I decided to go ahead and write something on the business side of things. I’m currently a partner in Spring2Mind, a Web Hosting provider with a new idea. Occasionally, I may write a little more about Spring2Mind and its products. In these stories, I will focus on the small business side of things when I can since big businesses rarely care or want major changes.
I recently ran across a Slashdot Article that brought up (in an argument, I might add) that work environments differ greatly and depending on what you do, you can attract anyone you want or no one at all. Its not just about money…
The Look
The appearance, both inside and out, is the factor that will stay with prospective employees. Lets try this example on for size… (At this point, the job type doesn’t matter.)
Employer number one brings you into a cube farm to show you how you will spend your day. Not only does this cube farm have street signs for “directions”, but the cubes themselves are half walled and it appears that there are no customizations. The floors are stained, the chairs are nasty, but you also have to sit across from someone with a very annoying voice or habit. You also get stares from employees, but no one smiles - just an occasional nod.
Employer number two brings you into a cube farm, but its sectioned off with full sized cubes that are setup as small dead-ends. You meet the few people surrounding your desk, all have decorations, toys, etc all over. They are smiling and joking about your new job. They allow headphones while you work to drown out the office noise and say that there is a networked MP3 jukebox available for use.
Just based on those 2 situations, I don’t think I’ll point to the one you’ll choose. The sad part is, I’ve worked for both of these types of companies. To tell you the truth, company number 2 was the one I had the most fun at out of all of my jobs. Clean up your environment, allow the employees to have some fun and relax a little. Allow them to get away while still at work by offering the ability of customization and headphones.
Unfortunately, sometimes its only about money. Personally, I’ve met very few people where this is the case. By far, I have met more people that would take a pay cut for some of the following….
Freebies
Coffee, tea, soda, etc… It doesn’t sound like much, but the simplest things make people the happiest. If you had the choice of getting up whenever you wanted a Cafe Mocha while working, I’m sure you’d be happy too. Me - I’ve had jobs where I couldn’t even have a beverage at my own desk.
Food? Allow a few things to go for free, bagels or donuts on certain days of the week tend to be popular. My supervisor at one of the above companies, who happened to sit behind me in the half-sized cube farm, would have had kittens, a herd of cattle and probably a few chickens if I would have brought food to my desk. Food can be messy on occasion, but let it in the office. Someone snacking at the desk is more productive than someone hiding around the corner attempting to jam a Twinkie into their mouth.
As a side note to this, either clean the keyboards every once in awhile (including removing the keys) or just replace the keyboard every year or so. We’ve all seen our fare share of nasty keyboards… I personally clean my keyboards (laptops too) as well as my wife’s keyboard every 6 months.
Beverages and Food are not the only freebies. How much do you think a gym membership costs for all of your employees? Certainly not $32 per person like the gym is advertising. Contact gyms, movie theaters, broadway & opera’s and anything else you can think of and contract for lower prices. When you have everything, give away certain things to everyone (the gym) and then setup a want/need system for tickets and such. Have everyone create a priority system for what they like. Most won’t like something like Opera’s, so those that do will be greatly thankful - its the same on the other side of the spectrum like baseball tickets. If an employee gets tickets, but can’t use them - raffle them via email the day before or the day of the event. This allows others to use them and generally stops the no-shows at events, wasting your money. Now, this only works if you setup the system to have the person pick their tickets up the day before the event otherwise a lot of tickets will go to waste. (My wife loved the opera tickets I brought home from work one week - talk about brownie points!)
Shirts, mugs, license plate frames, oh my! These may seem like trinkets, but it helps morale & your bottom line. A shirt that may cost you a few bucks is usually a year or more of advertising when your employee wears the shirt.
One company I worked for gave away free paint jobs. Sounds like an expensive program right? Nope… Make a deal with your local paint shop. Tell your employees you can have up to $XXX for new paint or touch-ups. In return, you’re going to put your logo on their car… You’ll soon get a whole fleet of vehicles advertising your company.
Technology
This is a big one. Currently, I have all the technology I need at my home desk. I have 3 P3 466’s (and up) and a laptop running Win98. To your average person, this would be horrific. Its all I need to do server maintenance and support for my clients though. I’m not greedy and one of the main rules of my company is froogleness. If I where a programmer (not a web programmer!), I would demand a top of the line machine. Tech Support and Customer Service reps would get the hand-me-downs from the programmers whenever that would occur. For larger places of business, look into Thin Clients.
Thin Clients are modern dumb terminals. A local “machine” allows use of the screen, keyboard and mouse for remote viewing of the Operating System.
