Managing the New Work Force

Ben Strohecker knows what it takes to keep his employees happy -- and it's not cash

Years before anyone talked about flextime, the "new labor force," or the"mommy track," Ben Strohecker was becoming an expert in all three. I visited his company intending to explore the answers he'd discovered -- and instead found a company full of questions about how to reconcile growth with its unusual corporate cuture. -- M.E.M.

Part of the reason this company exists is to provide a place for people like me." It's an odd way for an employee to feel about her company -- and particularly so in Billie Phillips's case. That's because, if anything, it looks to an outsider as though Phillips's employer were exploiting her, not vice versa. For $15,000 a year and no health insurance, Phillips, 39, who holds a master's degree in counseling psychology, gets the privilege of working 25 hours a week as the personnel manager for Salem, Mass.-based Harbor Sweets Inc. In that job she juggles the logistically insane hiring and scheduling of a largely part-time, seasonal work force of 150 and handles all manner of employee disputes and problems. Despite her part-time status, Phillips brings work home with her, takes calls at home, and often works overtime.

If Phillips is being exploited, it's willingly. "I feel satisfied because I also get something from this job that I can't have in another job," she says. "I can leave when my kids need me." Most of the time she doesn't need to leave unexpectedly -- and so does place the company first. At her company, she's not alone.

That's because at Harbor Sweets there is no separate "mommy track," to use the recently coined term for employees who make career trade-offs for more personal time. Or if there is, the whole company is on it, including founder and chief executive officer Benneville Strohecker. Harbor Sweets has always attracted -- and commanded loyalty from -- smart people like Phillips, for whom a flexible schedule means more than cash.

Harbor Sweets's ability to get talented people when it can't afford to pay them much is a major reason why the company has been able to grow from a basement start-up to a $2.5-million company. The only trouble is, the more Harbor Sweets grows, the harder it is for the company to stay flexible. And the more Harbor Sweets succeeds, the less flexibility it needs.

This is not something Strohecker wants to dwell on. When he looks at his company, he likes to see only the miracles. For 16 years, he has prided himself on building an organization that flouted all the rules. To him, the success of Harbor Sweets is testimony to the power of God in the human heart, a demonstration of what employees can do if they are just given trust and respect.

In his company, they are given little else. Harbor Sweets pays $5 an hour to start in a region where that's a fast-food wage, and the company does not pay for medical or other insurance for the part-time workers who make up the bulk of its work force. Part-timers get no pension plan, no 401(k), not even any paid sick days. They do get paid vacations, profit sharing that typically runs about 5% of wages, and a discount on candy. Because 60% of sales occur around Christmastime, most workers get laid off in the spring or summer.

Given that compensation package, it is no small miracle that Harbor Sweets can attract people like Phillips, who once worked there as a part-time production worker. Still, Strohecker's miracle started with some pretty pragmatic decisions. When he began cooking candy in his kitchen in 1973, Strohecker was marketing director at Schrafft's, a then-struggling Boston-based mass manufacturer of candy. But he dreamed of making and selling the best handmade candy, no matter the price. His first creation fit all his fantasies: a luscious, pecan-dipped, white- and dark-chocolate-coated triangle of almond-butter crunch he named the Sweet Sloop because it vaguely resembles a sailboat. From the start, the Sloop demanded extraordinary amounts of personal attention. To this day, a worker must run a teaspoon from the base of each white-chocolate triangle to its apex to create a ridge that suggests a sailboat mast.

As Strohecker began receiving orders from Harbor Sweets's first mailing (to his Christmas-card list), he needed help. Yet with such a labor-intensive product, he could afford to pay only minimum wage. Who could he hire at that wage to come into his house for a few hours a week while he was working in Boston? His answer was neighborhood women. In Marblehead, Mass., the affluent town where he lived, Strohecker discovered an ideal work force. Well-educated and responsible, the women next door didn't require supervision. They didn't demand benefits -- their husbands' jobs provided those -- and they didn't care that there was little work for months at a time. Joan Stephenson, 55, who's been at Harbor Sweets since 1978, is typical. "A lot of people are here not because they need the money, but because they need to be occupied," says Stephenson, who works three days a week so she can have an independent income, yet still play tennis on Wednesdays and take long weekends. "So the pay becomes irrelevant."

Even Strohecker wasn't interested in Harbor Sweets for solely business reasons. When he began to work there full-time in 1975, he had recently lost his job at Schrafft's and split up with his wife. "What I developed was my little substitute family," he says. "At a time in my life when I didn't feel I had any support, these people were nice to me." In return, Strohecker tried to make Harbor Sweets a place where they'd want to stay. "I probably would have gone out of business rather than substitute a group of machines for those employees," he admits.

Strohecker liked his unconventional work force so much that he structured his company to suit it. "We let everybody know that Harbor Sweets is not the most important thing in their lives," he says. "If your kindergartner is in a play on Friday morning, of course you can't miss it to come to work." The company's stated policy is that if you want unpaid time off, take it. Although the work force has grown far more diverse, part-time work is still the norm. Instead of two 8-hour shifts, the company has four 4-hour ones. Its 114 production employees can set any schedule that suits them, as long as it includes at least 20 hours a week.