What's the payoff for working so hard to create this kind of environment? Simple: better advertising. We get a more innovative, more energetic, more stimulated staff. When people are having fun, they're encouraged to work harder. And a motivated person is the difference between being able to bill 6 hours a day and 8, 9, or 10 hours. If we get people to work one more hour a day because they enjoy their work and like the environment, that's 12.5% more output.
Plus, our spirit wins us accounts. Clients tell us they can sense the unity and excitement our people project. It makes them think they'll get an exciting product. We gain a competitive advantage as a result.
Every day I think about the environment we provide and our employees. I let my partners take care of the clients. I worry whether the staff are happy. Are they motivated and compensated well enough to create great advertising for our clients? To create unique advertising, we need people having fun.
FAMILY VALUES
Rhino Foods
Rhino Foods, in Burlington, Vt., has fared well from its association with Ben & Jerry's ice cream; in addition to making cakes and ice-cream sandwiches, Rhino supplies the "cookie dough" that's smooshed into a hit Ben & Jerry's flavor, and as that flavor's popularity has fattened, so has Rhino, growing in the past two years from 13 people to 70, with more than $5 million in annual sales. Mark Koenigsberg, Rhino's director of sales and marketing, says the company also has grown its programs to help promote a healthy life outside the workplace for its staff.
We're kind of a work in progress as a company, and we're working really hard to be a good place for people. We have a company "list of purposes," which declares among other things that "Rhino Foods is a vehicle for people to get what they want." That's a pretty ambiguous statement, and it's unusual for a company to use the term want, but that's the way it's always been with Ted Castle, the founder and president, and his wife -- he was determined that the business wouldn't run him, that he'd still have time for sailing, golf, climbing mountains. And he figured that if the business would serve him, he wanted it to serve the other employees, too, even though they didn't start the company. Maybe that's radical, but that's the kind of company he wanted.
One of our projects is called Focus on Families. A group meets every Thursday to oversee programs for employees and for community groups like the Boys and Girls Club and the Special Olympics. The meetings last about a half hour, on company time, with anywhere from 7 to 25 people attending. We're about to start something called the Nurturing Program, a 15-weekend program that works with parents and kids to develop better parenting skills. It's run out of the Vermont Center for the Prevention of Child Abuse, which we've contributed money to. The center normally offers that program to a community, but we wanted to offer it to our employees.
Many people in our work force come from tough backgrounds -- broken homes or lousy childhood experiences. Many of the mothers here are single mothers or have a mate who's not the father of their kids. Six people from our company went to an educators' conference on children recently, and ours was the only company represented there. And those who went were the only lay people there -- people who make cheesecakes for a living. They reported back to the Focus on Families group on what they'd heard, but they also got a huge shot of self-esteem: they went representing their business. That sort of stuff works. We see people coming to the company now with incredibly great attitudes, people who are working hard, who feel they're getting something back for it. And people here work very hard; production work is not easy stuff. It's physical; you're on your feet; it's fast.
We've also hired a woman from the human-resources department at W. L. Gore & Associates, whose job is to help us create our future and be good at what we say we want to do with workers. Right now we have a staff meeting once a week, and new people sit there and say, "What, are these guys crazy? I thought I was coming here to make cookie dough, and now these people are talking about families and work environment."
On the other hand, this is still an amazingly levelheaded organization. We don't think this way out of charity; there are some very left-brain reasons. We view the things we're doing as good business. You have lower turnover; you have fewer sick days; you have people who are psyched about coming to work. It makes sense that people will be more productive if they're happier at home. It's the idea of thinking globally but acting locally: for us, "locally" is right inside this company.
BASIC TRAINING
White Storage and Retrieval Systems
When Donald Weiss became CEO of White Storage, in 1975, the company, an offshoot of a now-46-year-old family business, posted $4 million in sales. Seventeen years and thousands of training hours later, Weiss's company, which is based in Kenilworth, N.J., and manufactures automated retrieval systems for factories and offices, employs 400 people and reports $50 million in annual revenues.
I remember attending a seminar on quality back in 1988 and being completely inspired by it. I went back to the office inflamed with the idea of bringing quality to life in the company. But I took one look around at our work force and realized it would be impossible to instill the concept of quality in people who didn't even have basic language or math skills. So many had never been properly trained or educated. More than a hundred barely understood the language. We were going to have to start at the beginning -- with basic English.
I began by paying a couple of teachers to come in for two hours a week. Employees volunteered their time and came in after-hours. We had about 40 in the beginning. For about two years, the first classes were held for two hours a day, two days a week. We started to get some attention in the media and in government circles, and obtained state and federal grants to underwrite a full-blown workplace-literacy program. We got teacher salaries covered and started offering the classes during working hours. Soon we had 100 students in five levels of English classes. And training started to take hold of the entire company.
