When Bruce Freshwater, CEO and CTO of Sierra w/o Wires, discusses culture, he doesn’t bring up pool tables and vacation policies. It’s about keeping your employees happy.
“We have that stuff too, but we consider that a minor thing. That’s more of the sales mentality as far as trying to sell the organization,” he says.
You can talk about how great you are because this is what you do, but trust, teamwork and communication are the keys.
“In the end you might have a pool table sitting there collecting dust, because everyone is scared to use it because they are going to get yelled at by their boss,” Freshwater says.
“The most expensive asset of the organization is your employees, and the easiest way to keep the employees is to make them happy,” he says.
Sierra is Freshwater’s second company and he’s worked hard, thanks to some course corrections from his long-term employees, to make the IT managed service and support provider a place where people want to come to work — something that is borne out by Sierra’s consistent ranking on Best Places to Work lists.
Advice from all sources
To create a strong culture, people need to be able to voice their opinions.
If they bring good ideas, you can work with them to deploy those, Freshwater says. And if you don’t think they will work, then you need to share the justification, while still maybe taking a part of it to bring back into the culture of your organization.
His employees communicate formally in meetings, drop an email to the service delivery manager or come directly to him or their immediate boss.
Even little things that give people flexibility and input into the organization can go a long way.
For example, Freshwater says they are a big Microsoft shop, so the employees tend to use Microsoft phones and products. Sierra, however, allows people to use Droid or iPhones and the company still pays for them because it makes the employees happy.
“Make sure you understand whenever there’s an open door policy, you have to maintain that,” he says. “And sometimes, you’re going to hear things you don’t want to hear, but nevertheless, it’s the whole reason for the open door.
“At any point you can voice your opinion, and even if your opinion is not considered a valid one, you can’t be belittled for it,” Freshwater says.
As the company has grown to where Freshwater now manages through several key people, rather than working with every single person, his long-term employees feel comfortable letting him know when things are changing too quickly and it’s affecting the culture.
“It’s a reality shocker, a kick in the butt,” he says, “so then we swing it right back around to the way it was.”
He recommends making changes very, very slowly, while continually checking with your team to make sure it sits well with them.
And not only does Freshwater use his employees as advisers, he’s also willing to bounce ideas off of his competitors because none of Pittsburgh’s tech companies have the same business model.
“They are not straight competitors, and at the end it’s a very, very small world,” Freshwater says, “in which case, the more you can work with people, the better it is for everybody.”
100 percent replaceable
Sierra’s growth strategy has been to use more automation to do more with less. The bottom line is increasing, but the employee count stays static. Freshwater, however, says that his employees aren’t worried they’re going to be phased out of a job because there’s trust.
“They understand that is not our initiative, that is not our desire,” he says. “We want them to be an active member of the team and a member of the family.”
The culture also reinforces the idea of trust and working together.
“At a lot of organizations, the best way to ensure job security is to make sure you’re the only one that can do your job,” Freshwater says. “In our scenario, it’s the exact opposite. The best job security you’re going to get here is ensuring that you’re 100 percent replaceable.”
Management wants people to be able to go on vacation without their phone ringing because there’s a major failure and no one else knows how to fix it. Therefore, Sierra does a lot of cross training.
Freshwater says all of the sales people have to sit down with an engineer and the development team when they start, and he encourages an engineer who wants a baseline understanding of scripting to sit down with a developer.
The company has an management system that allows the executives to see how much time is spent doing X, Y and Z, but Freshwater is willing to take some productivity loss for the long-term aspects of those additional skills, which also helps substantially with retention.
“The whole goal is to make it so everyone feels that the better job is here,” he says.
