Happy employees, the company makes money

Where is such a good thing: Employees don't have a boss; all employees have the same title regardless of their position; employees have the opportunity to receive a lot of training - mutual training between employees; have many workshops, A quieter factory than most offices; HR managers never turn down employees' requests for flexible hours.

All of these seemingly whimsical ideas lead to a very real result: business success. The companies that implement these advanced people management concepts are not only the most reputable companies in the world, but also the most successful companies in the industry. The connection between the two is self-evident.

Let's enter and observe an unfamiliar world where employee satisfaction is as important as shareholder satisfaction.

This is nothing new: great companies are bound to outperform their competitors. Studies have shown that high employee satisfaction is conducive to the improvement of business performance. For example, the "Top 100 Employers" among listed companies has consistently far exceeded the average performance of the stock market.

The companies surveyed in this article are all ranked among the best employers in the world and have received numerous Top Employers awards. These companies have some common characteristics: their products and services are industry leaders in terms of quality and customer acceptance; and their employees are passionate about producing their products or providing their services.

WL Gore & Associates, one of the Best Employers, admits: "We've always been about making money and having fun."

Dive deeper into these Best Employers and discover how they "make money and have fun." happy".

HEAT Company: Teamwork

How can we ensure excellent customer service? A best employer company's answer is: First, ensure the satisfaction of the company's employees.

This business is HEAT, which has won awards for both customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. This year, the company was included in the list of "Top 100 Companies to Work For" by The Sunday Times. HEAT provides the design, installation and maintenance of central heating systems for social housing in the UK. The company installs more than 5,000 sets of new heating systems every year and provides maintenance services for more than 90,000 sets of heating systems. The company's customers are delighted that HEAT's call center recently received an award in recognition of its long-standing customer service. The jury spoke highly of the company's proactive, thoughtful and patient attitude towards customers. Linda Carson, executive manager of HEAT, wrote this acceptance speech on the company's website: "We have an outstanding service team! Everyone is extremely dedicated and takes great pride in helping customers solve problems. They are The most trusted bridge between our customers and our engineers."

HEAT's commitment to teamwork is as hard as it is to solve customers' problems. For a company where 90 percent of its employees work on-site away from the office, teamwork is critical.

Those on the service team have worked together for a long time and will continue to do so - turnover rates are as low as 4%, and over 40% are senior employees with five years or more.

In order to maintain this high-quality team spirit and make employees maintain their enthusiasm for work under high work pressure, the company is very focused on the core values of the company, the leadership communication mechanism and the apprentice training system.

Core Values: Health, Safety, Wealth. The company's core value is health and safety - which has actually become the number one priority in business operations. To this end, employees of the company enjoy various benefits: personal health insurance, hand and foot care, vision and hearing examination, body and head massage. In order to facilitate employees to seek medical treatment, HEAT Company specially employs corporate physicians. The company also funded the organization of various outdoor activities and sports, and purchased £1 million worth of sports and recreational facilities for employees.

Work-family balance is also a key focus for HEAT. In addition to flexible working hours, the company is also proud of the convenience measures it has introduced such as job sharing, working from home, reduced working hours, flexible working and staggered working hours. Female employees are the main beneficiaries of these convenience systems, and flexible work arrangements not only meet their needs, but also ensure their work efficiency.

All employees' families are also cared for by the company. Every time a company employee celebrates a birthday or a wedding anniversary, they can receive a £100 gift certificate from the company.

All of these measures have successfully relieved work stress while keeping employees on task - 90% of company employees sincerely say they are not stressed by work pressures and, moreover, because of the company's medical insurance system, they have no health problems.

HEAT's executive director, Bill McCandless, emphasizes, "The health and well-being of our employees is paramount to HEAT." Leadership Communication Mechanisms. McCandless himself represents another key feature of this Best Employers Company—leadership exchanges.

McKandless is known for being considerate and considerate of employees because of his ability to put himself in the shoes of his employees. He often asks himself how he wants to be treated as an employee and formulates policies accordingly. Much of HEAT's human resource planning stems from his thinking.

In his view, communication is key. "We work hard to make communication easy," he said. "But the work is not easy. If you can make it easy, everyone can understand it, and the approach is more likely to last for a long time. Keep it going."

McKandless equips employees with convenient communication tools. Company employees are generally equipped with portable communication tools such as cell phones, BlackBerry phones and laptop computers. Last year, HEAT subsidized 25 percent of the cost of home computer purchases for all employees and offered one-year, interest-free loans to ensure that every employee could receive timely email and Internet messages at home.

Company employees appreciate McCandless' leadership style. An investigation by The Sunday Times showed that company employees were motivated by McCandless to think his business philosophy and approach were sound.

