7.4 What Makes a Great Place to Work?

Job Rotation

Specialization promotes efficiency because workers get very good at doing particular tasks. The drawback is the tedium of repeating the same task day in and day out. The practice of job rotation allows employees to rotate from one job to another on a systematic basis, eventually cycling back to their original tasks. A computer maker, for example, might rotate a technician into the sales department to increase the employee’s awareness of customer needs and to give the employee a broader understanding of the company’s goals and operations. A hotel might rotate an accounting clerk to the check-in desk for a few hours each day to add variety to the daily workload. Rotated employees develop new skills and gain experience that increases their value to the company, which benefits management because cross-trained employees can fill in for absentees, thus providing greater flexibility in scheduling.

Job Enlargement

Instead of a job in which you performed just one or two tasks, wouldn’t you prefer a job that gave you many different tasks? In theory, you’d be less bored and more highly motivated if you had a chance at job enlargement—the policy of enhancing a job by adding tasks at similar skill levels (see Figure 7.7 “Job Enlargement versus Job Enrichment”). The job of sales clerk, for example, might be expanded to include gift-wrapping and packaging items for shipment. The additional duties would add variety without entailing higher skill levels.

Job Enrichment

As you can see from Figure 7.7 “Job Enlargement versus Job Enrichment”, merely expanding a job by adding similar tasks won’t necessarily “enrich” it by making it more challenging and rewarding. Job enrichment is the practice of adding tasks that increase both responsibility and opportunity for growth. It provides the kinds of benefits that, according to Maslow and Herzberg, contribute to job satisfaction: stimulating work, sense of personal achievement, self-esteem, recognition, and a chance to reach your potential.

Consider, for example, the evolving role of support staff in the contemporary office. Today, employees who used to be called “secretaries” assume many duties previously in the domain of management, such as project coordination and public relations. Information technology has enriched their jobs because they can now apply such skills as word processing, desktop publishing, creating spreadsheets, and managing databases. That’s why we now hear such a term as administrative assistant instead of secretary (Kerka, 2011).

Alternative Work Arrangements

The accounting firm KPMG, which has made the list of the “100 Best Companies for Working Mothers” for twelve years (KPMG firm, 2011), is committed to promoting a balance between its employees’ work and personal lives. KPMG offers a variety of work arrangements designed to accommodate different employee needs and provide scheduling flexibility (KPMG, 2011).

Flextime

Employers who provide for flextime set guidelines that allow employees to designate starting and quitting times. Guidelines, for example, might specify that all employees must work eight hours a day (with an hour for lunch) and that four of those hours must be between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. Thus, you could come in at 7 a.m. and leave at 4 p.m., while coworkers arrive at 10 a.m. and leave at 7 p.m. With permission you could even choose to work from 8 a.m to 2 p.m., take two hours for lunch, and then work from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.

Compressed Workweeks

Rather than work eight hours a day for five days a week, you might elect to earn a three-day weekend by working ten hours a day for four days a week.

Part-Time Work

If you’re willing to have your pay and benefits adjusted accordingly you can work fewer than forty hours a week.

Job Sharing

Under job sharing, two people share one full-time position, splitting the salary and benefits of the position as each handles half the job. Often they arrange their schedules to include at least an hour of shared time during which they can communicate about the job.

Telecommuting

Telecommuting means that you regularly work from home (or from some other nonwork location). You’re connected to the office by computer, fax, and phone. You save on commuting time, enjoy more flexible work hours, and have more opportunity to spend time with your family. A study of 5,500 IBM employees (one-fifth of whom telecommute) found that those who worked at home not only had a better balance between work and home life but also were more highly motivated and less likely to leave the organization (Reported in Work-Life, 2011) (The Business Case for Telecommuting, 2011).

Though it’s hard to count telecommuters accurately, some estimates put the number of people who work at home at least one day a week at 20 percent. This estimate includes 2 percent of workers who run home-based businesses and 2 percent who work exclusively at home for other companies (Telework Research Network, 2011). Telecommuting isn’t for everyone. Working at home means that you have to discipline yourself to avoid distractions, such as TV, personal phone calls, home chores, or pets, and some people feel isolated from social interaction in the workplace.

