Ask the Expert: Making a great work environment

Jeremy Hitchcock of Dynamic Network Services Inc. is May’s “Ask the Expert” volunteer for the popular online feature at www.unionleader.com and www.abi-nh.com.

HITCHCOCK

Hitchcock, CEO and CFO of the company known as Dyn Inc. — and a member of the Union Leader’s 2008 class of Forty Under 40 — has written “How Do You Create a Great Work Environment?” which will appear during May on the Web sites of the New Hampshire Union Leader and the Amoskeag Business Incubator.

►Jeremy Hitchcock: 'How Do You Create a Great Work Environment?'

The "Ask-the-Expert" series is a collaborative effort between the Amoskeag Business Incubator and the New Hampshire Union Leader. The online forum features an array of specialists representing New Hampshire business, including past topics such as social media, international trade, tax management, government procurement, venture capital, patents, trademarks, copyrights, disaster preparedness for business technology and leveraging the Internet for marketing success.

All "Expert" articles from the three-year series, along with the questions and responses, remain available for viewing.

To submit a question, use the form above or this link.

Question: Could you give a few specific examples of creative and successful approaches to showing team appreciation that don't break the budget?

Expert's reply: There are a few low-cost and even free things that you can do. I remember seeing 101 things you can do for your employees at a Barnes & Noble once. Flipping through, I saw a couple ideas in there which were interesting but as you probably can imagine, not all of them are good.

The key is frequent and expected feedback. You can show that in dollars, time, recognition, and appreciation. There is an art to public versus private feedback, too.

Here are some examples:

• Communicating no layoffs, raises (smaller than before but still raises), keeping health co-pays the same, and no furloughs are hard to communicate but critically important. We put on the employer contributions on people's pay stubs so they see it. In the annual health care increase, that number goes up, sometimes as significant as a major promotion.



• For whatever reason, cash or gifts are received better. If you gave out 12 $100 bills to employees, it would be a greater impact than $1200 at one time, especially if it's electronic. Our pseudo-profit sharing is electronic and we've been thinking about changing that.



• Put a smiley face or a handwritten note on the envelopes of your pay stubs.



• Build your team up as much as possible, great moral is from positive feedback.



• Involve the family, spouses or other when you can. They feel the stresses of late nights, deadlines, and stress and are sometime the gatekeepers to your employees.



• Tell people to take time off and relax (and give PTO if you don't already). Effective HR is about maximizing efficiency and taking PTO, while counter-intuitive, is a good move.

Question: You talked about not owning your employees and instead giving them direction and hoping they buy into your vision. Obviously it depends on the needs of a company, but do you find the option of flex time is an effective way to demonstrate trust and good will with employees?

Expert's reply: You talked about not owning your employees and instead giving them direction and hoping they buy into your vision. Obviously it depends on the needs of a company, but do you find the option of flex time is an effective way to demonstrate trust and good will with employees?

True to some extent. I've read that some consider a common vision important only for "knowledge workers". Traditional theory X/Y management styles differ on the authoritarian/free approach. I'm impressed at companies whose entry level technicians understand the high level strategy of the firm. I think it can be done with all workers regardless of sophistication, how important is another story. Ideally, you want everyone to know how they fit into a team and mission and pitch in to the common goal and get paid along the way.

Flex time is a lever that employers have on the less freedom/more freedom scale. All It's a pretty strong lever considering its cost. As we've tweaked benefits along the way, I am always surprised how something that is "costly" is not that exciting while the free items are well received. Flex time requires a bit of trust since policies can only go so far.

I will say that it can cause a couple of headaches for collaboration. We combat this by asking that people be in by a certain time (10am which isn't too late for a technology company) and telecommuting and flexibility is not preferred on Mondays and Fridays. Certain level of employee performance, as determined by our review process, is required to take advantage of this. Flex time can also create some resentment if the rules are different between groups or as managers have different tolerances for flex time.

