Customers perceive us as being different because of our employees. A couple of years ago we had a marketing consultant go out to pinpoint for us what the marketplace perception of us was and what made us different from other companies, and to help us determine what we should be focusing on. The main message we got was that people outside the company had the perception that everybody who works at Bread Loaf has high integrity, that our people are innovative and creative. That's the stuff that's made us different from competitors.
JOB CORE
MacTemps
John Chuang may have been in business only six years, but already he's grown his temp agency, MacTemps, into a company that made this year's Inc. 500 and expects 1992 revenues of $19 million. With 70 full-time employees coordinating 700 to 800 temporary workers each month, the agency, based in Cambridge, Mass., is a national player. Getting and keeping good employees when you have limited resources isn't that difficult, says Chuang, if you attend to the "core" issues of job satisfaction and don't try to compete on the "peripheral" ones. There is, he says, a clear difference.
Since we are vying for full-time employees against much bigger temp agencies -- billion-dollar companies -- we can't really compete on perks and health plans. So we've thought a lot about what people really want from an employment situation, and how we could satisfy that -- what is core, and what really is peripheral.
There are four issues we think are core in making a company good to work for. The first is a voice -- that people know they have a say in a job design or in their work environment.
We don't, for instance, give people procedures to follow when they open a new office -- and we've got 20 offices nationwide, and one in the United Kingdom. We'll tell them how something was done in the past and give them a model, but they're encouraged to improve upon it.
The things you tell employees early on in a job are the most important; those leave indelible impressions in their minds. So it's very important that they have good first experiences -- which means you have to give them a fair amount of autonomy. We've never had a disaster with that, giving people so much trust. We've occasionally had people who weren't a good fit with our company, but on the whole, it's worked out very, very well.
With a voice comes responsibility. We try to make clear to every employee that even the most mundane task is extremely important for the company. And people are happier if they're totally responsible for the task and if they know how it fits into the success of the company.
If you asked someone just to stuff envelopes to get our invoices out, no one would want to do it -- it's a drag of a job. But if you explain that getting invoices out two days earlier can increase the cash flow to the company by $100,000, well, that's a big number, and it becomes clear why it's important. The idea of "empowering employees" can sound very touchy-feely when you read about it in books, but my experience is that all this stuff translates to the bottom line really well. We've found that if you give someone an open-ended challenge to, say, make collections more efficient, that employee will go for it and will like his or her job more.
The third issue is learning: If you're giving people responsibility and trusting them to take action on the company's behalf, to make a frontline decision and act the way you would normally act, you've got to have people learning all the time. If your company's culture doesn't stress learning a lot, and sharing good decisions and learning from bad ones, the responsibility really won't work.
We have a program called Back to School, in which we fly all our employees to the main office and discuss the processes they're using in their offices. We'll teach people business-school stuff like cash-flow analysis; we'll clip articles to pass around to everyone. Business isn't rocket science; it's all a matter of talking about ways of improving.
The fourth issue is compensation. I consider us small now, but we were really, really small when we first began, and we had to be able to retain employees and keep them happy without just bombarding them with money, because we didn't have any. Good pay, though, is one of the very important things that a job should provide, and now that we're bigger, we're shooting to get our compensation to be twice the industry average. We're going to do that by keeping out layers and getting rid of hierarchy.
All these issues are interrelated; you can't de-layer, and save all the money you'd give to middle managers for the frontline people, if you don't have the learning. What we're really trying to do is trade a lot of control for a lot of trust, because otherwise it's hard for a company to grow quickly. If every time you set up a new office or a new division, you had to personally oversee things and set up auditing systems and check up on everybody, you couldn't grow fast. It isn't possible.
The issues that are peripheral, by the way, are a lot of the big-company things -- the subsidized lunches, the health clubs, the outings, the beautiful office space -- and other issues, such as a traditional career path, where every few years you get a promotion and a new title. I firmly believe that the career path at our company will become equal to if not greater than the path at big companies, because people get a lot of responsibility early, and we definitely give people room to grow. But they're bigger steps and will probably happen less often.
Benefits are just side things. If you don't get the core right, the most lavish benefits and perks don't mean anything. You want the job itself to be great. That's the real prescription for small companies that want to get big.
