“The customer comes first.” It’s the oldest rule in business. We put it on our websites, paint it on our walls, and drill it into our teams.
But what if we’ve had it backward this whole time?
Derrick Hall, President and CEO of the Arizona Diamondbacks, recently sat down for a SHRM interview where he shared his number-one cultural lesson after 35 years in baseball. It’s a lesson that raises eyebrows in every executive conversation he has:
“The customer doesn’t come first. The employee does.”
That sounds crazy coming from a sports franchise. Their entire survival depends on ticket sales, fan experience, and corporate sponsors. But Hall has the results to back it up including a 2023 National League Pennant and an incredibly loyal staff where 70% of employees have stuck around for 10 to 15 years.
“Ultimately we have to make sure we treat our fans or our customers better than any team in sports,” Hall explains. “But that’s not gonna happen unless our team players, our employees, feel respected, rewarded, acknowledged, recognized, developed, and invested in. When they are, they in turn will then treat our customers the way that we expect them to.”
The Cost of Getting It Wrong
Hall’s philosophy isn’t just a nice sentiment; it’s a strategic imperative. Prioritizing your team is a matter of survival in today’s labor market.
Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace report shows global employee engagement dropping for the second straight year in 2025. That drop hurts the bottom line. Gallup estimates low engagement drained about $10 trillion in lost productivity from the global economy last year alone.
When your team is checked out, your customers immediately feel the shift. A receptionist (or “First Impression Specialist” as Hall calls them) who feels undervalued isn’t going to bend over backward to solve a fan’s problem. An account manager who feels disconnected from your mission won’t fight for that extra renewal.
You can’t just mandate great customer service. You have to create a workplace that naturally produces it.
Making “Employees First” Actually Work
Most small and mid-sized businesses genuinely want to treat their employees well.
The problem is usually a lack of time and resources.
In a company of 20 to 100 people, HR usually lands on the desk of an owner, CFO, or office manager who already has three other jobs. Instead of building culture, they spend their days chasing down onboarding paperwork, fixing payroll glitches, and trying to decipher new compliance laws.
You can’t focus on your people when you’re buried in paperwork.
That’s where bringing in an HR partner changes the game. By handing off the busywork (payroll, benefits admin, compliance) you finally free up your internal team to focus on what actually keeps people around:
- Development: Creating clear career paths and training opportunities so employees don’t have to leave your company to grow.
- Recognition: Implementing systems to catch people doing things right and rewarding them publicly.
- Culture: Ensuring your core values are actually lived behaviors, not just words on a breakroom poster.
The Outsourcing Advantage
Putting your team first takes real infrastructure. It means having an onboarding process that makes new hires feel welcome immediately. It means offering benefits that actually support their lives. It means training managers to lead, rather than just supervise.
But you don’t have to build all of that from scratch.
Partnering with an HR outsourcing firm gives you access to “big company” tools and expertise without the massive overhead of an internal HR department. It allows you to focus on your people, while your partner handles the paperwork.
Derrick Hall had it right: if you want a team that takes incredible care of your customers, you have to take incredible care of your team first.
Clint Parry, MBA, SHRM-SCP is a Senior Business Consultant at Focus HR, now powered by OneDigital. Based in Arizona, Clint works with growing companies to help them turn HR from an administrative burden into a strategic advantage.
