Contemporary management has embraced the attitude that it is the employers' responsibility to enable staff to fulfil themselves in the workplace.

This is quite legitimate when the fulfilment of staff is a necessary condition for the satisfaction of corporate and shareholder objectives. However, many organisations pursue the fulfilment of staff as a primary objective of the organisation, ranking equally with other stakeholders and with shareholders - and sometimes above them.

Although sounding somewhat apocryphal and politically insensitive in this 'new age' environment, staff are “merely” enablers to help the organisation fulfil its objectives much like other organisational elements.

The organisation does not exist for the benefit of staff but for the organisational outcomes that are intended to be delivered by them. In order to deliver these outcomes, the organisation needs to employ and maintain staff. In order to maintain staff, it needs to satisfy them sufficiently for them to do their jobs.

This logical argument is intuitively recognised by most organisations. Yet some of them choose to elevate the importance of staff to a point where staff satisfaction is divorced from the roles they are there to fulfil, and rank such satisfaction ahead of shareholder (and sometimes even corporate) satisfaction.

The reason for this is that it is easier to provide employee fulfilment than deliver corporate objective. After all, who among the staff will argue against their own happiness and contentment?

That virtually all employees employed by corporations work for someone and are therefore “enablers” is painful to acknowledge – particularly by those in the organisation.

Even when employees own shares in a corporation, the shareholding is a mechanism to secure commitment and therefore a higher probability of achieving objectives – for all shareholders.

The cost for satisfying staff is borne by shareholders. A position where a corporation incurs costs borne by shareholders for the satisfaction or gratification of staff that do not deliver benefits to shareholders in excess of their own costs is not sustainable in the long term.

Managers need to ask themselves “what is the nature, structure and character of the employees we need to deliver our objectives.” Everything outside that definition is an unnecessary expense and at shareholder cost.