The most basic need from the human being

Sigmund Freud argued many years ago that there were two primary desires that served as a guiding thread for the lives of human beings: the sexual desire and the desire to be important.

The latter, which over the years has proved to be more and more accurate, is a basic need that has been exploited to the full by the organizations’ marketing and communication teams. Every piece of communication is centered on the user, the name of this is repeated until exhaustion because they know that this technique has effective results, the services are made to the customer’s dimension, allowing him to feel at the center of the whole process. Companies that make the customer the center of the world are the most profitable. Companies that make the customer feel important are the most remembered, not for the product but for the feeling they provoke in the customer. The companies that do this are right. Those that do are ahead of the rest.

But if this very basic premise of making the customer the center of everything, if this need to make them feel important, serves as a basis before designing any process, why don’t organizations take the same kind of care for their employees?

This realization that one of the most basic and primary needs of human beings is to be recognized is further proof that it is within the reach of any person, community or organization to satisfy their closest ones.

When I use the term “human being”, I do not use it in vain. There are characteristics and needs that are more suited to certain peoples and regions than to others. However, there are desires and needs that are transversal to all beings, regardless of their country of origin or region.

The law of reciprocity defends that every human being has an almost pathological need to reward the one who has done him good. Satisfied customers reward companies that have made them feel special through their loyalty, sometimes even paying a higher price for the same product because they feel indebted to the satisfaction that was provided to them. Why don’t the leaders we have in most of our companies apply the same revenue to their employees? After all, applying the same premise, employees will need to reward the organization for what it does to make them feel special.

The answer lies in the immediacy so often linked with millennials (they represent 50% of the workforce today), but which is actually more present in the bosses themselves. The vast majority of the Portuguese business fabric is made up of SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises), where the need to achieve profits and immediate returns often dulls the vision and mentality of the leaders themselves, creating an organizational culture based on high performance but which in the great most cases neglect some of the most basic requirements of good people management.

Immediate profit has been superimposed on the sustained creation of a solid team, with high levels of confidence that will lead to good results. This is the correct correlation. Reversing the order, there is no guarantee that a company merely based on obtaining results strengthens the employees’ feeling of importance. Those who satisfy the most basic needs of your employees will be helping them to satisfy the most basic needs of your customers. And it will be through this formula that the much-desired financial return will be obtained, which, wrongly, has been the most basic desire of managers.

By Vasco de Matos Ramos