We've spoken to a lot of good companies but Alias is the first one we've been to that has a golden Oscar in the lobby. It won Hollywood's highest honor for its Maya software. Maya was used to create the extraordinary special effects in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Spiderman, and many other films. In fact, films using Alias´s software have won Oscars for their special effects and animation in each of the past several years. Alias's success is rooted in people. HR.com spoke to its director of global human resources, David Wexler.
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HR.com: Alias has received accolades not just for its great software but also for being a great place to work. How did Alias create this great environment?
DW: Being seen as a great place to work is the result of years of effort. It´s not the kind of thing where, by virtue of putting in place two or three policies, you´re able to create that kind of atmosphere.
Perhaps we have a few advantages. The computer graphics industry is a hot industry; we´re working with our customers to help bring their imagination to life. The customer base includes some of the world´s most exciting companies including Disney, DreamWorks, Sony Pictures, Nike, Procter & Gamble and Nokia, as well as all of the major car companies. It´s a real charge to come to work every day and know that you´re working with these great customers.
Also, our employee population is a subset of some of the most intelligent and creative people in the world. You´re constantly interacting with people whose ability to think through challenges is extremely stimulating.
Finally, our people challenge us to constantly live by the principles of respect for the individual, integrity, openness, and trust. These build upon themselves so that we have a high energy enthusiastic work environment.
HR.com: It may help to be in such a fun industry but I know a lot of people who work in creative companies where it isn't all that fun.
DW: Regardless of whether you´re in a "fun" business or not there are ups and downs. The real question is how you deal with those down periods. The organizational trust we have built over time is a credit to both management and employees. There are times when you have to make tough decisions; unless you have built high trust with employees you will find it difficult to have employee support in moving forward with these.
HR.com: Everyone espouses trust as a value; can you think of some critical incidents or policies that kept the trust alive?
DW: Open communication has been the key. The economy is finally starting to come out of the recession but it´s been a really tough time and all through that recession we were communicating with our employees. We talked to them about how we were doing financially, how we were doing with customers, how our market share was doing, and about what things we needed to do to continue to be profitable.
Ultimately, building trust isn´t just communicating; it's walking the talk. If you´re putting in new restrictions, whether those restrictions are around salary or travel or benefits, then those programs must apply to senior management as well as other employees.
Also, how you treat people when you have to let them go is important. It's your approach to severance; it's your approach to the employee after he leaves the company; it's your approach to the employees remaining behind. There are no walls between ex-employees and employees so how you treat exiting employees is going to have a real impact on the employees who remain.
HR.com: The actual practice in a lot of companies is for security to escort laid-off employees out the door.
DW: We don´t do that. It´s really up to the individual how they want to leave. Do they want to go back to their desk to pick up a few things? Would they like us to send their stuff to them? Are they comfortable getting home themselves or would they like a taxi? We also make career transitioning professionals available for them. We believe this is something that can really be helpful but it´s ultimately up to them whether they use it or not. The real testament to how we´re treating our employees is that within the last year we have hired back six individuals who had left our company. People don't come back unless they feel it's a good place to work.
HR.com: The HR departments that escort terminated employees to the door do so because they're afraid somebody is going to throw their computer through the window or lock themselves in the bathroom crying. How do you get past that fear?
DW: Fears are legitimate but the reality is that it´s impossible to guard against every potential outcome. It really becomes a question of trust again. Do you trust that the person who´s receiving the message can handle it? What´s the relationship that you have with that individual? One of the things that we´ve always done is to defer to managers as much as possible. All of our managers will go out of their way to do the right thing for the departing individual.
HR.com: You mentioned open communications. To what extent do you open up the books to employees?
DW: Every quarter we bring together all the employees and hold a meeting where we share our results. Our employees are made aware of our results, of how we are doing against our objectives, and whether there are any strategic changes to the plan.
HR.com: Is there a lot of detail or is it just the bottom line?
