Employer / Employee Relationship BusinessWeek Pieces

Two brief interesting pieces around employees and the companies they work for from the November 16 issue of BusinessWeek.

The longer of the two is titled "The Return of the House Call" and details the Microsoft program that let's employees request an in-home doctor visit. From a financial perspective, it can actually reduce Microsoft expense in helping to bring down company costs for any unneeded emergency room visits by covered employees (should probably be noted that the Microsoft health care plan is apparently noted for being low-cost to it's employees).

The secondary, but still important impact of the program is in showing employees how valued they are by the company.

Very much tied to this latter concept, I thought the point raised in the extremely short "Are Your Employees Just Biding Their Time?" was a solid one. The concept is that there's a number of companies out there taking the current recession as an opportunity to squeeze employees and that could turn out to be counterproductive when the economy turns around. If an employee doesn't feel valued or treated fairly, it could well be a mass exodus of talent once other opportunities present themselves.

I find this whole idea of the employee / employer relationship to be a fascinating one and (keeping in mind things are always as they appear) it's interesting to read about and reflect upon the approaches taken by some large corporations.

I did a blog post in Oct 2008 titled Corporate Workplace Culture: the Good (Not the Bad or Ugly) which featured some positive employee treatment stories from companies such as Costco, Netflix, Google and yep... Microsoft and then another post in March of this year on People Management at IBM.

Just interesting... I think the point is that companies can squeeze employees under certain conditions, but I really question how sustainable the practice is over the long haul.

Corporate Workplace Culture: the Good (Not the Bad or Ugly)

While Corporate America often gets a bad rap (justifiably so) for the environment (not CFC-type environment, but employee mattering-type environment) it's people work in, there are some stories out there of companies that do it right...

In a September 2007 article, BusinessWeek ran "Netflix: Flex to the Max" about the efforts at Netflix to both attract and retain the best employees... through extreme "flexibility and responsibility" provided from CEO Reed Hastings on down.

Also, from September 2007, BusinessWeek published "How to Make a Microserf Smile" about the efforts at employee responsiveness done at the tech behemoth. Led by HR chief Lisa Brummel, Microsoft has fought gamely over the last few years to keep both it's star employees and overall moral up.

It's probably not necessary to point to Google as a company that treats it's employees well (given the legendary free cafeteria, child care, laundry, etc), but in it's March 2008 "50 Most Innovative Companies" issue, Fast Company has a piece about the perks enjoyed at Google, including an author and Presidential Candidate speaker series (pretty good stuff).

Finally (and more recently), Fred Kiel in his October 6, 2008 BusinessWeek opinion piece, tears apart the notion that employees are motivated only by self-interest. Kiel argues that rather than this, employees greatly value a workplace culture that trusts it's people (REI as an example) and gives them opportunities to advance (i.e. Costco Wholesale).