I was reminded of a conversation with a friend the other day.

He worked for a phone answering service that handled calls, took messages, and paged applicable people when necessary all across the country. They handled calls for doctors, corporations, and a whole gamut of people that needed to be contacted 24/7 but needed a filter for after-hour calls and didn’t want to hire someone to sit there for $8/hr to take one call every other week. The phone center had twenty people or so.

Because of the nature of the business, it was extremely important that they remain up as much as possible. Downtime meant that doctors weren’t getting important calls, corporate heads were unable to field emergencies, and so on. For reasons nobody understands, this company had no backup or procedure for when the office was down for whatever reason. They just paid a penalty for the unanswered calls and moved on.

Several years ago a hurricane was headed straight for Colosse and the city was evacuated. As it turned out the hurricane lost some of its steam, but ended up hovering over the city causing a flood that Colossians still talk about to this day. For two days, ten people lived at the office fielding those calls. Because they were only half-staffed, they took verbal abuse from companies in California and Dakota unaware that Colosse had just been hit with hurricane-related floods.

When it was all over, my friend tallied how much money the company made by virtue of the employees going far above and beyond the call of duty. The figure was nearly a quarter of a million dollars in lost time (they couldn’t charge their monthly fees if they weren’t open for the whole month) and penalties they would have had to pay and that didn’t include the business they likely would have lost.

These are people that made $8/hr. A couple of them attempted to drive in but had to leave their cars on the side of the road and walk the rest of the way. When all was said and done their cars were ticketed and towed and they were out $100 or so. My friend suggested to the president of the company that they should just cut a check for $2,000 to each employee that stayed. That was a drop in the bucket compared to what would have happened if they’d not weathered the hurricane, a huge amount for the lowly wage-earners, and the sort of thing that sends a loud and clear message that going above and beyond the call of duty will be rewarded.

Instead, the president of the company thanked them with coupons from a $6 coupon book that he’d bought. Within a few months, none of those employees were still working for the company.

-{To longtime readers of this blog, this story may sound a bit familiar. We were actually trading “ungrateful employers” stories. He won the award for that.}-