I’ve had it. I quit. I’m done. It can’t be done here. I’m tired. Help! Want to keep your employees from jumping ship? Maybe implement a few if not all of the following things below.

The Environment

1. Open Air: I want to work in a place where I can see what everyone is doing within the general area whether they are at their desk or not, etc. I want it to be a relaxed environment with lots of windows. Being walled away into cubical units is not conducive to and environment of collaboration and working together. Remember the developers room in that movie Antitrust? Open air, and developers having fun; collaborating.
2. A real Cafeteria: I want to work in a place that has or is near a real cafeteria; one where meals are prepared daily. The food is affordable (free preferred) and healthy.
3. Dress Code: I want to work in a place that would let me wear a t-shirt if I felt like it. Currently, I have a casual business dress code. This dress code is pretty flexible as a few of us are on the cutting edge wearing blue jeans each day. I’m not totally complaining because I know there may be a customer walking through, but I want to work in a place where the customers don’t mind the attire. A person shouldn’t be judged on whether they are dressed in a suit but on the results of their work. To say a t-shirt is going to make me look like less of a business person or less reliable is old-school thought and should be abandoned.
4. Mixing of management and workers: I want to work in a place where I have access to upper management. I want to work in a company where I can eat lunch with the CEO (at least in the same room) and let him know what kind of a job I think he’s doing. A CEO or boss who doesn’t have time to meet with the troops at least once a week or month is a boss who’s out of touch. If I were in charge, I’d want to know what my employees were thinking first hand. This may be tough to do if you have many remote offices, but the leadership of each office location should be doing the same thing to know exactly what’s going on in the minds of their people.
5. Embraces and acknowledges Ingenuity: I want to work in a place where research and development are the primary goals of the company. Researching and developing new ways of doing things and writing applications that implement these new ideas. I want everyone innovating and being awarded publicly. This furthers innovation and/or competition to achieve in the minds of those who want to be acknowledged amount their peers.
6. A “hip” culture: I want to work in a place where I’m not the youngest or the oldest person on the team. There needs to be a balance of tech-savvy individuals. I want to work with people who are smarter than me. Who are a wealth of knowledge but are friendly enough to share it with others. Ideally people with similar thoughts on business and worldly events. Who are active and have an appreciation for the outdoors.

Adoption of Technology

1. Proper Use of Security: I want to work in a place that has a IT-security department that isn’t run by the gestapo. They would be knowledgeable of best security practices but wouldn’t dare think of wholesale blocking all outbound traffic for all users.  I want to work for a company who has faith in their employees that they will do their job because they love their job. If an employee feels that what they’re doing is going to make a difference in the world, they’re going to pour every ounce of time they have into it; not surf YouTube. Since I work for a Government contractor I can understand why they would want to operate at a heightened state of security; not trusting their employees to be smart enough to not visit certain sites, but that’s only part of a problem.
2. Allow a worker to work remotely: I want to work in a place where I can work from home. Maybe not 100% but at least have the option not looked down upon as being a money waster. If a company has invested correctly in the technologies allowing their employees to telecommute, then I propose they would see no difference (perhaps even a savings) in costs than if the employee was taking up a space in the corporate building. A Virtual Private Network, video conferencing, and/or video/voice/text instant messaging along with standard e-mail all would provide the equivilant capabilities of having an employee on location. The only exception would be meeting a client outside of the corporate network infrastructure… but even then a conference call could be made. Studies I have read show that employees who work from home tend to work harder and longer hours rather than the perception that they don’t do any work at all. Again, if the employee’s heart is in the work, they will do the work no matter where they are.  I want a company who can appreciate these concepts, embrace them, and not be fearful that their employees are off shopping for pampers or fishing on some lake while on the clock.
3. Bleeding edge technologies: I want to work in a place where we are not only using the latest technologies but we are creating them. I want to develop code that is new, or at least is going to be integrated into something that’s new. Create a product that has never been seen before or has innovations that leap over the previous versions.  I don’t want to have to be the one constantly pushing management to have employees learn new technologies or adopt new theories. I want to work for a company that embraces the concept that their employees need to be always learning the latest consumer trends and technologies. This allows the employees to use the latest technologies to better their own processes, capabilities, and/or development results.
4. Encourages community outreach: I want to work in a place where I’m encouraged to communicate with others and help them in using our products. A company should embrace the concepts of blogging and message forums.  I want to work in a place where I can talk directly to the customers, get their uncoated-sugar-free feedback and let them know they’re important. Having the ear of the folks creating the product they spent a fortune on is a big plus in the minds of customers. Currently, I don’t even know why I’m coding a website or who is going to be using it, I just do it.

So there’s a few things I would like in my next job. If anyone can comment and let me know if a place exists where these things exist (besides Google) I’ll gladly consider their recommendation as my next job.

Tags: Job, Opinion, Workplace

This entry was posted on August 19, 2008 at 1:52 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Ponderings by RobK410 No Comments Yet