I am a keen football fan – for many years I have followed Manchester City, but I’m also a fan of football in general so I’m no stranger to the back pages of the newspapers. Every year the FA cup, and in particular the 3rd round, throws up its giant killing stories but one caught my eye this year for different reasons.
It was about the League One club Luton Town FC who are having a difficult time of things financially, but who landed a big tie with Liverpool in the 3rd round of the Cup. The result of this was that the manager and the players were not paid in November, and received only 50% of their wages in December – a difficult prelude to Christmas for all concerned. So far, most of the players have stayed with the club, but now Luton have earned a lucrative replay with Liverpool and the manager faces the prospect of seeing his best players leave in the January transfer window.
This made me think about how an equivalent situation would play out in the world of business or the public sector. I suspect that many of us would have very little patience if our boss told us that he/she couldn’t pay our full wages for two months running… and then added that the organisation still really needed us to carry on working at the top of our game. It’s almost unimaginable, isn’t it? It would probably be something that could only possibly happen in smallish, family businesses where there exists a sense of ‘loyalty beyond reason’. The kind of society we live in means that the vast majority of us would have too many financial commitments to be able to forego our salary at all, let alone for several months.
However, it is worth considering what these smaller organisations achieve when staff are willing to lose out on pay for the broader good of the business. Imagine the potential for bigger business if their staff were so engaged that they would be willing to make such sacrifices. But is it possible to develop a workforce in a big business that feels like a family? Certainly with latest research findings that show clear links between levels of employee engagement and levels of productivity it seems it would be a goal worth achieving for many large organisations. In this sense, workplaces can be very much like families – if it feels like a good place to be high levels of loyalty follow.
As for Luton Town FC, I wish them luck against Liverpool - both on the pitch and financially!!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/l/luton_town/7154021.stm
http://www.robertsoncooper.com/Pages/Products/ASSET/Wellbeing-Productivity-Link2.aspx