Question: It's nice to treat all staff equally; however, it's not always practical or efficient, after all, someone has to do the less-appealing jobs. How do you involve, or do you involve lower-level staff in day-to-day company decision making or in long-term planning?

Expert's reply: Depends on the company. I think that it's important to be consultative in nature but also fairly decisive. We typically use a consultative dictatorship for your background:

http://weirdblog.wordpress.com/2007/09/04/leadership-styles-dictatorial-authoritative-consultative-participative/

There are often aspects of a high-level decision that I like to hear from lower-level staff (sometimes more than from members our exec team). High-level decisions that affect everyone (space planning, corporate direction, etc) including a lot of pinging. Sometimes, it's just letting people know or selling an idea. More typically, tactical items get more official representation on how to put a service together.

I remember seeing something about Jeff Bezos spending a couple days a year doing front-line support. Classy because it keeps in touch with customers and those employees. Those bonds are useful for all sorts of things.

Personally, I like to test out strategies or product ideas on people. The downside is that you get people spun up on things that we could work on, but the upside is huge. Employees are largely the most informed people about the company and what's good at. Only really transformative changes don't need consultation, but that's typically for dire situations.

My $.02. Hope it's helpful.

Question: You mention that it is important to create "communities" at work. Can you give some examples of how you do this?

Expert's reply: I think anything that brings people together which is non-job responsibility related counts. Could be about sports, technology, fiction, or politics. It starts from just getting to know people and figuring out mutual interests and cultivating those relationships. At a smaller company, it's the founding team that provides that community. They are a tribe leader and set a lot of informal norms about the workplace and interactions which creates a community. In a larger organization, it's a well-liked or respected person which is the center of gravity. Org status may actually hurt.

Just interacting with people will create community over time. To make it stronger and accelerate it: event dinners for non-profits, friendly competition in the office (we did a cube decoration contest recently, have done Wii olympics), joint special project (everyone holes up to pound a project out), sporting event together, or running a 5k. No one single thing creates a community. Once you have a number of these informal ways to interact, community will develop.

Question: How important do you think pay is for establishing a great work environment for employees?

Expert's reply: Depends. Employees want fair compensation for their work. For higher paid employees, it's more about recognition, people, and opportunity while lower paid employees may be more about the hard benefits and total compensation. If you can provide an above-average workplace, you can probably pay a little below market rates.

Factors you want to think about include recruiting, productivity/morale, and retention. Pay probably helps on the recruiting side the most. A great work environment affects productivity, moral, and retention the most so we try to be above average there and do market rates to get the best people.

How much do you lean into the workforce? If you have a highly demanding environment, you may need to increase pay to offset the working conditions.

Question: I saw you mentioned in one of your responses how important PTO is, and I heartily agree with you. However, so many times when employees take vacations they come back to their work piled up waiting for them. Talk about dreading returning to work! If employees take a vacation, I think all the relaxing they did is quickly forgotten when faced with all the stress of catching up with work. Do you have any ideas how employers could step in and try to make that any better? Thanks!

Yes, I hear you there. We will see it with a reluctance to take time off. A few things, it's really a cultural thing to say that it's OK to be away and reassurance that when someone is out, they won't be replaced.

I believe that the ability to leave and come back with nothing bad happening (crisis or pile of work) is a sign of a good employee. It says that you can manage your responsibilities; the goal I use for myself is to constantly put myself out of a job so I can go off and do something new.

We like to be available and always reachable, but that feeds into the difficulty of vacation. When people are off, they need to be non-reachable and people in the company have to honor it.

Cross-training is another important task. Since we're very 24x7, we want to make sure that the fewest number of people have to wake up to deal with an event. It makes us less efficient, so it's a constant juggling of institutionalizing knowledge versus having specialized people who are project based.

Institute PTO that expires. We have a rule where a birthday is a PTO but it has to be taken on the actual day (or the Monday or Friday closest).