Can an employer make its people happy?

It was saddening to read this from a former employee today.

It would be unprofessional and unproductive for me to divulge any details about Alex's departure from our company, or get into a tit-for-tat debate so I'm not going to do that. The comment I Ieft on Alex's blog is a fair response I think:

Ultimately it's only you who can make yourself happy. We work hard to create an environment that supports this, and although we're far from cracking the perfect formula (has any company?) I think it's fair to say we do better than most. But no company can actually MAKE people happy - it has to come from the individual. I'm sorry it didn't work out for you, and I wish you the best of luck.

Alex is right that different things make different people happy. This is why I meet all of my team individually every six weeks to talk about how happy they are at work, and to see what we can do to improve things. It's a real shame that we couldn't find a happy formula for Alex.

We've shared the link with the team here and I'm hoping it'll prompt some lively debate. We're all committed to making Nixon McInnes an amazing place to work so it's good to question basic assumptions about how we're delivering on the principles that underpin our culture. I know we still have lots to learn and improve as our company develops. I for one am enjoying the journey.

I'm passionate and fascinated by this subject so I'd be pleased to hear from you if you have any thoughts or ideas.

Comments

[Mat]

I read Alex's blog post this morning and it struck me that all he really wanted was to be a cog in a wheel and get paid on time. Thats fair enough, some people prefer not to have the touchy feely stuff. It seems to me that Alex would be better suited to contracting in the city than in an environment like Nixon McInnes.

Just a thought but didn't all this get get covered in the interview? Maybe you should be looking again at your interview process to make sure you get the right people for the job but also for the Nixon McInnes culture.

[kelvin newman]

It's brave to acknowledge the criticism on stuff like this.

Inevitably some people don't gel with the culture of the company no matter how appealing the architects believe it to be.

Though ultimately it's better to have 75 happy and have 25 leave than have 100 people nonplussed.

[Tom Nixon]

I'd welcome any ideas on how you effectively evaluate someone's suitability for a particular culture. Our recruiting process is getting much more rigorous with more practical testing but 'touchy feely' stuff is quite hard to assess. I'm sure we've got plenty of room for improvement.

[Mat]

I've not been through your recruitment process so I can't comment on that but when i recruit I mention at every opportunity exactly how the culture is at SCIP, from the job ad to the job offer. I've had people turn round at the last minute over the job offer drinks and say they've changed their mind but thats cool with me. Rather that than after a month at work when I've got to start the whole process again. From the ads I've seen over the past few months I think it makes things pretty clear how things work at your place so you're obviously going in the right direction.

You can't ever please all the people all of the time and I guess as Nixon McInnes grows you're going to come across this more and more. As employees leave just make sure you have a good exit interview to find out their reasons, learn from anything they say and move on.

[Alex Farran]

Mat. I'm surprised at your interpretation of my post. I thought I'd been clear that my problem at NM was that they run development like an assembly line, with little room for creativity and exploration. Now that's not uncommon, but I had expected NM to be different.

Perhaps it's just that I've become used to being a freelancer. Everyone I've spoken to has said that they'd never go back to permanent employment.

[Tom Nixon]

This is the most public exit interview ever. It's an odd format but I'm happy to go with it :)

Nobody's against creativity and exploration, but if you budget X number of days for a project and it takes 3 times as long then you've got problems. Programming work in a small-medium sized web agency is definitely much more time pressured than in a software house, but on the flip side you get exposure to a more diverse range of interesting clients, and to join a participative culture. But if these things are less important to you then that's fair enough.

[Matthew Hill]

I worked at NM myself for nearly three years and I recently left to start a new job for an online publishing department in HSBC, Canary Wharf. On Monday I handed my notice in: 2 months is long enough to know that it simply is not the environment for me.

I've now been on two extreme ends of company culture. At NM, the culture is informal, flexible and geared towards staff being self managers, taking the view that all employees are adults and should be trusted to make responsible decisions about how they use their time to get the job done. That suits a lot of people, but not everyone. Conversely, HSBC is so focussed on targets and deliverables, that the human factor is all but ignored and (in my limited experience there), people are assets to be squeezed and manipulated. It didn't mesh with my personal ethics...

Hence, from the end of July, I am going to be freelancing as a web designer and front-end coder (anyone got any work? ;-). I have freelanced before. I enjoyed it but the one thing I missed was working with other people in a close knit team. When I joined NM, I enjoyed the fact that I could get back to a sense of team, but due to the nature of the business, it perhaps wasn't as team-based as I had hoped, more a group of highly talented individuals performaing their part of a well-defined process -- perhaps this is the assembly line that Alex refers to.

At this point in my life, being the expert and being in control of my time is now something I want to focus on, and this is likely to be at the expense of true 'team working'. I am hoping I will still be considered part of future teams as I start to work for other projects through other agencies, but time will tell.

The point I'm making is what Tom said in his first response. Being happy in your work is so important that if your work place isn't working for you, you have to either take responsibility and make changes there, or leave and find somewhere that is more suitable. There was certainly room for creativity at NM even if it maybe wasn't always apparent. I think Alex is wrong to criticise NM for this perceived lack as I think there were opportunities to make the role a creative and exploratory one, maybe Alex simply didn't want it enough?

I think Tom & Will have done a great job so far with their building of a great company culture and they have been open and honest about where they want to go with it and also where they have failed or made mistakes. The company is still small and has much to improve on, but it is already streets ahead of many competitors with it's culture and aspirations. Keep it up. :-)

[Ash]

This is interesting... I do find that the complaints that Alex makes to be a little unfair maybe... Development and programming tend to work like a production line, by their very nature. Things need to be CORRECT. To follow a logical development path. If you are creating experimental code within a development cycle it will probably be full of bugs.

The whole argument about freelance vs permanent is one I hear a lot. I was freelance once, but I found that you get treated MORE like a robot, not less. Being permanent, you can effect changes, inch by inch. As a freelancer, you drift from one place to the next in a kind of bubble. Never able to fully develop your skillsets within a working environment.

Fundamentally, surely chatting to Tom about your problems would have been a better way to go about this, rather than airing your dirty laundry in public. Perhaps a constructive discussion may have solved your issues - Knowing Tom, I very much doubt he would have ignored your greviences....

Just my $0.02