I’ve written many times describing the value of benefits and their effects on worker productivity.

Last year we looked at Amazon as a poster child for treating lower-level employees as expendable, replaceable ciphers.

However, some companies are eschewing Wall Street’s demand for short-term profit in favor of treating their employees and the environment better in the name of long-term profits and sustainability.

… a new type of business called a benefit corporation, which means its mission is to consider the needs of society and the environment, in addition to profit. There are 27 states that have passed legislation allowing companies to incorporate as benefit corporations…

Companies not located in one of those 27 states can apply as Certified B-Corporations.

The companies pledge to think about people and the planet in addition to profit, and an outside nonprofit inspects them and makes sure they’re doing so.

The premise is more back to the future than original — it’s called “stakeholder capitalism” and dates back more than 60 years.

Economists like Robert Reich, the one-time Labor Secretary, wondered if the Market Basket saga was a sign that the country was “witnessing the beginning of a return to a form of capitalism that was taken for granted in America sixty years ago.” He wrote that he hoped it was a return to “stakeholder capitalism,” in which employees and customers are also part of a company’s decision-making, as opposed to the “shareholder capitalism” of the last few decades that has focused on maximizing shareholder value.

While it’s Wall Street’s short-term, investor-as-god thinking that’s behind the minimization of workers and customers, it’s those same people, i.e., workers and customers, who are driving the change in attitude — along with multiple studies that prove treating all stakeholders well pays off.

More proof that, as I and others have said multiple times, business is like a three-legged stool — customers, investors and employees. When one or two legs are wildly out-of-whack with the third the stool falls over.

Maybe not immediately, but sooner than you think.

Wall Street and investors don’t care; they just go their merry, destructive way.

Flickr image credit: Gábor Kovács