Smart Leaders
Building a sanctuary
How to keep employees up when the economy’s down
By Brooke Bates
Smart Business Detroit | February 2010
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Aaron Chernow, CEO, Resource Technologies Corp.
Aaron Chernow is trying to make his company like a refuge from economic woes.
“There’s so much negative data and spin out there and it’s so available to everyone now,” says the CEO of Resource Technologies Corp. “It seems like that whole sky-is-falling mentality is so pungent out there.”
And Chernow knows how easy it would be to give in to a cut-and-brace philosophy. But he wants to turn that pressure into something positive. He’s doing it by focusing on the staffing firm’s core values, keeping his 250 employees in the know and watching his own stress levels.
“You really need to focus on creating an environment that is light, that provides sort of a sanctuary for people to come in,” says Chernow, who led the company to 2008 revenue of $32 million.
Smart Business spoke to Chernow about keeping your employees’ spirits high when the economy is weighing down.
Find a focus. When you enter into tough times or you increase the expectations on your work force, you need to increase the presence of what makes your organization special. So for us, it’s a focus around our core values.
[Our employees’] expectations for their success are always through the roof. In tough times, it’s hard to manage that: ‘The effort that I put in last year is not getting me the results this year.’ Our way around that is focusing elsewhere to help them find their self-value. So we celebrate the small wins at work; we celebrate the big wins at work. We also celebrate their commitment outside of work. That seems to create a really positive, energetic, authentic culture.
We created a communication group about nine months ago. This was a group of eight people that had tenure but also displayed the core values. We talked about ways to protect our culture. They thought that the focus on the individual employees was really important.
There was a suggestion to put a video together of all the things that people do — not only within the organization but externally — that drives their passion for excellence. We put a two-minute video together that had five clips, sort of a day in the life of our employees and some of the special things that our employees do outside of work that relates to our core values.
We shared the video with all of our internal employees and then they decided that we should send it to our clients. So we’ve celebrated what makes people special, both during the workday but also when they come home from work, whether it’s coaching their son’s soccer team to taking care of their elderly parents [or] to donating their time for Meals on Wheels to managing having six children.