DW: It changes depending on where we´re at in our business cycle. Early in the year, there´ll be a heavy focus on our strategic plan, but as we move further into the year the tone may change. For example, we often do a product demo when we´re getting ready to introduce a new product.
We do some unusual things as well. This year, we held our first ever "artist's showcase" where we invited employees from around the world to share their non-Alias work related talents. Over 40 sculptors, painters, musicians, photographers, storytellers, modelers, and cartoonists displayed their works. More than 300 people attended the event, which also featured cocktails and munchies. At a subsequent quarterly employee "All Hands" meeting, we recognized the two individuals who conceived of and made the event happen, with an award.
HR.com: How do you know if your communication is working?
DW: We have a very vocal employee population-which is not a bad thing at all. There is always a Q&A period at the end of each quarterly meeting, and some of the questions are pretty blunt. We also do an annual third-party web-based employee opinion survey and that is very important too. This gives us data on how the employees are feeling about corporate communication, about their career path, about our vision and mission, and so on. We benchmark the survey results against other technology companies in Canada. This provides valuable input to our executive decisions around employee related investments, as part of our annual strategic planning process.
HR.com: We´ve talked about the industry, trust and communication. What are the other elements that make Alias a great place to work?
DW: A high-level characteristic of our approach is flexibility. We´re hiring some of the most creative, highly regarded, hotly contested individuals in a global marketplace. The last thing you want to do is take a cookie-cutter approach in dealing with these individuals. You don´t want to send the message that we have one policy and no ability to accommodate individual needs. While we don´t have 500 different policies for 500 employees, we also don´t have one policy for 500 employees; instead we have guidelines.
HR.com: How flexible will you be? If someone wants a Ferrari do you give them one?
DW: I´d love to be able to say yes. In some jurisdictions of the world some of our employees do drive Jaguars or BMWs because it just so happens that the car guidelines in place allow an individual to have that kind of car.
However, a better example of flexibility is how you respond when something unexpected happens in or outside of the workplace, such as an employee becoming ill with SARS or the West Nile Virus-and this actually happened. There is no policy to deal with these kinds of situations when they arise for the first time. There isn't even a lot known about the long-term effects of these kinds of illness. So when one of our employees became ill, we let the individual work part time from their home for an extended period of time, but did not put them on a disability plan which over time would have reduced their take home pay, and we kept their salary the same until they returned to work, several months later.. We also had a case where an individual didn´t qualify for long-term disability because they had gone from a permanent to a contract employee and we made the decision that we were going to treat it as if they were eligible for long-term disability. We have individuals who have had to move because of a spouse´s career, to places like rural Ontario, Quebec, the UK and in one case, India. We managed to keep all these employees by being flexible in their work arrangements.
HR.com: So it´s not that you´re throwing a lot of money at the problem, it´s doing things that make sense for the individual.
DW: It´s treating people right. I frankly don´t believe that money solves much. We set up a group retirement program for employees which the company partially funded. We didn´t put in place vesting provisions. You can walk out of the company one month after joining the plan and keep all the money that´s in there. We don't believe you should retain people based on those kinds of monetary hooks. You retain individuals by providing a challenging, stimulating environment where they get to use their talents, grow their talents, and feel rewarded.
HR.com: What is HR´s role in creating a challenging environment, and what is the line manager's role?
DW: Our HR function has evolved over the last five years. When I first joined the company HR was mostly operational and administrative. It was there to act as a service bureau to the general employee population. In the last five years we have aligned HR with the business units. It starts with the executive team, of which I am a member, developing a strategic plan for the company. That strategic plan has a number of aspects and one of them is employee-focus. Employee focus extends beyond me to the HR team and we´re weighted 70 per cent to the strategic side and 30 per cent to the operational side.
Each one of the major line functions has an HR business partner attached to it. That HR business partner´s responsibility is to work with their client group to develop a strategic plan that ties into the company´s overall strategic plan. That HR partner is responsible for making sure the HR component of their business partner's strategic plan gets delivered. I didn´t say they are responsible for delivering it because HR is a team effort and doesn´t just belong to HR. The best functioning HR teams are the ones where they are the least visible; where managers are stepping up and playing a complete managerial role.