Dependent Care

Caring for dependents—young children and elderly parents—is of utmost importance to some employees, but combining dependent-care responsibilities with a busy job can be particularly difficult. KPMG provides on-site child care during tax season (when employees are especially busy) and offers emergency backup dependent care all year round, either at a provider’s facility or in the employee’s home. To get referrals or information, employees can call KPMG’s LifeWorks Resource and Referral Service. KPMG is by no means unique in this respect: more than eight thousand companies maintain on-site day care (Harris, 2000) and 18 percent of all U.S. companies offer child-care resources or referral services (CNNMoney, 2003).

Paid Parental Leave

Any employee (whether male or female) who becomes a parent can take two weeks of paid leave. New mothers also get time off through short-term disability benefits.

Caring for Yourself

Like many companies, KPMG allows employees to aggregate all paid days off and use them in any way they want. In other words, instead of getting, say, ten sick days, five personal days, and fifteen vacation days, you get a total of thirty days to use for anything. If you’re having personal problems, you can contact the Employee Assistance Program. If staying fit makes you happier and more productive, you can take out a discount membership at one of more than nine thousand health clubs.

Piecework and Commissions

Sometimes it makes more sense to pay workers according to the quantity of product that they produce or sell. Byrd’s Seafood, a crab-processing plant in Crisfield, Maryland, pays workers on piecework: Workers’ pay is based on the amount of crabmeat that’s picked from recently cooked crabs. (A good picker can produce fifteen pounds of crabmeat an hour and earn about $100 a day.) (Crisfield Off the Beaten Path, 2006; Learner, 2000). If you’re working on commission, you’re probably getting paid for quantity of sales. If you were a sales representative for an insurance company, like The Hartford, you’d get a certain amount of money for each automobile or homeowner policy that you sell (The Hartford, 2011).

Bonus Plans

TI’s year-end bonuses—annual income given in addition to salary—are based on company-wide performance. If the company has a profitable year, and if you contributed to that success, you’ll get a bonus. If the company doesn’t do well, you’re out of luck, regardless of what you contributed.

Bonus plans have become quite common, and the range of employees eligible for bonuses has widened in recent years. In the past, bonus plans were usually reserved for managers above a certain level. Today, however, companies have realized the value of extending plans to include employees at virtually every level. The magnitude of bonuses still favors those at the top. High-ranking officers (such as CEOs and CFOs) often get bonuses ranging from 30 percent to 50 percent of their salaries. Upper-level managers may get from 15 percent to 25 percent and middle managers from 10 percent to 15 percent. At lower levels, employees may expect bonuses from 3 percent to 5 percent of their annual compensation (Opdyke, 2004).

Profit-Sharing Plans

TI also maintains a profit-sharing plan, which relies on a predetermined formula to distribute a share of the company’s profits to eligible employees. Today, about 40 percent of all U.S. companies offer some type of profit-sharing program (Obringer, 2011). TI’s plan, however, is a little unusual: while most plans don’t allow employees to access profit-sharing funds until retirement or termination, TI employees get their shares immediately—in cash.

TI’s plan is also pretty generous—as long as the company has a good year. Here’s how it works. An employee’s profit share depends on the company’s operating profit for the year. If profits from operations reach 10 percent of sales, the employee gets a bonus worth 4 percent of his or her salary. If operating profit soars to 20 percent, the employee bonuses go up to 26 percent of salary. But if operating profits fall short of a certain threshold, nobody gets anything (Texas Instruments, 2011).

Stock-Option Plans

Like most stock-option plans, the TI plan gives employees the right to buy a specific number of shares of company stock at a set price on a specified date. At TI, an employee may buy stock at its selling price at the time when he or she was given the option. So, if the price of the stock goes up, the employee benefits. Say, for example, that the stock was selling for $30 a share when the option was granted in 2007. In 2011, it was selling for $40 a share. Exercising his or her option, the employee could buy TI stock at the 2007 price of $30 a share—a bargain price (Texas Instruments, 2011).

At TI, stock options are used as an incentive to attract and retain top people. Starbucks, by contrast, isn’t nearly as selective in awarding stock options. At Starbucks, all employees can earn “Bean Stock”—the Starbucks employee stock-option plan. Both full- and part-time employees get options to buy Starbucks shares at a set price. If the company does well and its stock goes up, employees make a profit. CEO Howard Schultz believes that Bean Stock pays off: because employees are rewarded when the company does well, they have a stronger incentive to add value to the company (and so drive up its stock price). Shortly after the program was begun, the phrase “bean-stocking” became workplace lingo for figuring out how to save the company money.