I have a workstation report to look over if you would like to compare different types of workstations along with their pro’s and con’s. I even went in depth with Support calls/chats, etc. For a small to large cube environment (20+), I’ll tell you right away that the winner was Thin Clients vs your average computer from XXX corp. Read the report if you want more info on that argument. To clean that up a little, if you REALLY want personal computers for everyone, use Open Source Software. Your security problems, support costs, etc go down - a lot. Honestly, with Spring2Mind, Support and Service folks will be using Thin Clients. Management will be using hand-me-downs from programmers (these will also be used as Windows test machines) and our Programmers/Engineers will have the nicer machines. All real machines (not thin clients) will be running Linux or FreeBSD - that hasn’t been decided yet. There won’t be any windows machines except for the windows test boxes, all on their closed LAN.
Office Toys
Office toys may seem trivial, but they’re not. This technically fits within the Technology section, but I decided to specifically focus on it.Employees are happier listening to music - fact. Employees can’t listen to music while working - fiction. Why though? As someone that has come from an environment that allows employees to listen to music, I can tell you that there is a 100% boost in production and focus on work when listening to music through headphones. This allows your employee to drown out office noise, conversations, etc while focusing on their work. Heck, I even listened to music while helping customers over the phone. It helped drown out other problems people where having. Try tech’ing a call and hearing “Does anyone have a weird fix for a 691!?!” - you lose complete focus on the issue at hand because you’re thinking about 2 problems now.
As a side note, there is a way to increase conversation, but keep noise down. Chat… Run your own chat server (Jabber) for in-house communication. This allows employees to talk to each other, but keep the conversations on your own network. Heck, Jabber is so popular that even Google is using it now!
Other toys include gift certificates to places like ThinkGeek or Amazon allowing employees to customize their desks or buy books, etc… Some companies give away gift certificates, but require whatever you buy to be used at work or for work purposes. This could be a book on programming that your employee wants, etc.
Certifications
This is a big one for me and most companies do a few different things. Personally, if an employee passes a certification test, I would reimburse the fee for it. Now, that doesn’t mean I’m going to be a tech company reimbursing a fitness certification. Also, I have a little bit of a problem with companies that throw their employees into a week long course for their certification. Offer your employees the classes at a discount, but they don’t have to take the test right then. If I offered a discounted CCNA class, I would let my employees practice - which leads me to my next topic.Labs
A business (usually) has hardware sitting around, doing absolutely nothing. Sometimes its old, sometimes its just not needed at that point in time. Instead of letting the hardware sit around, build a lab in a room for your employees to study. Offer components so people can put computers together, piece by piece (A+), offer a few windows machines for networking and studying (MCSE), offer a few routers and switches for playing with (CCNA) and offer a few Linux or FreeBSD boxes (Linux/FreeBSD cert) to study. All of these can be on their own LAN with 1 connection to the outside world.Going with this, you will need a few things.
1. Study hall - Offer the ability for people using the lab to go to study hall during their shift to learn. This can be for a half hour, 45 mins, etc.
2. Scheduled times - People will need specific equipment for a specific amount of time. If someone wants to attempt a Linux install and setup of a webserver they’re going to need awhile.Library
I’m getting long winded, but I needed to throw this in too. Offer employees a place where they can check out technical books. Allow employees to donate books as well. I personally don’t need the Beginning PHP book I have anymore. I don’t need the old ASP book or MySQL in 21 days. Heck, I have all kinds of crap I am going to donate to Spring2Mind’s library. Set this up - employees will use it and like it.
The Rejection
This has always irked me the wrong way and it really gets to a lot of people. When you interview an employee, let them know right away if you’re not interested. If you send them away, at least send a “Thanks, but no thanks” letter or call them. During my travels as an Army Spouse, I would consistently apply to jobs that I was fully qualified for, but never received phone calls or letters about. Well, I take that back… In my 10 years, I’ve received exactly 2 letters out of about 200+ applications (I was unemployed for 7 months…)
Its actually nice to know that you didn’t get the sweet job you just found. Think I’m crazy? What happens when that once in a lifetime job rolls around and you apply just to it thinking you’ll get it no matter what and…you don’t hear anything back? You waste a month doing precisely nothing hoping for that interview call. This happened to me when I was young and stupid (which I still partially claim to be) and its happened to almost everyone else out in the world. This will also stop those annoying calls of “did you get my resume?” My dream job was a 60K Professional PHP Programming gig in Houston Texas that flew me in for an interview - what was your dream job?
As a side note, I’m currently working on an Open Source Program that will allow a Monster like system and allow you to reject someone easily. Resume Builder Engine. Its taking me awhile due to how busy I am, but I’m working on it!
In Closing
You don’t have to do everything I outlined, but hopefully it incited some excitement or at least one “yea, we could do that here”. If you’re not the boss or management, pass the link along. Who knows, one of these days, you might see some of what you read about. If you’re really lucky, you have a lot of this already.
