How I Saved Our Crumbling Company Culture
By Razor Suleman, CEO and Founder, I Love Rewards, Boston, Mass.
My company, I Love Rewards, designs customizable Web-based employee recognition programs. The idea is to let employees publicly recognize each other's work and award each other points that add up to meaningful rewards. Our goal is to help our clients create better work environments and increase employee engagement and productivity.
Ironically, it took us a long time to incorporate the lessons we were sharing with our clients at our own company: After five years, staff morale was at an all-time low, and the business was falling apart.
Here's how I turned it around.
On the verge of disaster
In 2006, six of our 18 employees quit within the space of a single summer. I didn't blame them. Despite our focus on helping other businesses create employee rewards programs, we hadn't done anything to show our own employees that we cared. Employees felt that they weren't appreciated, and lacked the motivation to stay focused. Because there was no long-term vision for the company, they felt directionless. Nobody was excited about coming into work, including me.
I was so frustrated by the situation that I offered my own resignation. But my second-in-command wouldn't let me quit. He told me to go home and write up a plan for how to change the situation. Our employees needed leadership, recognition, and motivation, he said. I knew he was right: I had spent so much time thinking about how to improve other companies' work environments that I hadn't devoted a second to improving mine.
When I got home, I started writing up a plan, which hangs on the office wall to this day. I had many ambitions for my company, but I realized that if our business was going to grow, I would first need to build a better workplace. The first step was finding the right employees.
We use social recruiting
We hire aggressively because we're in a stage of hyper-growth. Previously, we advertised open positions on traditional recruiting sites like Monster.com, but they didn't attract enough responses on their own. We were having a hard time filling our open positions, so we added social recruiting to our mix of hiring efforts. We asked our employees to post open job positions on their personal social media pages based on the premise that A-players are likely to know other A-players. Recruits may be employees' friends, but the idea is more about obtaining top talent.
Social recruiting gives employees a stake in the hiring process and helps them feel more involved with the company. Plus, it's grown our hiring pool exponentially at no cost. We've hired one-third of our current employees through social recruiting.
We use peer recognition
We've also incorporated some of the best practices from our clients' programs into our own recognition program. Each week, all of our employees pick the colleague they feel most embodies the company's values. The employees get the public spotlight for what they've done and receive $5 worth of points, but the real motivator is the peer recognition -- it works wonders when it comes to motivating employees to do more than just the bare minimum, which is essential if we want to continue to improve and grow.
Employees are accountable
Focusing on employee accountability has improved both employee performance and engagement. Individual employees are empowered to take ownership of specific tasks, and are held personally accountable for their completion through transparent communication to the entire company.
Each year we rework our strategic plan, known as the MasterPlan. We begin the planning process by hosting focus groups and soliciting feedback from clients to learn more about their user experience and to find out what tools and features they want. Then we meet with employees in small groups to brainstorm. The senior leadership team compiles suggestions from customers, employees, and the Board of Directors.
Individual departments participate in a similar exercise, creating a vision for how they want their departments to look and feel at the end of the fiscal year based on the MasterPlan. Then employees take ownership of our new initiatives. This year, for example, I needed a staff member to upgrade our company information-sharing database, where we upload expense reports, customer acquisition information, product launch deadlines, and other important company data.
When I asked for volunteers, Frank, a new technical writer, stepped up to the plate. He researched alternative database programs, and discovered one that met our criteria. He introduced it to the company and explained how it worked, and in January we had an office party to celebrate the launch of the new database. It was far and away more user-friendly and efficient than the software we'd used previously.
Asking employees to volunteer for internal company tasks gives them the opportunity to take initiative and showcase their strengths. It takes work off management's plate, and it makes employees feel that they are making concrete contributions to the company. It also ensures that when the job is done, they'll get the credit for doing it.
Employees are happy, business is booming
Within a few years of implementing these new policies, our staff has grown from 12 to 100. We have almost 100 percent retention. My hypothesis that if we improved the work environment, growth would follow proved to be absolutely true. Last year we grew 108 percent. Now, there's a buzz of excitement in the air at the office. My employees' passion for their work is evident in the attitude that they bring to the job, the enthusiasm they have, and the quality of work they produce.
Razor Suleman was an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist in 2004, and has been featured in Fortune, HRO Today, and Wall Street Journal.
--As told to Harper Willis
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