1. After some probation period, fire only as a last resort or for really terrible behaviour. Have a plan to correct behavior in all other cases.
2. No layoffs unless the firm's very existence is threatened. It's a tough year? Too bad, that's part of the risk involved in being the owner.
3. Keep pay up to market/replacement rates. If someone is 20% more valuable with his new knowledge, pay him 20% more. 4. Have good benefits/vacation policies.
5. Make sure there's lots of interesting and challenging work to do. Allow people to switch roles/teams on a regular basis if they're interested.
6. Hire good people.
That's a company I'd be loyal to, and I think a lot of others would be too. Sure, you'd get people who would leave for their own thing, or a dream job, or because their husband/wife got a job 2000 miles away, but I don't think you'd see people jump ship nearly as often.
The other stupid thing is companies trot out how much it costs to hire a new person, but never want to invest in just retaining their employees.
You'll often find places like this away from the big hubs. They're doing "quite nicely, thank you" with no ambition to become #1, IPO or make the owners richer than Croesus. They also tend to have little to no problem recruiting good people in their 30s and 40s into their nice part of the world where there are good schools, affordable homes and comfortable living.
Nowhere is perfect, the grass is always greener etc. You couldn't pay me enough money to move to London from Scotland.
Could you please give some examples? Having only worked in mega cities, I am totally unaware of such opportunities.
Anyway his point was, I think: you can be the best developer (or even co-owner) at Small Web Shop Ltd, Countryshire, be paid 1/3rd of what you would get in London, and still have a good life and (occasionally) get interesting work.
Many individuals assume it's their privilege to be employed by you.
This company really does treat their employees like family. My wife got a phone call a few months ago that her father was very ill and in hospital (he's now recovered). Her boss immediately bought her a plane ticket so she could go home to visit him.
Last year she had to take a month off for surgery, and the company was really nice about it. They paid part of her salary while she was off to make up for the unemployment benefit (even though they didn't have to), told her to take as long as she needed to recover, sent her flowers at the hospital, etc.
She started off on a fairly low salary, but she's got multiple large pay rises since she started there, and is now earning a decent salary. (Her boss talked to her about salary, and basically asked her what she thought she should be making).
They do expect hard work and commitment. Quite often she will work overtime if it's busy, and they are very quick to fire useless people. However in return for your commitment they do treat their employees very well.
The reality is that it's difficult to be a happy employee if you're not a happy person. Unfortunately, our society is filled with people who either don't spend enough time working on their own happiness, or who pursue happiness in the wrong ways.
Employers can create great environments for their employees, but an environment is only as happy as the people in it.
Knowing you could get paid more elsewhere, would you accept the pay cut to prevent layoffs or would you leave?
I'm not ashamed to say that I would probably leave. Loyalty shouldn't be expected on either side, and that's ok.
That said, writing the biggest checks to get the people chasing the biggest bonuses is also a viable, if potentially unstable, business model. So is hiring people that probably couldn't work somewhere better. The key is being honest to yourself about what glue keeps your organization together.
I agree, it's not reasonable to expect loyalty in either direction. I think the key for employers is to remove as many reasons for leaving as possible; then who cares if employees stay out of loyalty or out of logic, they're still staying.
edit: typo
2. My experience is that typically employees are more concerned for their employers' interests than employers are for their employees'.
3. In Aesop's fable, the farmer helps the viper out of the kindness of his heart. I have had some good employers, but not once have I had the impression that they were employing me just to make my life better rather than because they hoped I would do work for them to their benefit.
What's funny is that small and mid-size businesses that Silicon Valley looks down on can generate IPO money.
Founders, senior management and investors can make vast fortunes when companies go public, but "IPO money" for rank-and-file employees is typically in the six and seven figures, and that's in best case scenarios.
A lot of small businesses generate net profits of six and seven figures annually. My SO's uncle, for instance, makes over a million dollars a year running a services business. So every year, he's banking more than many employees will make in one-off IPO windfalls. There are tons of business owners like him in this country.
