After listening to Josh at that first meeting, Corrie decided that the first thing she needed to do was a major overhaul of the company intranet, hence her request for additional help. That, and researching new technologies, became Randy’s major focus.

Before we get into the IT end of things, let me remind you that I am a Luddite wannabe. My involvement on this part of the project was in the form of ideas and considerations, i.e., things that needed to happen to preserve the close connections, both intra and inter-team. In other words, along with the professional interactions they needed to preserve a vibrant virtual water-cooler. It had to be fun/interesting/useful/cool or folks would be unwilling to spend their most precious resource—time—on it. So what I’m going to describe is more in the category of goals, why stuff was needed and general solutions, not specific brands or products, since they change quickly and new ones appear, nor detailed descriptions of how any of it was/is accomplished.

Everybody received two webcams, one for the office and one for home.

Everybody received a USB flash drive.

Because so much proprietary information is available on the intranet, collaboration functions and flash drives, Corrie opted to switch login security to a biometric fingerprint reader, instead of passwords, for both home and office.

Employees receive company assistance, including tech support and hardware/software upgrades as needed when they start working remotely.

Every department has a high-end teleconferencing unit, with extra units available from IT.

They added virtual whiteboards and other collaborative software.

Meeting software that includes voice and records it for future viewing/listening is available to each department.

Several different wikis were immediately set up

• Us is a directory of all the expertise, knowledge and skills, hard and soft, available within the company. It’s the go-to source when anyone needs help or information.
• Them is a directory of clients, vendors, and other outside resources, with continually updated commentary on doing-business-with, including the people and politics involved. It’s invaluable for helping newer workers to avoid rocking the boat or succumbing to a bout of foot-in-mouth.
• Each department has its own wiki to use as they see fit.
• The company FAQ is an easily searchable, heavily annotated collection of worker wisdom. It’s set so nothing is deleted, just added, and is monitored for inaccuracies by each department.

Getting to know you is a MySpace type function gives everybody their own place to talk about family, friends, hobbies, doings, post videos, pictures and dozens of recipes.

A homework help and tutoring function is in development.

URLs from anywhere on the intranet are set to act like this one, USB Flash Drives and Portable Storage for Computers, (from a Google search for “flash drive”), but using the fingerprint reader.

Just how cost-effective is all this? When Josh and Doug crunched the numbers, they found that the costs, including estimates for interviewing time and lost productivity, just to replace Doug, Kelly, Tom, Warren, and Katy, paid for all the new technology, training, and Randy (as an intern), with some left over. That, along with the savings achieved on the rest of the hires and the phenomenal leap in productivity pays for the other expenses, such as air fair, temporary living, childcare, IT, etc.

Another substantial savings has come from the 100% retention rate—the new approach, together with the extraordinary culture and careful hiring, has made the company recruiter-proof.

In spite of how I wrote this, it hasn’t been easy, and it’s won’t get any easier. As the company grows there’s pressure to ease the hiring process, lessen the time new hires spend on site, reduce distance worker fly-ins, eliminate the childcare, etc., but Josh and Doug have the numbers on their side and the Board’s full support, so it won’t happen.

As Josh says, why fix an engine that’s not broken and do it with substandard parts.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 20th, 2007 at 11:47 am and is filed under Business info, Communication, Culture, Hiring, Leadership, Motivation, Retention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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