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Cynthetiq · 10-26-2004, 07:10 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by theFez

plain and simple, workers who are having fun are more productive and more likely to stick around instead of jumping ship at the first job offer that pays a nickel more. turnover costs. if a company can make the job fun they should try to do it.

not for the employees benefit, for the benefit of the business.

the company i work for does nothing to make the job fun, and they suffer from nearly 90% annual turnover. so i try to make it as fun as possible for me. I try to be upbeat, joking around with people, trying to compete to get tasks done quickly, things like that.

of course my favorite part is how it annoys the 'stick-in-the-mud' types who think work should be no fun!!

That's very correct.

I worked on a retention program to keep our technical people at the office. We had stressful jobs, and there was lots of people jumping ship to run to dot com companies. When other companies were losing people left and right, we were able to keep people on for 3-5 years, totally unheard of during that time. All due to retention programs of creating a good enjoyable work environment. (Notice I did not say fun.)

We already had good benefits, good salaries and bonuses.

What did we do to make it enjoyable?

I created a bonus based on knowledge. I called it the $5,000 book report. Basically I convinced upper management that technical people learn on their own as a hobby and habit. They don't ever see any compensation for that, they buy the hardware, they buy the books, software, and they invest the personal time. They just had to document how they learned the technology and how they applied it at the office over the course of 6 months. If they were awarded the bonus it was given out as a 3% merit increase, and a 3% cash award.

We had LAN parties even before there were such things called LAN parties. Sometimes in the middle of a work day when it was slow we'd all fire up another PC and play Duke Nukem across the network. Sometimes we'd not even go home staying until 11pm playing hooting and hollaring.

Once in a while, the managers would get together and take everyone out for dinner and drinks. Sometimes not paid for by the company but from our OWN pockets and we'd let the teams know when it was corporate or when it was personal.

I created mentoring programs for them to learn from more senior technical people in other groups to help great career growth paths.

I also let the senior technical people mentor people on the helpdesk to help create workers that I could eventually promote

I partenered with other managers in other departments to give them some of my team members 2-3 days a week so that my team members would get exposure to different parts of the technologies like the server and network teams so that they could gain experience and exposure. A few of them eventually got hired when openings became available.

Once in a while we'd have pizza for lunch.

Once in a while we'd have afternoon make a sundae snacks.

Every 3 months we did salary surveys and every 6 months we adjusted salaries to keep up with market rates.

I got tuition reimbursement for gettting MSCE/CNA certifications. Most companies would never do that because you'd need to go to an accreditted university.

We'd go to parties with music and hollywood stars that usually only production people would get invited to.

Sounds great huh? Sounds like people had lots of fun?

While we still had almost ZERO turn over for close to 5 years, people still complained about the bonus, "Why can't they just give it to us..."

People still complained about the long hours. Sometimes we'd work from 9am until 11pm because that's what the studios required of us. Sometimes we'd have to travel and work 20 hour days for 3 weeks straight...because that's what it takes to make TV shows.

I had to fire a few people because they didn't want to work, they just wanted to sit a their desks chatting on the phone with their friends surfing the web, or they came in late all the time. I had to write people up for using more then their alloted vacation, personal and sick days because they wanted to take off 1.5 months to go on a long trip or just hang out at home.

I had another guy fake disabilty for 6 months until I proved that he wasn't as injured as he was saying. He eventually left because we put him on modified desk duty instead of walking around in the field. He just wanted to sit at home and collect money.

I managed 15 people and of those 15 people, 15 of them would love to work for me again. They would do whatever it was that I asked of them because they knew that I would never ask them to do something that I was not willing to do myself first. I worked alongside them shoulder to shoulder. While I think I had a wonderful team that was able to accomplish amazing things, of those 15 I'd only pick 9 of them.