Well, that's short-sighted. I am an owner, and unhappy employees cost me a shitload of money. I spend two years training them until they are actually valuable, and then they leave. Or they just trudge along doing the minimum they can to get by; our work demands periodic nights and weekends, frequently on short notice, so why would someone be willing to go to the wall for me and sacrifice their own personal time if I treat them like shit? And that makes my life difficult, because then I have to do that work myself so our clients don't get pissed and leave. And I don't like things that make my life more difficult.
The fundamental problem here is that your best employees will always, always have other options. Make it clear to them that you don't care -- that you are just out to suck as much work from them in return for as little from you as possible -- and they're gone. And then you're left with the mediocre-to-poor performers, because they don't have other options. Which then costs you more time in managing, more time in trying to develop them, more time in trying to hire new people, more time in figuring out how to get rid of someone who isn't pulling their weight without getting sued -- none of which brings in any money. IOW, you are forcing the folks with the highest hourly rate to spend hours and hours on nonbillable bullshit because you don't have the right people at the lower rates doing the actual work. And then when I have to jump in and do the work myself, I end up writing off half of the time, because the client expects that to be done by those cheap people -- so I blow my weekend and don't even get paid for it. Fuck that. Talk about opportunity cost.
The best part is, when you're paying attention to what your employees actually care about, you can frequently make them happy without throwing a lot of shareholders' profits at them. "Real" mentoring and development makes a huge difference to ambitious young kids. We give people 16 weeks (unpaid) maternity leave instead of the mandatory 12, and they love the extra 4 weeks.* We let people work from home whenever their work allows; maybe that means they only get 6 hrs in when a kid is sick, but they appreciate the flexibility, and it's win-win beecause the alternative would be to force them to take off and we get a big fat 0 from them that day. Etc. etc. etc.
YMMV, of course. If you are in a field in which people are widgets and one is as good as the next, feel free to treat them like shit.
*We do give some paid parental leave to both, but just focusing on the extra time here, because that's not an out-of-pocket cost that eats shareholder profits.
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We are in complete agreement. The actual costs of an average employee is significant vs. a good one. Factor in additional training, reviewing, then add in recruitment costs and hiring new employees, you need to treat every employee with respect and great ones like gold. I am hoping to elevate the standard perks and then offer additional ones to high level performers.