The Wrap - What do employees say about working for you?

Richard Warner

March 1, 2008

Business magazines are out with their 2008 rankings of the "Best Places to Work," featuring a familiar array of local companies such as Aflac, Children's Healthcare and Alston & Bird.

Scanning the list often makes you wonder how your company could make the cut. After all, morale is a squishy thing.

The benefits of being a best place to work are obvious. Happy employees often translate to happy customers. And unhappy employees ... well, consider that today's college grads will have nearly a dozen jobs by the time they're 40. A bad work environment means you'll spend even more time trying to fill the funnel of new hires.

But being the best requires more than allowing people to bring their pets to work.

A while back, respected author Tom Peters surprised me on our Georgia Public Broadcasting show when he said management's responsibility was to line up "cool clients" as a way to retain employees. Best places to work must be able to accommodate uncool, mundane clients, too.

Management also must have a laser focus on productivity. How do you set performance goals and measure every employee's performance to ensure they're profitable? It's these real-world requirements of growing a business that make it difficult to keep employees happy.

The solution starts at the top. CEOs such as Dan Amos of Aflac and Jim Geiger of the fast-growing telecom firm Cbeyond accomplish it through "servant leadership," a faith-based management style that focuses on listening and empathy. But, as Amos says, "Don't mistake it with being soft. We still have high expectations and hold all of our people accountable."

Jimmy Tallent took sleepy United Community Bank and grew it to a regional powerhouse with a three-word philosophy of management, "What is, is." It means every tough decision from employee promotions to bank branch expansion has to stand on facts, not emotion.

At a recent Catalyst event, I was surprised at the number of Atlanta's fastest-growing companies that use peer pressure to enforce productivity. Dan Campbell, CEO of No. 1-ranked Hire Dynamics, uses a concept called "Team Cohesion," where employee teams approve new hires and police cases where a worker's performance is below par.

What about measuring productivity? One local company is so transparent, all employees see twice-weekly metrics on each individual's productivity. Sonny Morris, one of the founders of the 31-year-old law firm of Morris, Manning & Martin, says it's a motivator because compensation is linked directly to productivity.

With this approach, if your salary isn't keeping pace, it's your fault. And if you're carrying more than your share of the load, everybody knows it.

Being the best involves more than letting employees dress as they like and play foosball on-premises. You must set productivity standards and measure all the time. That leads to a growing business that wins accounts and keeps customers. And you can't be a best place to work until you win in the marketplace.

Richard Warner hosts "Georgia's Business" on GPTV and is CEO of What's Up Interactive.