Sustaining sustainability

I'm pondering on my FT column for next week. Somewhere it will feature something about employment measuring. I went to a Best Companies accreditation event on Wednesday that discussed a couple of interesting measures.

The Best Companies measuring should blend nicely with an interview I had on Thursday with Andy Taylor, the boss of Enterprise-Rent-A-Car, the biggest car rental company in North American (more than $9bn in revenues last year).

I have written quite a bit about Enterprise because it uses an interesting customer-feedback measure and links the feedback it gets to staff promotions. Needless to say, it ensures the staff stay pretty focused on keeping customers happy.

But not every member of staff is happy at Enterprise and this was something I had to bring up with Mr Taylor. A while back I came across a web site called JobVent.com. This is a site that enables employees to rate their companies, awarding them plus or minus points depending on how much they love or loath their jobs.

I was surprised to find a lot of negative feedback on Enterprise based on 239 reviews to date. The feedback puts it in fifth place on the "I hate my job list" that is topped by United Stationers. Mr Taylor didn't know about the list. He does now and I can imagine there is going to be a bit of reading homework for Enterprise managers over the weekend.

I don't like giving people bad news and I'm confident that Enterprise is the kind of company that can deal with it positively. But that doesn't mean it is going to change its style. This is a family-owned company, reared on homespun mid-western values. It's the kind of company that, if you work hard, have the right attitude and learn the business you could go far on a traditional promotion ladder.

But this is car rental. It's not the film industry. It's not glamour work. It's about delivering good service which, after all, is what we want of any company. You start at the bottom in this business and that means washing cars from time to time. "I still wash cars, haven't got a problem with that," says Mr Taylor. But it seems that some of the graduates who have entered the business may not feel the same way. I have plenty to say about this because it shows how attitudes are changing in the educated young. Nobody wants to do the dirty work anymore.

I have it in my family. A house doesn't run itself. Floors, bathrooms, kitchens all need cleaning. Lawns have to be mowed, dogs have to be walked and, yes, cars need washing. Who ends up doing most of this work? Our young and able boys? No. Mr and Mrs Muggins.

I'm not saying that the grousing about Enterprise is unfair. But I am saying that too many young people are focusing so much on their education - encouraged by parents, like myself, who want the best for them - that they forget that hard physical work is still necessary in this world and an education should not make us believe we are exempt from that.

I must leave space too for a mention of H. Lee Scott, the president of Wal-Mart. I saw him yesterday afternoon speaking at the Banqueting House in Whitehall at an event organised by Cambridge Programme for Industry that administers the Prince of Wales's Business and the Environment Programme. Prince Charles was there.

There is an impressive throne at one end of the large room but the prince wasn't going to sit there. He had his tatty red chair and cushion installed on the front row. The Banqueting House is not a great place to linger if you're royalty. Charles I was executed on a scaffold in front of the house in 1649. Since that time the royal household has prudently decamped to palaces a little further afield from the Palace of Westminster.

The Scott speech was incredibly worthy. I can't recall the number of times he used the word "sustainability" going so far as to hope that "we will make sustainability....sustainable".

Wal-Mart is in eighth place on the JobVent "I hate my job" list but that is based on only 82 reviews. "Not many given that we have 1.8m employees," said the Wal-Mart executive sitting next to me when I told her about the site. Not the best conversation starter, I know, but it's a long time since I read Dale Carnegie's book, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

The worthiness factor was maintained on a slip of paper in the information pack that was handed to everyone who went to the event. It said:

"In order to reduce the environmental impact of this event CPI will estimate the CO2 produced by your transport to and attendance of the event and will offset this."

It's a pity no-one had mentioned this to the chauffeurs of various company bosses whose Mercs and BMWs I saw outside ticking over steadily to ensure that everything was warm for the "top people" when it was time to leave. Mind you a chauffeur-driven Mercedes is easily sustainable on the salaries of these company bosses.