Steve Quesnelle always wondered what it would be like to work for a company considered one of best in the country – an organization with strong leadership and employees willing to go the extra mile.
As a human-resources professional and a member of the Conference Board of Canada’s council for HR executives, he had once toured a handful of Top 100 U.S. companies and was intrigued.
“You get inside some of these organizations, and they are just so cool,” says Quesnelle.
Last fall, he got his first taste of working for a Top 50 employer when he was hired as the director of human resources at Intuit Canada Ltd.
Based in Edmonton, the financial software maker earlier this year was named one of the Top 50 best companies to work for in Canada in a study by Hewitt Associates for the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business Magazine.
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| File photo by Bill Brennan, for Business Edge |
| Intuit Canada workers, shown here inside the company’s technical support room, help boost their firm’s image. |
The fourth annual survey polled 59,000 employees from 128 organizations that had applied to be considered best companies. Confidential employee comments count for 70 per cent of the company score. Intuit ranked eighth overall in the 2003 rankings (it finished second a year ago), one of six Alberta employers making the list.
Not surprisingly, considering the corporate scandals of 2002, the survey summary said that trust in leadership is a key ingredient to engaging employees who “stay, and strive.” These are the type of employees who demonstrate an intense desire to be a member of the organization, speak positively about their employer, exert extra effort, and engage in work that contributes to business success, said the report.
Hewitt consultant Neil Crawford says that the study focused on the employee assessment, and where employees were highly engaged, there was also a strongly positive attitude toward the leadership.
Good leadership plays out in a number of ways. From a people perspective, it’s about committing time, being consistent, not having a feast-and-famine approach to the people budget, says Crawford. It’s also about management accessibility to employees and having all managers “singing from the same song book.”
Accessibility is an interesting issue, dependent on company size and geography. But accessibility doesn’t necessarily mean face-to-face access all the time, explains Crawford. It simply means that there are open lines of communication and ways of getting messages up and down the organization.
In Edmonton, Intuit Canada makes a good case study. Quesnelle offers some keen observations on a company that has grown from two employees to more than 350 in a decade.
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| File photo by Bill Brennan, for Business Edge |
| Employees at Intuit Canada are keen to chip in when it comes to organizing company events. |
He recalls his first few days at Intuit, how on Halloween Eve he and the rest of the management team hand-rolled 1,200 pieces of rouladen that they were preparing for staff the next day.
At different times of the year, various employee groups host barbecues or cookouts for all company workers, and Halloween was management’s turn.
“We had a ball hanging out together that night,” says Quesnelle.
“One of the neat things about a small company, something that makes a small company strong and powerful, is how the senior leadership team spends time together.
We do have formal meetings, but the rouladen example is a good one. It’s not an intense environment, it’s casual.”
That attitude is embodied in the company culture – creativity and financial results are expected, but the atmosphere is relaxed. Employees are expected to question why procedures are done a certain way. They can also take two-hour lunches, nod off in the nap room or run off some steam in the gymnasium, as long as they meet their deadlines. The CEO and senior management team can be seen eating lunch down in the cafeteria every day, at different tables with different people.
“It’s kept the essence of a very small firm,” says Quesnelle. “Everyone knows everyone. You don’t have to go through someone to get to somebody.”
Depending on the size of a company and geographical distribution, obviously not all companies can enjoy the accessibility of Intuit employees.
Weekly CEO letters, video conferencing, town hall meetings, breakfast, lunch and dinners with front-line employees, and commitments from CEOs to answer questions on a timely basis via an electronic mailbox are all means of spreading the word.
It’s whatever works best for the employer and employees, and setting expectations, says Hewitt’s Crawford.
If the leaders are on the same page – everything they do, how they coach their managers and how managers coach their employees – the culture begins to have a similar feel.
“When there are no mixed messages, you gain a consistency, an integrated feeling where the employee says: ‘This is the place for me. I fit in here.’ ”
However, if employees don’t feel the management team is accessible, they aren’t necessarily going to make an accurate assessment of how open and honest the leadership is, how expert they are at running the business, or how good a job they are doing of providing a clear direction towards the future.
The survey adds that employers who haven’t “captured the hearts” of their employees can still change that culture.
It suggests that leaders take care of the fundamentals: the execution of core people- management practices such as promotion, recognition, appreciation, etc.; connect employees to the business by providing them with information and enabling them to act on it; and offer a greater variety of development tools such as career counseling, sabbaticals and formal leadership development programs.
A good company should ask itself how it can create a fertile environment to attract and motivate employees, then develop an overall strategy.
“That to me is what people leadership is all about,” says Crawford. “Then it is being relentless in executing, and continually looking at the way we are managing people, making sure we are not falling down on our promise of what we are trying to do.”
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