I’ve been a leader in two non-profit student organizations and a member of three more. One of the toughest things for an organization is to find people to do the jobs that no one wants to or have the skills to do. With so many companies using clueless HR firms to help them find employees, I think it’s a tough job for the for-profit organizations as well.

For a business, finding employees for a not so appealing job means you might have to increase the wages to provide more incentives for these roles. If you’re a non-profit who is leveraged by volunteers, it’s far more difficult. The solution, I believe, is to make these roles more appealing, not with cheap HR marketing tactics that make these jobs sound more interesting than they really are, but actually make them interesting. Otherwise you get an organization full of disillusioned people. This solution corresponds nicely with the second ethical principle prescribed by John Rawls.

In the book A Theory of Justice, John Rawls prescribes two principles of ethics:

1. Each person should have as many rights as possible as long as those rights can be extended to everyone without conflict.

2. The quality of the society we live in should only be considered as good as the quality of lives of the most disadvantaged group in our society. So society should aim to provide the greatest benefit to the most disadvantaged.

The first principle is common sense. If you can do away with fewer restrictions for everyone, why not?

The second is interesting because it’s a measure of quality that isn’t based on the median or mean, but rather the minimum. Like a computer scientist designing algorithms, Rawls is trying to minimize the worst state a person could be in a society. His rationale for doing so is often explained in this thought experiment. If you had the chance to design the world that you will be born into, but you have to distribute a limited amount of wealth and you had no control over which social class you were born into, what kind of a world you design? Most people would design a world with equality in mind. They would rather not risk being born into the lower class of an unequal society even if it means they have a chance to be extremely wealthy. The kind of society one would design under this condition is the kind of society that we ought to have.

Now think about an organization that you would like to work for or lead. If you were to design it from the begining, and you didn’t know where in the organization you would be placed, what kind of an organization would you build? Would you build one where the CEOs make millions of dollars when an employee at the bottom is barely scrapping a minimum wage? Probably not, but you wouldn’t make an organization where everyone is exactly equal either because unless you have the absolute best people, you need leaders and followers. The problem with this assumption that you have no choice in what position you will be placed is that it does not resemble reality. This blank canvas argument does not hold for organizations since people have a choice in joining an organization, and your position in it isn’t inherited. However, the benefits of the second principle still exists.

In any organization, whether it’s for profit or non-profit, social or political, there are roles for different types of people. There are leaders like a president (CEO), a treasurer (CFO), a secretary, a technology manager (CTO), and there are, middle managers, members and employees, who leverage the organization. These roles are treated differently in different organizations. If you’re a bank, the CFO and anyone working in finance is far more important than the CTO and anyone working in IT. If you’re a hight tech firm, then it’s the other way around. There is a tendency to focus only on the best people, or the people who look like they’re doing the most for the company.

In a business, the head of marketing is often gets the most credit because it looks like it’s she who made the sale where as it’s hard to measure how much income the engineers who created the product brought in. What about the key roles that customer service or support played? These roles are important. A friendly and enthusiastic person working in tech support might be keeping a customer from switching to the competition, yet support is considered one of the worst jobs in a tech company because of it’s low salaries and high stress. A good IT infrastructure means that other employees can be more productive.

Employees are a scarce resource, therefore there is a supply and a demand. Few employees will offer themselves to do boring or difficult jobs unless there is a significant financial advantage, so salary increases and it costs businesses more. If the job became more fun, appealing, or if the job had more perks, more people would be willing to do it at a lower salary.

Similarly, one of the toughest jobs that a non-profit organization faces is that no one wants to do the hard work. There is no financial incentive, and if it’s the most difficult, most boring or least appealing work, few people will volunteer to do it. Going door to door knocking for donations to support a charity is hard work, and it’s not very appealing. Calling companies for sponsorship is hard work. Promoting your project to a crowd of strangers is hard work. If you focus on improving the condition of these jobs, it becomes much easier. Give your door to door fund raisers a special hat to wear, make sure they have enough water for the day. Organize social events for them and show them your appreciation. If people actually want to do the hard work, then the stress in trying to find people for these roles is removed and leaders of the organization can focus on more important things like finding the best people rather than just finding someone for the job. Finding someone who can design a professional brochure means you’re more likely to get people to trust you, but getting your cusin with no design experience to design it as a personal favour means you’ll look “dodgy”, and fewer people will want to be associated with you.

Having better conditions for the worst jobs mean that better people will want to do them. Using the conditions of those jobs as a measure of the quality of an organization is a good way to start doing that. It’s that simple.