engineering management
showing up happy
How can you keep your employees content and productive? Some successful managers share their tips.
By Jean Thilmany, Supplement Editor
What
makes one engineering company a great place to work, but another only
a passable way to pull in a paycheck?
Surprisingly, the answer is not all that intangible; and it doesn't
much depend on the individual employee. Yes, everyone's work needs
vary; yes, everyone has a different reason for coming to work in the morning.
But ultimately employees universally want to value their jobs and to feel
valued. If that bottom-line sense of worth is in place, you can count
on happy, productive engineers even as they rush like mad to meet a tight
project deadline or create a new technology. And that, of course, aids
your bottom line.
Not surprisingly, it's the executives and managers who set the
tone for the entire operation. By speaking to employers with happy hires,
it's fairly easy to identify what their managers are doing right.
Robert Levering sought the opinions of workers at thousands of companies
about what gets them jazzed for their jobs. Their musings became the backbone
of his book, A Great Place to Work: What Makes Some Employers So Good—and
Most So Bad (Random House Inc., 1988).
Workers across the board told Levering they want to be treated fairly
and to have their work successes acknowledged by the boss. They want a
fair share of company ownership and profits.
With that information, Levering profiled a composite outstanding employer.
Great employers and great managers treat their employees fairly and make
sure they enjoy their jobs. They give responsibility to the people who
work for them, they recognize outstanding employees, they offer employees
on-the-job and classroom training, encourage them to learn from their
mistakes, and foster open communication.
A Non-Internet Startup Succeeds
None of this is news to Kent Schien. He's president and chief executive
officer at Innoventor, a St. Louis-based engineering company that makes
custom-designed process, control, test, and other equipment. It employs
about 50 engineers. Before he founded the company in 1996, Schien worked
as an engineer and project manager at McDonnell Douglas, followed by a
four-year stint managing a small engineering and manufacturing company.
"Those were great places to work, but after those years, I said
to myself, 'There might be a better way, or what I perceive to be
a better way, to run a company,' " he said. "I felt
engineering companies could treat their engineers a little bit differently
than they'd traditionally done in the past."
Innoventor operates with the open-book management policy espoused by Jack
Stack, author of The Great Game of Business (Currency, 1994).
"Everyone knows where we stand financially, so everyone understands
where they stand in terms of the general health of the company,"
Schien said. "That's important because they can make decisions to
help the company be even more viable."
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| National Instruments has an organized basketball team and an onsite gym. |
Innoventor took root amid what will certainly be seen in retrospect as
a unique chapter in U.S. business history: the Internet boom. Schien chose
to take a page from other young, admittedly sexier, start-ups of the 1990s.
His engineers may not relax in a huge, dramatically outfitted game room,
but they benefit from policies that encourage flexible time, a focus on
family, and a community involvement that might include volunteering, running
a road race to raise money for charity, or getting involved in church
activities.
"We've established a policy that if you're keeping
your customers happy, it doesn't matter where you work, at home
or in the office," Schien said.
One late summer day the engineering company's main phone line was
being answered by a series of engineers and other Innoventor employees.
They'd volunteered for the job because the woman who usually fields
calls stayed home with her sick child. Schien had encouraged her to take
the day off.
Making sure an employee thrives in such an environment starts with the
hiring process, when interviewers give potential employees tests designed
to determine their personality types. Candidates get to look at the tests
to see whether they agree with how they've been pegged. If they
do, results are used as a management tool.
By studying how their employees do their jobs, his eight managers can
build teams based on personality. That way, one person's strength
can balance another's weakness, and vice versa. Schien said weakness
is negated within such a purpose-built team, while strengths shine.
Just One of the Guys
If an engineering company's environment can be traced to its leadership,
then the folks at National Instruments know exactly where the work environment
they prize originates: the man they affectionately call Dr. T.
Dr. T., or James Truchard, founded the virtual instrumentation company
27 years ago with Jeff Kodosky. They were both researchers in the Applied
Research Laboratories of the University of Texas at Austin and decided
from the get-go to draw up a 100-year plan for their company. They also
wanted to take into the business world some important lessons learned
in academia, like relying on interns to do important jobs.
Because their plan called for 20 to 40 percent growth each year—which
continues—the founders purchased a large campus in Austin, Texas,
where 2,000 employees now work. An additional 1,200 people work at small
branch offices worldwide.
