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“The people in the front lines are my customers,” says Orfalea. “I need to keep them happy. And, the best way to take care of your customers is to take care of your workers.”
Orfalea could never master the art of reading and writing. “I’m lucky, I can’t read well, and I’m not mechanically inclined,” he says. “So I know anybody else could do any particular task better than I can.” But he did not let that stand in the way of his success. Instead, he chose to focus on what he did know – not books, but people.
“You need to first understand what their needs are,” he says. “You have to empathize and understand what their problems are. You might not be able to solve everybody’s problems, but you have to at least be able to understand them.”
Orfalea made it his top priority to ensure a satisfying work environment for his staff, one where they would enjoy coming to work each and every day. “The people in the middle are my employees, and if they’re not aligned to those customers, then it is my job to make them aligned,” he says. “A lot of times middle managers take their eyes off the ball, which is to take care of their customers and workers.”
Orfalea never believed much in corporate policies, but he did make the rare exception. “I battled very hard for daycare, orthodontics coverage for our company. I battled pretty hard for twelve weeks off for our workers after pregnancy, childcare leave,” he says. “I always believe that a corporation’s first responsibility is to its workers.” Orfalea also implemented generous incentive programs.
Fortune magazine has consistently rated Kinko’s one of the best places to work in the U.S., and that is for a reason. Orfalea has made it his priority to ensure his workers were taken care of, both financially and in terms of their job satisfaction. To that end, he also strove to ensure a close knit community, one where managers knew what it was to look after their people.
“I’ll tell you what my biggest challenge at Kinko’s was,” says Orfalea. “When we had two and three workers in the store, the manager knew everything about everything. Now you have forty or fifty workers. Now you want the manager to know about people, not about things. So, as an organization evolves and grows, managers need to have good people skills more than good technical skills.”
Even if one of his staff members was having problems at home, Orfalea wanted to make it his business. “When you are dealing with employees, you are dealing with a total person - the whole enchilada of the worker,” he says. “A worker might have a problem with her husband, but you’ve still got to get a smile on her face. That’s your problem. When workers have mood problems because they’ve got baggage, that’s your problem.”
Orfalea never believed in separating home life and personal needs from a person’s work life. Even something as small as having trouble catching the bus to work could lead to serious motivational problems, he believed. That is why Orfalea encourages everyone in his company – from managers to retail staff – to send him ideas for improvements by voicemail.
“These great guys who ran corporate businesses in New York…they’d ask me what our greatest competitive advantage was with Kinko’s, and I said it was a spark in our workers’ eyes,” says Orfalea. “And they didn’t realize that.”
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In today’s multi-generational workplace, it’s not unusual for an older worker to have a younger boss. In order for that relationship to survive, both partners have to capitalize on each other’s experiences and stren...
“The people in the front lines are my customers,” says Orfalea. “I need to keep them happy. And, the best way to take care of your customers is to take care of your workers.” 
