Treat your workers well

Bartleby’s tour d’horizon of the most important person in a company (September 16th) makes stimulating reading for what it includes and for what it omits. Most of the people mentioned, including the chief executive, are employees. As companies migrate, or at least inch, towards some form of stakeholder capitalism, CEOs would do well to measure the value of employees not merely as productive assets or human capital but as sources of intelligence, reputation and resilience. At every level, employees who are esteemed and rewarded for everything they can offer to their company, as opposed to just being paid for work done, are much less likely to engage in quiet quitting and much more likely to display lasting loyalty to their organisation. Moreover, Bartleby conspicuously omitted shareholders. Here again, if shareholders are cultivated for their contribution beyond their investment and not just until the next quarterly results, they too can show loyalty as sources of intelligence, reputation and resilience.

NICHOLAS DUNGAN

Chief executive

CogitoPraxis

The Hague

Schumpeter amply plumbed the abysses to which customer service, particularly for tech firms, has sunk (September 30th). He wonders why customers are becoming increasingly uncivil. Anyone who has found themselves locked in voice-mail jail or in the clutches of an incompetent chatbot to resolve a problem that they know could be easily taken care of if they could just reach a human understands this. When things go awry, people need knowledgeable help quickly without being forced to go through a chain of time-consuming, fruitless connections with automated “intelligent agents”.

I have found it extremely difficult to reach a human at two big telecoms and cable companies. The sorry track record of those and other corporate giants gives little confidence that they will make the kind of enlightened, sophisticated use of generative AI that Schumpeter thinks will help solve the problem.

STEWART WILLS

Silver Spring, Maryland