Today, everyone from vice presidents to the new intern refers to the president,
chief executive officer, and co-founder as Dr. T. It would be almost sacrilegious
to call him anything else.
Todd Walter tells the story of the first time he met Dr. T. National Instruments
had flown him and a passel of other young engineers to Austin for a round
of interviews. During the Thursday night meet-and-greet, Walter chatted
about engineering issues with the guy beside him, a man casually dressed
in jeans.
"Then they said, 'It's time to meet Dr. T, the company
founder,' and sure enough this guy I've been sitting next
to gets up to talk.
"The first time I met the vice president of research and development,
I met him in the elevator and he said, 'I'm in R&D,' " Walter
added. "I later figured out he was research and development."
For the past five years National Instruments has been named one of Fortune
magazine's 100 best companies to work for. Now, a lot of people want to
know the National Instruments secret, said Mark Finger, vice president
of human resources. The secret is not in the salary, he said.
You have to pay people what they're worth, of course. But it may
come as a surprise to some that pay is not the biggest part of the contented-employee
equation, Finger said.
As at Innoventor, upper management clues in employees to National Instruments'
financial standing. During the high-technology downturn in the 1990s,
National Instruments didn't lay off people. Instead, it brought
more engineers than ever on board. That move might have raised anxiety
levels if managers hadn't talked openly about their decision to
hold off on raises and funnel the cost savings to new employee salaries,
Finger said.
"We knew additional engineers would get more products out more
quickly which, for the long term, would be for the greater good of NI,"
he said. "We hire smart people. If you explain stuff to them and
get them committed, 95 percent of them are OK with it."
To find those smart people, National Instruments takes advantage of a
well-established internship program. Last summer, the company hired 130
interns. A large number of them go on to work for National Instruments
after college, which is the company plan. National Instruments has vetted
its interns who, in turn, have vetted their future employer.
Company managers recognize that a good engineer wants to be challenged.
That's why interns aren't restricted to filing papers. They
immediately have a hand in company projects and act as full-time employees,
said Ben Weatherman, a vision software developer who was a summer 2000
intern and came back for two more stints before beginning his full-time
employment.
"They give you as much as you can handle and sometimes more than
you think you can handle," Weatherman said. "As an intern,
you're expected to solve problems and you can't just go
to your manager and ask, 'How do you do this?' "
Interns choose to stay on at National Instruments, knowing exactly what
they're getting themselves into. They know they'll like
the job, which makes it more likely they'll sign on for the long
haul, Finger said.
"You can't hire the kind of talent we hire and then lose
them two years later, or you've wasted a lot of time and effort,"
he added.
About 85 percent of new hires come straight from their college campuses,
and about 25 percent of them have worked as interns. Recruiters make a
special effort to woo top graduates from leading engineering schools.
"We hire really, really bright people who would be successful anywhere
they went," Walter said. "They stay because they have instant
ownership in the company. When I was here two months, I was already helping
recruit new hires."
Because the average age of an employee is about 32 and because so many
come to Austin fresh from college and may not know a soul, the company
caters to its young, recently relocated hires.
"You're coming fresh out of school and you're still
looking for fun," Weatherman said. "It's hard work
in the day, and at night we get together and maybe go catch a football
game together."
The company boasts organized football and basketball teams, as well as
an onsite gym.
Moving On Up
National Instruments is quick to assign employees responsibility. Managers
know employees are happier when they're taking on successively
more responsibility, so they're quick to assign those roles. Walter,
a four-year NI employee, is now industrial control group manager.
In that capacity, he works mainly to remove day-to-day roadblocks that
could keep his engineers from working as quickly and efficiently as they
might like. Is it working? Weatherman, who reports to Walter, says yes.
"It's not as though I knock on his door and walk into his
office," he said. "I mean that in a good way. I respect
him, but it's not like I'm afraid to go talk to him about
a question I have. And that's indicative of all managers in the
company."
National Instruments and Innoventor may be getting a lot of things right
when it comes to keeping their employees happy, productive, and employed
long-term. But are they doing everything right? No. That's impossible,
Schien said. Managers and executives, like everyone else, can only learn
how to steer their companies by making mistakes and changing course when
it's clear they're not on the right path.
"Your ability to be an expert is the summation of all your experiences
and that's a summation of most of your failures, because that's
how you learn," Schien said.