“My strategy is to improve working conditions for my employees”

The Trap: When Employee Comfort Overshadows Customer Relations

“Thinking that if they feel good, they’ll take better care of the customers. It’s 3 p.m. and my Store Director closes the shop because he has an osteopath appointment… but now no one is available to assist the customers! Did I miss something?”

Indeed, Mr. CEO, you’ve been caught by a misinterpretation of the principle of mutual attention.

Understand that it is essential to take care of employees not to offer comfort at all costs, but to enable them to do their job better in relation to customers. This involves streamlined processes, suitable tools, increased autonomy, in short: a well-thought-out and deeply rooted customer culture that supports performance without sacrificing it.

Finding the Balance Between Well-Being and Performance in Service of the Customer

Team comfort is great. As long as it doesn’t harm customer relations or the company’s performance.

It’s not about opposing well-being and high standards, but about remembering that customer culture requires constant arbitration between these two dimensions, in service of lasting customer satisfaction.

Put differently:

There’s absolutely no issue (on the contrary) in improving the personal comfort of employees who keep customer focus as their compass. But as soon as comfort becomes a goal in itself and overrides the logic of service, there’s a problem.

Today, labor market pressure is pushing some leaders to ease up on expectations.

The risk? The emergence of misaligned organizations, where customer culture becomes more of a narrative than a lived reality.

So: comfort, yes.

But comfort compatible with customer culture.

Author: Guillaume Antonietti