It’s a cycle, really. Happy employees mean happy customers mean more profits. While I am not advocating for a total lack of a marketing budget, I am saying that your employees make your business what it is.

It is not–as some may think–the CEO, the coffee, or the Instagrammable space that keeps a business going. You can have all that and fail if you have a high turnover rate and unhappy employees. Employee hiring and training is expensive.

How does a company justify having the money to pay for social media influencers but not having it to pay their employees well? I get the concept that marketing will bring in more sales but do these sales get funneled back to employee retention programs? If your marketing isn’t also helping your employees, then I say good luck.

Studies have been done on unhappy employees and their impact on the workplace. Engaged employees are twice as productive and 58% more likely to go out of their way to help a customer. In a study of retail and food-service workers, researchers found that employees who knew their schedules more than two weeks in advance were 10% more likely to be happy than those who only had a few days’ notice.

On a personal anecdote, I can safely say that some of the reasons I didn’t like being a barista were that my hours per week constantly changed, sometimes to 20/week in the winter, but the schedule wasn’t released until less than a week before. This completely prevented me from finding a second job. I quit that job after less than a year.

Employee advocacy isn’t a new thing but it seems to be missed in coffee businesses. Salespeople who use social media are found to have increased sales, employees who talk about their company are deemed twice as trustworthy than the CEO. This is a good 101 guide if you are interested in setting up an employee advocacy program.

In conclusion, don’t go all in on marketing at the detriment of your employees.