I’m a factory owner. Is there any way to make my employees love the factory and work to the fullest?

To make our employees love the factory and their own work sounds easy, and many people say that training and a good paycheck will make employees love their jobs, but if it’s true, we don’t have to have practical Dhamma for our daily lives.

Actually, money is not everything. It’s true that everybody has to feed themselves, but money is still not the only important thing; we also have to ask ourselves how we can make our employees love their jobs and the factory. To say briefly, before somebody loves his job and his factory, he must have loved being a good person. If he doesn’t, don’t expect that he will love the factory and the job; but he will just work for money and will not care about the factory. But whenever he loves to be a good person, he will work well and the factory work will be efficient.

The next question is what we can do to make our employees love to be good. This question is always disregarded. We must not think that the people being with us are only our slaves. But we should think that they are our world mates, or even better by thinking that they are our mates in the cycle of life, or even more by thinking that they are our own children. They don’t have jobs, and we have jobs for them, also we should take care of them like our own children. If you can do this way, the work will progress.

To instill mind for goodness to them, we have to teach them how good a good person is. Is he good because of knowledge or good look or anything? This is the standard of good people that the Lord Buddha gave us. He taught that a good person is good because of his responsibility. When he does make a mistake, he admits it and solves it, also doesn’t shift this mistake onto others. When he does any good thing, he also admits it no matter if somebody thinks it’s wrong.

A good person is responsible. What are these responsibilities then? To be good people, our employees should at least have these things.

1. Responsibility to themselves—They have to be responsible for themselves before be responsible for our factory and our work. That’s the first one.

2. Responsibility to their own economy. To say easily, they have to know how to spend money correctly. If they don’t know, they will always ask for money, and then you and they cannot be together.

3. Responsibity totheir family—since everybody has his own family, just like that we have parents and somebody has a wife and children, good people need to be responsible, starting from the responsibility to themselves. At least they must have 5 precepts. Whoever who holds precepts well is able to be called that he is self-responsible in his human-being.

The second one is they must not walk on roads to ruin because roads to ruin are the cause of the destruction of our assets, no matter how much we make, they ruin it. Therefore, the people who stay with us must not walk on roads to ruin.

The third one is the responsibility to their families. If they are not responsible even to their own families, how can they be responsible to our factory and our work?

When these pictures in your mind are clear, they can teach you how to treat your employees. You must not only give them work, but you also need to teach them virtue. Teaching and training must go together. Actually, it means you must be their second mother, or mother of their work since they are your employees. If they are counted as only your workers, you and they would talk only about money, not virtue. But if you count them as your own children, teach them virtue, and pay them reasonably, the love to the factory and the work will grow in their heart.