Chapter 19: Make Your Company a Great Story

P. 294 – Zappos…

Their practice of a protracted hiring process including purely social events, as well as making their front lobby into a village green of sorts is consistent as a best practice with a few things I have read or experienced…

1. This is right out of Jim Collins' “Good To Great”: hiring is about not just specific skills but about getting the right people on the bus.

2. Johnson Controls commissioned the “OxygenZ” report on the Millennial generation and how they view work. What that study and others have shown is that the next generation to enter the work force does not want to view work nearly as transactionally – “you do what I need from 9 to 5, I give you a paycheck”. Moreso than past generations, they really want to be personally invested in their work. You spend more time with your co-workers than your family and friends, and you spend more time working than anything else. These young people want to be invested, to care about their jobs beyond the monetary reward. They care about work-life balance more than past generations, but they want to do it by making work a little more like life. So Zappos' hiring process is a true mating dance, not just a screening for requisite skill sets and red flags. And their insistence on making sure their workers commingle makes their organization what a young work force wants it to be: a community.

3. During my MBA internship with Systematic Software Engineering – a company in Aarhus, Denmark that writes mission-critical software for the defense and health care sectors – I learned a great deal about their culture by working with them for three months and brought home some lessons.

Now, as much as we in America pay lip service to “all men are created equal”… we don't really live it. But in Denmark, they walk the walk when it comes to an egalitarian society. It's entirely possible that the CEO is weekend golf buddies with the guy sweeping the floors. You would certainly never see that here. In the workplace, it translates like this: there was a large meeting area extended from the central sun-splashed atrium that served as the cafeteria as well as a training and event space. It is common in Denmark for companies to serve a healthy lunch to their staff, and everyone comes down at the same time to eat together. No one eats at their desk (and rarely do people go our for lunch). My first day, when I didn't know anyone yet, I brought down a stack of white papers to get up to speed on some of the products my assigned team was working on. After about 15 minutes, I looked up and noticed no one else in the room was working! So the next couple of days, I came down without any reading material, but couldn't figure out why none of the four people I shared an office with wanted to sit with me. Finally Christian, with whom I would become good friends by the end of the summer, noticed I was a little confused and explained that lunch was a time to mix and mingle – it was expected that you would sit with people you don't share a space with all day, get to know new people, and soon come to learn everyone's name and what they do and who they are. They treated lunchtime as the “commons” the same way Zappos treats the front lobby as the community hub. And sure enough, by the end of the summer, I probably knew 150 people at Systematic by name.

Another part of Systematic's “story” is their approach to training: they really allow their engineers to continually pursue new knowledge and push them to always raise their skill level, and this comes at great expense to the company. But they have a saying: better to invest in your people and risk that they leave, than NOT invest in them and risk that they STAY!

As you might guess: Systematic has freakishly low turnover.