As someone who needs at least a 3 day intro to a vacation to even start to relax, the European-style 5 weeks of vacation initially caught my eye and kept me reading. The rest of the story brought tears to my eyes (and I read a fair amount of business overview articles, for your average UI designer). A woman-owned company, with acknowledged lower salaries and internally published salary levels, in return for real quality of life outside the office? But that's not all.
Employees also know when an employee isn’t able to keep up with the workload. The result? Price offers a financial reward to employees who ask for help in order to stay on schedule. “The goal is to get the work done, not establish a star system,” she says.
Of course, it’s one thing to conjure up a cutting-edge culture and quite another to thrive amid relentless daily pressures. But Price hasn’t overlooked this aspect, either. While other companies talk about collaboration, Motek lives it. The company keeps a single to-do list... so that everyone is on the same page about priorities and the state of various projects. Anyone can enter an item, including customers and vendors. The list can include everything from ordering ink cartridges to customizing a specific function for a customer. Motek divvies up the tasks at meetings — and teams don’t pay any attention to who entered particular items.
The way Price sees it, the company’s success is a direct result of the money it invests in employees and of its commitment to developing a business structure that fosters knowledge-sharing and mutual goal-setting. What’s more, “It’s amazing what a rejuvenated person brings back to the office, not just in terms of great new ideas but also in terms of enthusiasm and desire,” she explains. “The software industry’s idea that employees are entirely replaceable is absurd.” In fact, she believes it is precisely because of long hours and poor working conditions that today’s software is so buggy and behind schedule.
Apart from mourning that they are located in Beverly Hills (although I really do love my current job), it's now my goal to find other studies supporting her assertions. Let me know if you know of any...
Here's Motek's News page with links to many other articles about them.
Wow. I am continually amazed at the bad choices I must have made - cause I don't work for this company, and I'm not retiring at 42 from Microsoft like another friend, and I'm not being sent to Europe multiple time this year like another friend, and... I guess I'll take a deep breath, pet my cats and continue preparing my internal clients for working with people half a world away, for when my job is finally 'off-shored'. Or go sailing, that sounds nice too.
ReplyDeleteYes... it made me want to start a company like this, to be honest.
ReplyDeleteI've long wanted to start a company like this. Build something that solves a problem for relativly narrowly defined but currently in pain market. Wanting to do it and actually finding the thing to solve and acting are separated by a large gulf.
ReplyDeleteHuh 5 weeks? I get 28 days + flexi-time. Next year I will (boggle) have been there for 10 years and get another 5 days!
ReplyDeletei, too, read the same article on an american airlines flight back from antigua. and, in a stunning coincidence, came back to my company which just announced a new "holiday policy that reflects industry benchmarks and that enables Factiva to further support the work/life balance and the diverse needs of our workforce." we now get the day after thanksgiving off (whooo hoo!), 6 (instead of 4) personal days, and persons like me, who have been there more than 5 years now get 25 days for vacation, with one buy-back week (just in case we do not use all of it). all i can says is : it's about time (my company started acted like the global company it claims to be).
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