I came across this tweet this morning and it perfectly explains a phenomenon that all customers and employees intuitively understand.

"So: what's a thermocline? Well large bodies of water are made of layers of differing temperatures. Like a layer cake. The top bit is where all the the waves happen and has a gradually decreasing temperature. Then SUDDENLY there's a point where it gets super-cold."

The Trust Thermocline in Products and Services

John Bull's explanation is straightforward: if you gradually provide less quality for more money, you are gradually eroding your customers' trust in you as a provider. At some point your customers will lose faith and bail, and it won't be because of one specific change. It will be due to a breach of faith so bad that leaving or switching to a new provider will be worth the cost.

He explains that this breach is never sudden and silent. Customers complain — everyone on Medium is familiar with this, every time there's a change in algorithm or interface a multitude of articles come out declaring the end of Medium — but their grumblings are largely ignored by the provider because the customers are still putting money down.

But continuing to put money down doesn't signal trust as much as it indicates lock-in.

Avoiding the Trust Thermocline

According to Bull, if you find yourself with staff or departments dedicated to customer retention, you're probably well on your way to the Trust Thermocline. Your services and value for money should be keeping your customers, not begging and bribing. Here's the unroll for the part of the conversation about avoiding hitting the Thermocline with some interesting tips:

The Trust Thermocline in Employment

There's another aspect of the Trust Thermocline that was raised in one of the subthreads, and that's the trust between an employee and their employer, and this ties in to something I've been saying for years:

When your employees are given increased responsibility with no change in compensation, you are eroding their trust. When an employee needs to actively request a raise in order to keep up with inflation — ie. in order to not have their salary naturally lowered — you are eroding their trust.

Employers tend to talk about employee loyalty and take offense when people jump ship frequently for higher salaries, not realizing that loyalty must be earned. An enormous part of earning that loyalty is the perception of fair compensation.

The switching cost for an employee is terrifically high. Very few people can afford to even temporarily give up the stability of a paying job, and very few people enjoy the modern-day gauntlet of finding and applying for new roles.

Most employers take advantage of this switching cost and milk it for all it's worth.

The problem with doing this is not only that employee retention becomes difficult, but that the quality of your employees' work will naturally be dramatically lowered. I've read a fair amount of articles lately discussing "quiet quitting", and I'm pretty confident that happy employees whose needs are taken care of don't behave like this.

Final Thoughts

I warmly recommend diving in to the original thread, it contains many interesting comments and a couple of riveting subthreads. Including a link to an article breaking down how Disneyland and Disney World are rapidly approaching their Trust Thermocline.

I would also suggest to the Medium Staff that they pay more attention to all the grumblings on this platform: I've been a paid member for a couple of years now and I'd really like Medium to thrive! A little more transparency whenever making changes to the algorithms and payments would go a long way to rebuilding trust, too.