The Power of One (1)

It seems much easier in approaching our work to consider groups of clients and staff rather than relating with each as individuals because it tends to avoid the mess of caring. However, since we have chosen to make people our focus rather than the environment or transactions or accounts, it behoves us to deal with the people we come across as individuals and the clients we serve as unique entities or beings, different from all others, even if they are in the same sector or industry.

This deviates somewhat from what we are taught in B-school, where you need to analyze a whole industry and develop solutions that fit the needs of the industry. As I think of it however, I realize how absurd and contrary to common sense it is to treat all our day care clients as "day cares" or all our co-working space clients as "co-working spaces". Each client is as different as the individuals who comprise it. Each staff is different from the other and therefore have needs that differ from each other.

Our solution is to treat each client as a unique entity comprising unique individuals that should be related with as whole human beings and each staff as an individual unlike any other. This can be potentially messy but it is easier when one operates at a "higher level of being" than mere economic, as beautifully expounded by E.F. Schumacher, in his book, A Guide for the Perplexed. At a higher level of being, it is easy to relate with each client as distinct and with peculiar needs. This can be rewarding financially and intrinsically. Recently, by treating one of our daycare clients (the biggest daycare in Montreal) as a unique entity and not as a "day care", we were able to come up with a solution that was unique to them and ended up becoming a solution multiplier because it solved other internal challenges beyond cleaning, unintended. Beyond the potential economic rewards, this was intrinsically rewarding for the team.

Staff members too are related with as individuals, unique and whole beings too complex to be generalized and so complex that our spirits, not just our heads need to be the arena of engagement. No one who works with Zenith Cleaners is a "cleaner" in the traditional sense and even if they were, they are whole beings whose lives have to do with much more than cleaning. It is a privilege to relate with them as such and it is easier to genuinely care when we relate with them, not as "employees", here to do a job and get paid, but engage with each other as human beings whose lives intersect at this point in time but will not forever. We will therefore celebrate each other one to one and the work we do today.