Apprenticeship training system. When it comes to employee hiring, companies face a dilemma—skilled workers are in short supply due to a general skills shortage in the industry. To address staffing shortages, HEAT has implemented an "Apprenticeship Training Program" for which it won another award last year, the "National Training Award". This award is given to companies that have made outstanding achievements in employee training and development.

Specifically, the company won this award for changing the way employees are hired and trained. The old way is to only train employees in a specific technology. Now this approach is no longer applicable, because employees must have many aspects of technology. The HEAT company first recruited skilled workers from EU countries, especially the Czech Republic. Newly recruited workers are then systematically trained to become professional technicians in plumbing, electricity and gas.

At the awards ceremony, Northern Ireland's Minister for Employment and Training, Sir Reg Empey, said: "HEAT's contribution has been to use an innovative approach to addressing the shortage of skilled workers in businesses. The apprenticeship training system A proven solution to a technology shortage."

WL Gore & Associates: Structural Innovation

Gore-Tex is a unique coating. It was invented to be used in space technology. Because the coating is waterproof and breathable, it is successfully used in outdoor sportswear. Correspondingly, the success of the company WL, Gore & Associates, which produces this coating, is also based on a unique corporate culture. The company has eight thousand employees, and there is no doubt that these employees are generally satisfied with the business. The company has been featured in "Best Companies to Work For" lists in the United States and some European countries for many years. In addition, the company has been ranked first in the "100 Employers" of the British "Sunday Times" for four consecutive years.

Unique products, coupled with a unique corporate culture, create extraordinary success. Worldwide sales of WL Gore & Associates' various products totaled $2 billion in 2007. The success of the business is largely due to the "Gore Model". The most prominent features of this model are: "barrier-free" corporate structure, structural innovation and natural leadership.

"Accessible" corporate structure. Bill Gore, the chief inventor of the new fabric, created a "flat" lattice corporate structure. That is to say, enterprises are composed of many small task groups, and there is no top-down command system or preset communication channels.

There is no "boss" in an enterprise, there are only "heads" of the team. After all, the team is the boss. Work partners choose their own "responsible person", not the "boss" sent by the top. Personal performance evaluation is not the responsibility of the boss, but by peer review.

The company describes it on the company's website: "Our company does not have the barriers that are common in traditional businesses. We have eliminated various job titles and special rights. We encourage direct one-on-one communication between members. Numerous Teams of working partners with different responsibilities in the factory are effectively self-organized according to the requirements of technical needs and market opportunities."

Despite the overall size of the company, the organization of the company is small. Even the largest unit divisions do not exceed two hundred people. The good2work.com website discloses a legendary story circulating at WL Gore & Associates: In 1965, Gore was inspecting a new factory when he suddenly found many employees he did not know. This prompted him to formulate a rule: No more than two hundred employees were allowed to work in the same factory or department. Employees must know each other and call each other by name.

Structural innovation. The unique corporate structure in turn stimulates a passion for innovation. This enthusiasm translates into hundreds of patented inventions by the company each year. In total, WL Gore & Associates produces about a thousand products. It doesn't release its financial statistics, but it is estimated that it has been growing double-digit profits for several years. The company publicly declared: "In the past 50 years, the company has launched a large number of new products, relying on the talent, determination, curiosity and innovative spirit of its working partners, and its speed is beyond the reach of any large international enterprise."

The diversity of the company's products attests to this. WL Gore & Associates vigorously encourages its employees to innovate, and as a result, the company has doubled the number of products in the past few years alone.

Media investigation provides further confirmation. An article in Fast Company magazine last December said: "America's most innovative company should push WL Gore & Associates." Fast Company visited WL Gore & Way of working. For example, product development technicians, sales staff and production staff work in the same building, which makes the communication and division of labor more convenient for the entire team.

Enterprise employees conduct innovative scientific research in their spare time, neither need to apply to anyone nor subject to any form of supervision. Gore encourages its co-workers to devote nearly one-tenth of their work time to innovation. Natural Leadership. WL Gore & Associates also encourages each working partner to strive to be the leader. Leadership is assumed voluntarily, and leadership in the traditional sense is only the heads of major departments. Conversely, the position of "person in charge" is not acquired by appointment or appointment. “Teams are organized around market opportunities, and a leader will naturally appear.” The company’s description of the process is succinct.

People rely on actual leadership actions to gain leadership, Fast Company found: "If you want to get the boss position, you have to gain followers yourself. Because there is no set system for communicating instructions in the company, people don't need to be told You can only attract others by your own talent, attract other talented people to work with you, and unite others with you by virtue of your passion for your work and the prestige you have built up.” Disappointing," one company leader said in an interview with the news magazine Industrial Maintenance & Plant Operation, "if I point fingers, no one will pay attention to me. My job is to win mates, set goals, and strive to achieve… ...and want others to think that my plan works."

