How the swine flu scare taught me that motherhood and customer relationships within staffing would make for a good analogy

I’m known around the office for analogies that takes quite a bit of mental bandwidth to even understand. This is one of those.

So I’ve been sidelined at home the last couple of days to take care of my kids, ages 9 and 7.5. They had the sniffles and with the whole swine flu scare and precautions, the school advised me to keep them at home and I was happy to oblige.

I don’t like it when my kids are sick, but I enjoy taking care of them when they are. When they are well, they seem like ungrateful little creatures. They sit at the dinner table, demanding to be fed. They expect that I would wake them up in time for school every single morning, breakfast waiting on the table. They expect their lunches to be ready. They expect that they will be picked up on time after school and that they will get their time on the playground. They can rely on these things day in and day out, and as a mom, I’m just expected to do these things and expect no appreciation other than the privilege of maybe getting a hug at night. But when they are under the weather, things definitely change. They don’t run around as much. They eat the chicken porridge I make like it’s the best thing they’ve ever had. The same boys who are embarrassed to be seen with me around school now want nothing more than to just sit in the couch with me, cuddle up in a blanket and watch Spongebob…and they don’t want anyone else but me.

Not all of it is lovey-dovey. There are those nights when I don’t sleep because I’m watching their temperature, listening to each breath, inhaler at hand…hideous, tiring nights…but these are also the moments that separate me from everyone else in their lives. When everyone else won’t touch you with a 10-foot pole because you’ve got some hideous virus, your mom would still be there to take care of you.

I think we all agree that the economy is pretty much in the tank and a few of our clients are…well…feeling under the weather. I was just chatting with a client of mine a few days back and he mentioned that he’s getting a lot of phone calls from staffing firms and he was a bit depressed telling people that he had no reqs to tell people about. “They couldn’t get off the phone fast enough,” he said. “They are just too eager to call the next person on their list of calls to do that day. Maybe they have reqs.”

When the economy is hot, our clients have reqs and they rely on us to fill them. They can’t sit down and talk because they simply don’t have the time to have that relationship with us, and we, in turn, are busy working on their reqs. We’re staffing firms. It’s what we are paid to do. But right now, they are feeling under the weather. Budgets are shrinking, very few are actually hiring, and unfortunately, the staffing firms that were eager to listen and take down reqs just a few months ago aren’t so attentive now.

Now, just as no mother will admit to or feel good about not taking care of a sick child, no staffing firm will admit to abandoning their clients in a downturn. But take a look at the survey results conducted by the Staffing Industry Analysts: 30% of staffing companies feel that providing excellent customer service was a key to their success to 2008. In 2009, only 22% of staffing companies feel that providing excellent customer service is a key factor to their success. Seriously? Thirty percent was already an embarrassing number, 22% is simply horrible. The same survey also revealed that 56% of staffing companies feel that “increasing revenue” was their top priority.

Increase revenues by taking care of your customers less. Seriously? Even more astonishing, no, wait, embarrassing, is that at 56%, a majority of staffing firms subscribe to this baffling concept.

Going back to the mom analogy, that’s like saying I only want to deal with healthy children and when they get sick, well, maybe I can just stick them in a room, check on them the next day and maybe they’d be well again and everything will be just fine.

Just as I don’t really like it when my children are sick (who wishes illness on their child?), this downtime that we’re all having is a good opportunity to nurture relationships and pay closer attention to our customers, because they sure are recognizing who they can really rely on. Relationships. It’s what sets you apart as a business partner from everyone else, simply known as “vendors.”