Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [111]
Stan Richards’s approach is intensely pragmatic, and that does lead to anomalies. But the Richards Group nevertheless has managed to operate according to the same principles found at other liberated companies. It is, for one, deeply suspicious of controlling hierarchy and conspicuous perks of power. The seating arrangements are in some sense random but respect one principle: Within a room, those who have been with the company the longest, regardless of rank, sit the closest to the windows. A similar loyalty-reward program applies to parking spaces. Unlike many liberated companies, the Richards Group does have a small number of assigned spots near the entrance to the building. But these are not reserved for top executives. Rather, they have been awarded, again, to those with the longest service with the company, whether they are secretaries, account managers, art directors, or what-have-you. Moreover, if the holder of a spot doesn’t need it or chooses not to use it, she is free to rent it to someone else in the company for whatever price she can command. In this way, what might otherwise seem an arbitrary perk can ultimately flow to those who value it the most. And in a final nod to loyalty, the company’s conference rooms are not named after some luminaries but after those same long-serving employees—who, again, may not be senior in any other sense of the word.
Stan Richards himself has somewhat more space around his desk than most other employees, it is true, but even he doesn’t get an office with walls and doors. All these steps are designed to replace the traditional privileges of power in a company with a different message: We treat our people with respect and dignity, and we value loyalty. And while this message may help explain some of the low turnover, we doubt very much that most Richards Groupers are hanging on at the firm for their shot at an eponymous conference room. Low turnover is another hallmark of all liberated companies. This is true even though none of the companies profiled in this book pay what could be called industry-leading wages. Stan Richards estimates that the base pay at the Richards Group is, on average, somewhat lower than at the competition—although he says that more generous bonus and retirement programs balance this out.
That may be true. But when it comes to talent retention, the psychic income—as McDermott liked to call it—of working in a free workplace is even more important than these alternative forms of financial compensation. This explains another universal feature of liberated companies: the “boomerang”—the employee who is offered a higher-paying job elsewhere, takes it, regrets it, and comes back. We met boomerangs such as Les Lewis at W. L. Gore & Associates at nearly every company we visited. The Richards Group, with some seven hundred people, had about one hundred of its own—one of the poets at the stairwell we attended read an ode in their honor. Pat Pelino, a consulting-practice leader at Vertex, insisted that she’d never seen anything like the way Vertex embraced its boomerangs. It has twenty-seven of them, or 4.5 percent of the total workforce—including three out of the company’s top eight executives. At other companies where she’d worked, “It was like when you left, you left. There was no opportunity to come back, no matter how good the relationship was when you left.”8 Pelino had identified