HR.com: How do you handle the recruitment and orientation?
DW: We only use external search partners about two per cent of the time. Most of the time we´re hiring from unsolicited resumes, and we receive a tremendous number of applications from individuals who want to work for our company, from ads we place on electronic job boards like Monster, and finally through employee referrals. We have a generous employee referral program because we believe that when we have great people working for us they´re able to refer other great people.
We also have a highly developed co-op program in our software engineering group. We have partnered with a couple of universities in Canada and regularly bring in between 30 and 40 engineering students for a four-month co-op assignment. We evaluate those students at the end of their term and invite the really great ones to come back.
Once people are hired, orientation is done at the department level although we are looking at putting in more of a corporate component.
HR.com: What kind of staffing technology do you use?
DW: We have a web-based applicant tracking system. When we first started looking at applicant tracking systems, Resumix was the market leader and at $65,000 we just couldn´t afford it so we found a web-based solution that´s worked very well for us. It links into Monster and our website and a number of other job boards that we want to use.
HR.com: What is the CEO´s role in making HR successful?
DW: We have one of the most impressive president´s anywhere in the world. I started my career with Procter & Gamble and I´ve been with some other great Fortune 500 companies. I have had the pleasure of working with some pretty impressive executives and this guy is as good as any of them. He has incredible integrity and ethics, he walks the talk and he is completely accessible to employees at any level. I can tell you he takes any employee input seriously, including the employee opinion survey.
HR.com: If you were to go to a different company, what sorts of things would you do right away?
DW: There are some fundamental questions you have to ask the leader of an organization. What do you want to achieve through the people of your organization? How do you want the employees to feel? What do you want the legacy of your leadership to be?
Asking those questions, finding out what´s important to the leader, finding out what the reality is, and putting together a plan to move forward is the way I would start at any new firm.
Obviously if you find that what that leader wants is not aligned with your values then it´s probably better to not go in there.
HR.com: What´s next for HR at Alias?
DW: There´s a lot ahead for us. We are still coming out of a recession and as the economy picks up we'll look at acquiring additional talent. We are also looking at growing the talent within our organization. Finally, we'll be looking at how we´re organized and how to adjust that organization to support the anticipated growth in the company.
David Wexler is Director, Global Human Resources Alias
David Wexler is another Alias executive who sports a decidedly creative bent. A poet, he also writes fanciful stories for his three children and their school classmates. The joy of using creativity to build dynamic environments is at the heart of David's job as director of Global Human Resources.
"As much as I love the business we're in, I love the people who work in this business even more," he says. "The company is full of people who are very creative, very bright, very turned on by doing great work and very ethical and honest. Everyone says that people are a company's strength," he continues. "I believe that people ARE the company, so you can't pay lip service to employee development, ethics, or compensation. At Alias, the senior management has the courage, vision and ethics to make that a reality."
With an honours Bachelor's degree in economics from Toronto's York University, Wexler says he went to "business university" at one of the biggest companies in the world, Procter & Gamble. A five-year stint at Digital Equipment Corporation as Director of Operations for Eastern Canada gave him more experience at handling a tremendous scale of responsibility. He experienced corporate life at a small software start-up, VARNET, where he was Vice President of Operations.
A strong believer in "giving back to the community we work and live in," Wexler has served on advisory committees and boards at the municipal, provincial and federal government levels. His personal emphasis on values in the workplace has, he says, developed through his experiences in human resources and operations at a number of "superb companies" -- exemplified by what he's found at Alias.
"The individuals at the top here are committed to doing the right thing," says Wexler. "It makes my job easy. A lot of companies have good talent. What differentiates the good companies from the great ones is that the great ones find a way to unleash that talent. It comes down to making an employee feel comfortable enough to use all his talents. And that's what we're trying to do here."