If enough people think your goals are worth the effort, you'll become a leader—and perhaps get a salary commensurate with the role . This "peer decision-making" structure means that the team has the most decision-making power, including your compensation package, by a committee that evaluates your contributions. The stock income of the company's employees is very generous. Every employee who has worked at WL Gore WL Gore & Associates for one year will receive company stock equivalent to 15% of their annual salary, which can be cashed at market value when they leave.

Only those high-profile titles are not available to employees here. Everyone in the business is called a "work buddy".

Reaktor Innovations: The Expert Company

If everyone in your company is an expert, and your Your business looks a lot like Reaktor Innovations to your employees and customers.

Reaktor Innovations is a privately run software and technology consulting company headquartered in Helsinki, Finland. The company has just been named one of Europe's 50 Best Employers for Small Businesses (50 to 500 employees) this year by the Great Place to Work Institute.

Reaktor scored an excellent 96 on the Best Employers Trust Index, which evaluates employee satisfaction. In addition, the company was selected out of about 1,250 companies in fifteen European countries to receive high marks in independent assessments.

Meanwhile, Reaktor was selected as "Best IT Company of the Year" by the authoritative Finnish IT magazine Tietoviikko.

Excellent employee satisfaction and business success come from Reaktor's corporate style of excellence: the organization and mutual training of professionals.

Organize professionals. The company has a total of about 100 employees, all of whom are experts in their fields, mainly technical consultants and engineers. The company has made great efforts to ensure the technical level and comfortable life of its employees.

Reaktor President Vesa Lauronen said at the award ceremony: "The only way to succeed is to attract the top talent in the field to serve the company. It is impossible to operate a successful business behind closed doors in an ivory tower. Organised by professionals."

For Reaktor, it takes the best professionals to join the business in order to maximize the return on the client's investment in the IT industry. This philosophy has brought huge benefits to the company. Since its inception in 2000, Reaktor has been successful in both operations and internal fundraising. In 2007, the company had a turnover of 9.3 million euros and a net profit of 2 million euros. In the past five years, the annual growth rate of the company's turnover is about 77%.

Asta Rossi, President of the Best Employers Institute Finland, commented: "Reaktor's management experience demonstrates a high level of expert management skills. Reaktor not only attracts outstanding individuals, but also attracts companies. The overall management philosophy is applied to each member."

The company was a little surprised to be named Europe's Best Employers, but not a surprise, because the company has higher goals. "This is truly a remarkable achievement. Kudos to every Reaktor member. But we believe we can do even better. Our goal is to be the best specialist business in the world," said Laurent. "Learning First" business philosophy. Reaktor said that it wants to provide its employees with the best opportunities for learning and personal development, which can only be achieved by undertaking the highest-end projects. Therefore, enterprises attach great importance to the learning and training of employees.

The company's expanding customer base provides employees with numerous opportunities to invent and apply various new IT technologies. "We want our employees to have reason to be genuinely proud of their careers and work teams, to give them the opportunity to satisfy their insatiable intellectual curiosity, and to have the opportunity to become the top talent in their fields."

To achieve this, Reaktor Companies do what it takes: Companies are known to often reject certain projects because they lack the challenge to meet the demands of this kind of learning. mutual training. In an environment where everyone is an expert, what better way to learn from each other? Therefore, Reaktor vigorously promotes mutual training among its employees. Employees place great value on using this approach to gain advanced technical experience. According to the British "Financial Times" report, Reaktor often organizes exchange seminars to facilitate the sharing of experience among corporate colleagues. People with similar functions in different teams also form cross-departmental expert groups.

Financial Times revealed that Reaktor has also established an internal guidance mechanism, and the project team can apply for experts from other teams to join to provide technical training for the team. The company also holds training camps every Saturday, with courses such as "Teaching Skills" and "Coding Languages". About two-thirds of employees signed up for training camps, even though they had to sacrifice part of their weekend breaks.

Be open and honest. New members of the company will quickly discover that the company's corporate culture is very open, as is the company's internal communications.

New recruits rave about the company's introductory process. Through this procedure, newcomers can accurately and quickly grasp the basic situation of the company. Ceridian, a British human resource management consulting firm, disclosed that Reaktor would send him the password of the local area network and invite him to participate in the company's corresponding activities and meetings long before the new employee went to work.

Like all good employers, Reaktor takes internal communication very seriously. The company has frequent online discussions and is very supportive of employees starting their own blogs. In addition, Reaktor regularly encourages its employees to attend various industry conferences as guests and speakers.

