jobs that are not great. And they want to improve them. They also have a business problem, and they have high turnover, which results in poor operational execution, which results in dissatisfied customers.
To give you two examples: we work with a Moe's original barbecue franchise in Maine. They have two stores and about 30 employees. They were in a vicious cycle of high turnover and their food wasn't as good. And their owner, who is an entrepreneur, had lost his love for the business. He was stressed out and he just knew that he didn't want to run a business like this. He didn't want to treat people like this and he didn't want to feel like this every day.
So we worked with them to look at both, how to invest more in people, but also how to build a different operating system that would have unrealized potential for his business. So he increased wages and other benefits for his team and reduced turnover. He also looked at their menu and how diverse it was, and made it a little bit tighter so it was easier and better to execute for their teams. They redid their back kitchen organization, looked at the front of house, they did all sorts of different assessments operationally across the organization, and what they found is that when you both, reduce turnover and get people excited to be there and improve operations, their sales went up 20%.
But more than that, they had this unrealized potential in catering, and because people were happy to be there, it became a team effort to do catering and their catering went up like 60% and stabilized the business. That's hard for small businesses to do because they often are their own investors. They don't want to take on a lot of debt and increasing wages can be really hard.
Taking care of workers and providing good jobs is not only a moral imperative, it's good business. Sarah sees more and more companies heading this way!
I think this is a super hopeful time for good jobs. I see so much momentum across the entire ecosystem, from nonprofits and government to corporations that are thinking differently. So I'm going to focus there because we work directly with companies to improve jobs. And I think there's a narrative about business leaders not caring about people. And for the most part, the companies coming to us, they deeply care about their frontline workers. They want to provide better jobs and it feels hard and it feels insurmountable, whether you've got 100,000 jobs or 100, it's really expensive and every dollar that goes out the door could build your business or could quickly undermine it. I get a lot of inspiration from the business leaders who come and say, we want to rethink everything and we want to do things differently and we recognize and respect the work and we don't want to lead this way.
We want to lead with good jobs. I think again, B Corps are business leaders who raise their hand and say, we want to do things differently. And the more we can encourage that and celebrate that and lift that up, and make business leaders who offer great jobs, the business heroes of at the bookstore, in biographies, at business school case studies, in the places where capitalism is celebrated.
Sarah and Joachim have given us a pretty good idea of why good jobs matter, now we just have to make sure everyone has one! Seems easy enough. I could not be more excited to dive further into the data and examples from the B Corp community and investigate this topic throughout the season.
This is truly just a taste of everything I've learned about how we can make work better. We have bi-weekly episodes on topics including AI's role in the future of our workplaces, the myriad ways alternative ownership models can benefit employees, and how retraining drives economic mobility to revitalize entire communities.
If you'd like to learn more about B Corps and purpose-driven companies visit bcorporation.net. And listen to the rest of our season! Please subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Your ratings and reviews help Forces for Good reach new audiences, so we thank you for your support.
For more opportunities to engage with us, follow us on social media.
This podcast was brought to you by B Lab, with funding provided by the Gates Foundation. Special thanks to Sherri Jordan for coordination. Forces For Good is produced by Hueman Group Media.
The views and opinions expressed are those of the interviewees and do not reflect the positions or opinions of the producers, affiliated organizations, or our funders.
I’m your host, Irving Chan-Gomez. Thanks for listening. And I look forward to catching you in the next episode!