This is a great way to earn loyalty from the person not being fired and at the same time alienate multiple other employees who may have to work with someone who just might be a bad fit or incompetent. I've seen the situation happen too many times where a company's reluctance to let one person go without a long, dragged-out process of formal correctional measures caused several other, much more valuable team members, to leave instead.
So the owner asked if we'd all take 20% or so paycuts, with some of the older/better paid staff and the owner himself taking bigger cuts. As the business was otherwise profitable (being in a pretty niche market) we all agreed. Something like 9months later we all got paid back with interest and a bonus.
Smaller scale, and a bit more recently at a different (also small) place, all the non-management staff offerred to forego the (expensive) christmas party so one of the contractors could get paid back pay they were owed due to problems with a difficult client.
It's obviously very situational, but in both cases it felt like the right thing to do and both places were smallish firms where loyalty and morale etc. at the time, were high.
Improving "behavior" (I would say "fit" -- the problem can often be on the company's end as well as the employees, and if you want to take the family analogy even semi-seriously, the employer needs to be able to be introspective enough to recognize this) needs to be taken just as seriously as "fire only as a last resort" in these cases; and if you don't have a credible plan to improve fit, you are at the last resort.
(Lots of places that give lip service to an ideal like this, especially places that are still afflicted by heavy bureaucracy, take it the wrong way, and it amounts to "never impose negative consequence and just try to sweep any performance problems under the rug as long as possible"; that's at least as bad as "fire at the first sign of trouble, and never try to understand what went wrong and how it could be improved".)
Internal processes only take as long as you make them. Correct the issue in 2 weeks. Not solved? Let them go. It doesn't have to be some 6 month ordeal of trying to get things worked out. The point is to have a process to deal with these things rather than telling the employee to pack up their shit and get out.
It's alright to fire as a "last resort", but make the process to come to that decision a swift and confident one - your other employees are watching.
Before I started working on my business full-time I earned about 5x what I make now (and that was over 15 years ago), but I'm much happier now.
In this day and age, anyone who expects loyalty--from an employer or an employee--is either blinded by nostalgia, hopelessly naive, or a blithering idiot. Loyalty in the workplace died many, many years ago.
"Last resort" does not mean "long process", it means, "only when there is no reasonable expectation of being able to improve fit to an acceptable level".
Whether it takes a while to reasonably determine that or not depends on what the problem that has manifested is and what opportunities there are to alter conditions to address the problem.
Firing somebody who is doing a decent job causes a lot of damage. The first company I worked at fired two devs after implementing new metrics and determining they were 15-20% less productive than the rest of the team.
In reality these two guys were doing a good job; just not quite as good a job as the rest of us. I immediately started looking for a new job and within six months the entire rest of the team left.
I work for a company where firing is kind of a no-go, at least at the the level of engineers. You'd have to provoke it, e.g. by stealing something. Also, if I decide to leave the company, I tell so as early as possible.
It seems you must have had experiences at workplaces where there was no trust.
Disclaimer: I work for a german company.
:)
Companies such as your employer are prettymuch unheard of around here.
Besides, if they did let me go after a month, I'd have resented them for not giving me a fair chance.
How they didn't see it coming… Well, we informally discussed the project, my OOP knowledge etc… But they didn't read my blog, where my biases are quite clear. Come to think of it, my colleague didn't read the coding style rules he asked me to write either. If he had, some issues would have been addressed right away.
I was also told I would work on equal footing with my colleague, participate in technical decisions… He was my elder, and in the project from the very beginning, so he wasn't really my equal. But I failed to treat him like my boss, and it turned out to be such a big problem that the hierarchy made it official 10 weeks after my arrival.
My first commits weren't object oriented, so my colleague deduced I didn't know OOP. I lost all credibility at that point.
Finally, I was too careful. My unwillingness to rush the next feature as fast as possible without any regard for technical debt was interpreted as "doing research". Sorry, I just can't work that way. I was told we would "rewrite the code 50 times over", which would indeed have compensated. In practice we never rewrote anything. The first version always ended up being set in stone. Even code we both agreed was a mistake.
On the bright side, I did adjust over time, and they even said so (to me and my hierarchy). Maybe that's why they kept me for so long. But it wasn't enough to keep me in the middle of a general downsizing.