Another example of the extent to which a company can be sincere to its employees: In order to retain an employee who had to leave Finland for personal reasons, the company opened a store in Buenos Aires just for him. an office.

In total, only three employees have voluntarily resigned in the company's history.

Ferrari: Healthy competition

This is the most successful company in the history of Formula 1. It produces some of the most coveted cars in the world. Its name is synonymous with style, speed and glamour.

Now, Ferrari can add another cog to the mighty corporate machine: it is again on the "World's Best Companies to Work For" list.

The Best Employers Institute hosted last year's "Best Employers in Europe" awards, which took into account corporate environment and investment in facilities, focus on employee benefits, training and improvement, relationships with raw material suppliers, and more factor. Among the more than 1,000 participating companies, Ferrari clinched the Italian and European Grand Prix in one fell swoop.

This Italian luxury car manufacturer won the award because it established a high-quality corporate culture and environment, and cultivated a competitive and dynamic team spirit. Inherit the traditional corporate culture. The history of Ferrari is a history of victory. Since 1947, the Italian car company, marked by flying steeds, has dominated motor racing at the highest level. At the same time, Ferrari has also become one of the most reputable luxury brands in the world.

For the company's nearly 3,000 employees, this corporate tradition has been passed down since they entered the company and underwent a carefully designed introductory education and training program. "We realized that we were perpetuating a myth by working here," an employee said in an interview. "Ferrari is unique in the world."

In order to maintain this uniqueness, the company opened a new a series of educational programs. These include "Welcome Day", on which new employees are given a personal "Ferrari passport" with the words "Welcome" written by the company president, as well as information on the company's location, work procedures, experience and opportunities. There is also a manual called "Code of Conduct", which details the company's policies and requirements for employees. New hires then take part in a training program called "The Christopher Columbus Journey", where they spend two days learning about Ferrari's values, including tradition and innovation, passion and sportsmanship, and refinement and speed. Then spend another three days to communicate and organize training.

They have to study hard, because in the months following their inauguration, they attend the "Ferrari Academy", which includes interactive quizzes and multimedia presentations, mostly "Do you know our company?" topic.

Healthy competition. Naturally, the competitive spirit of racing is integrated into the company's corporate culture, and the employees are no exception. The company has a "Quality Grand Prix", in which employees put forward various improvement suggestions to the company, and once adopted by the company, they will increase their points. In the end, the employee with the most points wins the competition and is rewarded.

Some competing projects are conducted as a team. For example, the "Fiorano Competition" is a quality improvement competition conducted by ten participating teams. A team of winners is selected every four months. There is no competition to watch Formula 1, though, and each employee gets two tickets.

A people-centred work environment. The Fiorano 599 is Ferrari's fastest and most powerful production car. "National Geographic" in the United States called Ferrari a "giant factory": "To put such a car on the market, Ferrari's factory must be half a high-tech garage and half an art studio."

" National Geographic wrote: "The entire factory is an architectural wonder, with many trees planted in the engine shop building to maintain the ideal humidity and air quality required for engine assembly."

Ferrari's factory fully embodies Ferrari leadership's focus on a clean and safe working environment. According to the website carbody.com, each position in the factory has been specially designed according to ergonomic principles to minimize worker activity, improve work efficiency, and ensure that workers can enjoy year-round comfort through a climate control system work environment, thereby improving the quality of work. An employee said: "Our work environment is quiet and clean, which guarantees our enthusiasm and drive."

Ferrari continues to improve the environment of the racing factory and sports car factory, and adopts a new method called "people-oriented formula". idea. The idea is to put people at the center and build the facility around them, thereby creating a great work environment and enhancing the creativity and quality of life of employees.

Moderate passion. Watching a Formula 1 race in Italy, you feel a frenzy that you can't see anywhere else. Part of this sentiment is of national character, but more importantly: it's Ferrari's corporate heritage.

Passionate is an important characteristic of Ferrari employees. "The real secret to business success is passion," says company president Luca Montezemolo. Every Ferrari employee knows this. When they first joined the company, they all received a beautiful card from the president, with these two poems written under the familiar flying horse logo: "Own it everything can be done; lose it and hesitate."

Thescuderia.net website quotes Montezemolo as saying that there are three key elements to a successful business: people, products and customers. Since Montezemolo took over in 1993, he has made massive improvements to the company's products.

These products are highly favored by customers, and many customers are willing to wait for two years to buy their favorite new car. Having secured these two elements, Montezemolo turned his attention to a third element: manpower. He has been committed to making Ferrari "the number one company in the world in terms of quality of life and working environment inside the factory".

But he carefully controls his passion. "Success is hard to manage because people learn more from failure than from success," he said.

However, with his passionate approach to people management, Ferrari has rarely failed in recent years. .