Wed, Aug 3, 2005

Designing the perfect place to work

by Austin Govella

Since I’m Comments

Since I’m looking for a new job, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what the perfect workplace would be like. So here’s some more unrealistic idealism: It’s all about context.

In designing the perfect place to work, employers should remember this is not their employee’s first job, and more important, it won’t be their last. Ideally, employers should know what their employees really want to do and help employees use their proclivities to benefit the organization.

Similarly, work is not the first or last thing an employee will do in any given day. They have families, friends, a home, a life. Healthy people work so they can live. They don’t live so they can work. Employers should encourage employees to place personal responsibilities on level with business responsibilities. Running an errand, an appointment, or an annoying call to customer service shouldn’t need to be hidden beneath the polite fiction of “no, really… I’m working”.

As long as business responsibilites are met, what an employee does or doesn’t do at the office should be pretty irrelevent.

Employees should work the way they work best. Some people need quiet. Some need noise. Some work best alone, others in teams. Some work best from home, others in the office. Others in the coffee shop on the corner. With communication and collaboration tools so prevalent, there’s no reason employees should be required to just “be in the office”.

Employers should encourage and assist employees in moving to their next position. Whether inside or outside the organization, transitioning from an experienced employee to someone new to that position entails a specific cost. Negotiating the switch directly, on a friendly basis, is much cheaper than filling a void.

Managers should re-envision employees not as commodified human resources, but as a microcosm of the entire organization. Whenever one business unit or another has a weakness, the rest of the organization works to help correct the problem, to heal the problem. A physical analogy works best: it’s better to heal the injured hand than to chop it off and hope you can find another one.

Oddly enough, contemporary wisdom suggests these kinds of working conditions would benefit a company’s performance, as a whole. Seth Godin recently compared employees at Starbuck’s and a fast food joint, and he noticed “this is the Starbucks marketing effort, almost in its entirety. They don’t advertise, they don’t launch new products every day, but they are selling the way it makes you feel to purchase something there.” In my words, I’d say Starbuck’s message is integrated into everything they do, including how they treat their employees.

Godin explicitly links managing to marketing in another post about the Shake Shack in New York: “It’s about management. It’s about managers who don’t blame employees, but who empower them and push them instead. And yes, that’s marketing. The good news is that while it’s almost impossible to blow people away with an ad campaign or a coupon or even a product, the bar is set so astonishingly low for managers that it’s pretty easy to blow people away by enabling your staff to be amazing, honest and happy at the same time.”

And I recently read something from Jack Welch (that I can’t find now) that suggested it’s better to keep under-performing employees who can be improved than it is to keep over-performing employees who are toxic to those around them. One needs training. One’s a cancer.

Victor Lombardi’s notes on Flying high quote a bit about Southwest Airlines’ approach to employees:

“Neeleman insists he doesn?

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