Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [110]
In The Peaceable Kingdom, we did find a passage that is the closest to a philosophical declaration as one can hope to get:
I’d rather get burned now and then than to treat my employees like snakes…. Besides, experience shows that I’d be wasting my time as self-appointed corporate hall monitor trying to keep people in line all the time. My… colleagues are honorable men and women, and they prove it every day by their actions in a workplace where they’re at liberty to run amok if they’re so inclined. They’re just not so inclined, that’s all. The exceptions are so rare that to clamp heavy restrictions on the whole work force just to try to control the actions of the potential bad apples would be a colossal self-sabotage. We’d be robbing ourselves up front of the potential that people at liberty have.7
Richards has—effective upon his eventual death—given away his company to a foundation that is barred from selling it. Thus, the freedom environment Stan created for his people will never be destroyed by some Madison Avenue agency that might otherwise buy it.
For now, however, Richards owns 100 percent of the company. Even so, he is very open about company news—good and bad. Whenever “something comes up,” whether it’s losing a big account or winning a new one, he calls a stairwell to share the information throughout the company. He explained the openness this way: “The only way to defeat paranoia is by not keeping secrets, and so everyone is allowed to know everything.” This is one reason that Stan Richards calls his five-minute stairwells.
“In most organizations,” he explained, “the information goes to the important people first, and then it drifts down to the unimportant. There are no unimportant people here and therefore, information should go to everyone at exactly the same moment.” A second benefit of the stairwell: It is used to introduce prospects, clients, and visitors to all employees. Why is this a benefit? “A typical client working closely together will get to know twenty of us,” Richards replied. “But the fact is there will be two hundred to three hundred others in this company who will touch and support their business in some way. And they will never meet [that client]…. But for them to see [the client] and to be a part of that experience that we have in the stairwell, makes us better at what we do because those people now feel connected to that client…. And this second benefit is far more important than the first.”
Compensation is the one big exception to this openness. At the Richards Group, discussing your pay with your fellow employees is a firing offense. Asked to square this with his views on trusting people with information and being open, he said that it is “easier” this way. And certainly, it makes it easier on him, although his statement about paranoia, quoted above, would seem to apply in this area as much as in any other. Richards argued that people should decide for themselves whether they feel fairly paid, not by reference to colleagues, whose pay may reflect circumstances that don’t apply to those around them. He may have a point, but the policy, like the time clock, is paternalistic in a way that Richards eschews in other areas.
But whether justified or not, these are exceptions. Most of what he has done at the Richards Group leaves people there far freer and more autonomous than their colleagues elsewhere. This satisfaction of their need for self-direction, as well as those for respect and growth, leads to both higher performance and employee happiness.
LOW TURNOVER, BOOMERANGS, AND OTHER SUPERNATURAL PHENOMENA
As at all liberated companies, the Richards Group’s happy employees move on to other firms much less often than their peers do. Richards estimated a turnover rate of perhaps 7 percent annually—compared