미국위싱턴주에 있는 WashingtonCEO라는 잡지에서 2007년 가장 일하기 좋은 기업에 조사를 실시했는데…근로자가 2인부터 99인까지의 소기업에서 가장 일하기 좋은 기업을 뽑힌 회사가 Construx Software라는 회사입니다.
Washington CEO 에서는 아래의 10가지 항목으로 평가를 실시합니다.
- Communication
- Training & Education
- Responsibility & Decision Making
- Performance Standards
- Rewards & Recognition
- Benefits
- Leadership
- Work Environment
- Hiring & Retention
- Corporate Culture
아래는 Construx회사가 받은 점수입니다.
직원수는 15명인데도 Programmer’s Paradise라는 제목으로 회사를 소개하고 있습니다.
WashingtonCEO에서 Construx를 Best Conpany로 뽑은 이유는 아래와 같습니다.
What Makes Construx the Best Company to Work For, Part 1? (Washington CEO magazine view)
Washington CEO magazine mentioned numerous specific points that they felt made Construx a best company:
Leadership
Construx is led by a software industry guru. [that’s me — I didn’t write that]. Construx’s CEO avoids arrogance and defensiveness, and?strives for perfection in everything. He takes time to talk and listen.
Construx’s COO communicates openly and directly. He spends a lot of time worrying about morale. He makes sure that issues don’t tend to fester.
When our company hit hard times during the dot com collapse (when many of our clients went out of business), Construx’s management team was very open about fully disclosing all aspects of the company’s financial condition with all our employees. We laid out every possible option so that employees could “walk with us” through the decisions we had to make. During that difficult time, rather than just laying off employees, we gathered input from our staff, and based on strong staff consensus, we applied across-the-board salary cuts rather than laying anyone off.
Benefits
Benefits are generous, including 401K with 100% match up to 10% of salary; fully paid employee health-care premiums, with dependents paid at 75%; 24 days of vacation minimum, increasing with seniority. Pay is industry average salaries, with bonuses for “those who exceed expectations” [we wouldn’t word it that way, since virtually everyone receives bonuses of some kind or other]
Employees have lots of flexibility. They can set their own schedules, to balance their personal and professional lives [within the constraints of how they can still satisfy their clients], and employees can turn down assignments that aren’t appealing to them as long as
they’re pulling their weight overall.Culture
Construx holds weekly “wind downs,” during which employees drink beer and wine, sit on sofas, and chat.
Construx has a “cozy, modern looking cafe” where employees can get free bottled water, soda, Gatorade, and most other kinds of bottled drinks. The whole company has read Built to Last and discussed it. Everyone in the company can recite the company’s mission: Advancing the art and science of commercial software engineering.
Focus on Employee Satisfaction
We explicitly make employee satisfaction a top priority. The COO’s comp package actually ranks employee satisfaction above profit and?revenue. We have a kegerator, a white refrigerator with beer taps and three home brewed beers on tap [the number actually varies, but that’s what the article said]
Construx’s business philosophy is “hire competent smart people and let them do their jobs.” Construx expects employees to regularly?develop their professional skills. Construx also supports them in getting better, by emphasizing professional development, particularly,?Construx’s Professional Development Ladder.
My Reaction
I’ve been interviewed enough times that I’ve learned that minor factual errors are to be expected. That said, I thought the Washington CEO article was quite accurate. We gave them 5-10 times as much content as they could describe in a short story, so they left out more than they included, and what’s interesting to me are the specific points they chose to highlight.
이런 결과에 대한 Construx 직원들의 생각은 이렇습니다.
Construx Employee Perspective
As I mentioned in an earlier post, at the end of June I was very pleased to learn that Construx Software (my company) had been recognized as the Best Small Company to Work For?in Washington state. Getting the outside validation was gratifying, but what does the inside view look like? What do Construx’s employees think makes Construx a good company to work for? We held an all company lunch discussion in July to talk about that question, and here’s what people said.
Participatory Decision Making. We don’t make very many decisions behind closed doors, or at least not without getting input from some, most, or all employees. We survey employees regularly. We do a big employee satisfaction survey once a year. We survey on other issues as needed, on topics like when we should hold our holiday dinner, which new benefits employees would value more, and so on. The Washington CEO article also commented on the degree to which we involved employees during our rocky period in 2001-2002, which our employees brought up again during our lunch discussion.
Make Your Own Job. Our technical service providers (TSPs) essentially define their own jobs within three broad parameters. First, their work needs to support our mission (Advancing the art and science of commercial software engineering). Second, they need to hit their billable revenue target (which isn’t a problem since most of our TSPs beat their target at least 50%). Third, their work needs to meet our service quality targets — we reserve the right to pull the plug on offerings that aren’t delighting our clients. As long as the work they want to do meets those criteria, each TSP has a lot of latitude. A TSP can develop a new course more or less according to his/her interests. A TSP can work on a new consulting offering, spend time blogging, write a book, etc. The people who like this approach, love it. A couple people have seemed to want more direction. In any case, the decision about what to work on is made collaborative (see point #1, above), so people who want more direction get that, and people who have a strong feeling about a direction they want to pursue normally get that, too.
The flip side of this is that employees become highly responsible for service quality. This is fine for us as we want to hire people who?seek out responsibility.
Lack of Competitiveness/Helping Each Other. Our environment is very cooperative. TSPs help each other; sales personnel help each other; TSPs help sales staff, and sales staff helps the TSPs. We’ve worked hard to replace “us vs. them” thinking with “we” thinking, and I think that’s pretty deeply engrained in our culture at this point. We understand that we’re all in this together, and people act accordingly.
This can go to fairly extreme degrees, with one TSP pitching in and teaching a class in a remote city to help out another TSP.
Flexibility.? We offer a lot of flexibility in terms of hours and days worked, subject to the three criteria mentioned?at the top of the post.
Profitability. We believe strongly that we can be good to our employees and still be profitable ? furthermore, that being good to our employees will actually help profitability in the long run.
Easy going culture. There isn’t much yelling here. It’s pretty relaxed. We wear business casual clothing (even on the?casual side of “business casual”), including shorts in the summer. If we have client meetings we expect people to dress appropriate for the client. In the software business, that’s usually business casual, but probably not shorts and t-shirts for most of our clients.
Treating Employees as Humans First, Employees Second. We had a rough patch this spring during which we had 3 employees lose parents in a 60-day period. Losing a parent is a major life event, and work needs to take a back seat for awhile when that happens. Our employees were appreciative that we recognized that. I have to admit that I am surprised that people appreciate this, mostly because I simply can’t imagine a manager being so heartless as to not recognize the significance of that kind of major event.
At a more day-to-day level, we’re also pretty understanding of people needing to leave to pick up their kids from daycare, attend?school plays, ball games, etc. Sometimes work has to take precedence, but usually work life and home life can be kept in balance.
Overall. Our lunch discussion didn’t turn out to be a very comprehensive or systematic discussion. I think we mostly just hit points that the Washington CEO writeup missed, or that seemed underemphasized in that article.
작지만 강한 기업입니다.
그리고 Softwar개발회사로써 96년부터 현재까지 이런 기업을 같이 만들어왔다는 것이 무척이나 부럽습니다.
