By Dr. Cole Webb – 9/5/26
Employers can come up with every excuse in the book for why their workforce does not deserve higher wages or greater investment. They point to skill gaps, productivity, labor costs, and the need to remain competitive.
And the truth is, to some extent, they are right.
Being a mediocre company is profitable.
I was recently greatly moved by the book, “The Case for Good Jobs: How Great Companies Bring Dignity, Pay, and Meaning to Everyone’s Work” by Zeynep Ton. I felt as though I was re-experiencing my entire intellectual journey behind the founding of CraftED. Ton describes the vicious cycles that emerge when companies underinvest in their workers. Poor wages and working conditions contribute to poor performance. Poor performance makes employers even more reluctant to invest in their employees. That lack of investment further reduces performance, beginning the cycle again. The same feedback loop occurs at the level of the business. Poor execution produces worse customer experiences. Worse customer experiences hurt sales. Lower sales create pressure to cut costs. Labor is treated as one of the easiest costs to reduce, which further damages the company’s ability to execute. From my background in science, I can’t help but see this as a positive feedback loop: a self-reinforcing cycle that accelerates itself.
It’s an exponential march toward mediocrity, and mediocrity works.
For decades, businesses have demonstrated that it is possible to build profitable business models around minimizing the marginal contribution required from individual workers. Jobs can be standardized, simplified, and broken into increasingly mind-numbing tasks. If the work requires little judgment from the employee, then employees are easier to replace. If employees are easy to replace, turnover becomes less expensive. If turnover is inexpensive, there is less reason to invest heavily in training, wages, or long-term development.
The system is entirely rational. Why spend thousands of dollars developing someone’s skill set for them to potentially leave, when the job has been deliberately designed so that someone else can learn it in a few hours?
This philosophy has spread far beyond fast food or retail. Businesses across industries increasingly attempt to reduce labor to a variable cost that can be optimized. Work becomes more standardized. Employees receive less autonomy. Staffing gets leaner. Training becomes shorter. Individual judgment is replaced wherever possible with scripts, software, policies, and SOPs.
And increasingly, customers are experiencing the consequences.
The internet has rather endearingly adopted the term enshittification to describe the deterioration people feel in the products and services they interact with every day. Customer service becomes harder to access. Employees know less about the products they sell. Problems require three transfers instead of one knowledgeable person. Quality declines while prices increase. Businesses become remarkably efficient at delivering experiences nobody particularly enjoys. Poor workforce investment certainly isn’t the sole cause of this deterioration. But it belongs to the same philosophy: the relentless pursuit of short-term profit maximization rather than building long-term capability.
There is another path.
What if we designed work around what employees could become?
Profit maximization does not have to depend exclusively on minimizing the cost of labor. It can be achieved through designing work on the assumption of high worker skill, productivity, and marginal contribution.
But that requires businesses to think differently about training.
Training is often treated as an expense or employee benefit. Companies provide the minimum instruction necessary for someone to perform their immediate responsibilities and then expect experience to take care of the rest. We don’t think this way about other productive assets. A manufacturer purchases better equipment because it can increase production, improve quality, or reduce waste. A contractor buys better tools because they allow skilled workers to accomplish more. Companies invest in software, automation, logistics, facilities, and processes because increasing productive capacity can create economic returns. Worker capability should be viewed through the same lens.
Training is productive infrastructure.
The purpose of good training is not simply to make an employee better at performing low-value work. It is to make that employee capable of performing increasingly higher-value work. In much of the corporate and academic world, this is often called Professional Development, but it’s more than that.
Imagine two businesses employing workers in the same occupation.
The first teaches employees only what they need to perform the immediate task in front of them. Workers learn procedures but may not understand the systems surrounding those procedures. When something falls outside the standard process, the employee escalates the problem to a supervisor. Management makes decisions. Management solves unusual problems. Management communicates with difficult customers. Management improves processes.
The employee performs.
The second company deliberately develops competence.
Employees learn not only what to do but why they are doing it. They practice solving problems. They receive feedback. They gradually take responsibility for more complex work. They demonstrate and verify their competence before assigning greater responsibility.
Eventually, that employee isn’t merely performing the work. They are diagnosing problems and noticing inefficiencies. They are answering customer questions and saving management’s time. They are preventing mistakes and teaching these skills to newer employees. They are recognizing opportunities that management may have never thought of, leading to improved business quality.
The marginal contribution of those two workers is dramatically different.
Capability changes the customer experience
Customers benefit when the people serving them are actually good at what they do. A capable employee diagnoses the problem correctly the first time. A knowledgeable salesperson understands what the customer actually needs instead of simply pushing whatever product the company wants sold. A skilled operator notices a quality problem before hundreds of defective parts are produced. A well-trained customer service representative can solve a problem without transferring the customer through three departments. A competent construction worker produces work that does not require an expensive callback six months later.
These aren’t HR outcomes. They are business outcomes.
Fewer mistakes reduce costs. Better judgment improves quality. Faster problem-solving improves productivity. Greater knowledge creates better customer interactions. Better customer interactions create trust. Trust creates repeat business, referrals, stronger reputations, and ultimately more sales.
The employee’s skill becomes part of the company’s product. If you can replicate that skill repeatedly through quality training, you’ve really got yourself a high-margin asset.
That point is easy to miss because we tend to separate “workforce development” from “customer experience.” But customers rarely experience a company’s strategy directly. They experience the people executing it. You can have the best mission statement in the industry. You can develop brilliant processes. You can purchase world-class equipment and spend millions of dollars marketing your brand.
Eventually, somebody has to do the work. Is it being done well?
The experience gap
Employers frequently say they cannot find skilled workers. Yet what they often mean is that they cannot find workers who already possess the experience necessary to contribute at the level the employer needs.
That is not the same.
Skill can be developed. Experience you either have or you don’t, and skill only comes from experience.
But many businesses have effectively outsourced both responsibilities to the labor market. They search for someone another employer has already trained, compete for that person, and then complain about a shortage when everyone else is searching for the same finished worker. That they try to pay “market wages” for.
We have created an economy full of companies hunting for experienced workers and far too few companies willing to create them.
Instead of asking whether an applicant already possesses every capability the organization needs, the business asks whether it has a system capable of developing those capabilities, and it requires more than handing someone an employee handbook and hoping to squeeze enough low-value productivity out of them until the stress of existing in the secondary labor market gives the business an excuse to replace them.
Experience must be designed and skill developed.
The case for good training
Businesses ultimately make a choice about the kind of organization they want to build. They can design work around the assumption that employees will contribute as little as necessary and build systems that make individual workers interchangeable. Or they can design work around the assumption that employees can become high-margin assets and then create the training infrastructure necessary to make that assumption true.
The second path is harder.
It requires employers to invest before every return is immediately visible. It requires coaching. It requires naming elements of your company that are done well and those that are not. And it requires employees to accept greater responsibility for their own growth. But the potential return is much larger than simply having “better-trained employees.”
You create a workforce capable of doing better work. Better work creates better products and services. Better products and services create happier customers. Happier customers come back. They tell other people. They buy more. They trust the company with more difficult problems.
The purpose of good training isn’t to make employees better at low-value work. It is to make employees capable of higher-value work.
And when businesses build systems that continuously increase the value of their people, investment in workers is no longer charity. It’s a growth strategy.