Employee Loyalty
An Interview with Cheryl Breetwor
In a hot job market, many employers find it difficult to
keep workers, who are often lured away by the promise of stock
options and their potential for wealth. Cheryl Breetwor gives
her perspective on the virtue of loyalty:
There's a mentality in [the Silicon Valley] that I find interesting
almost like there's this entitlement. There are some
people, no matter what you do for them, it's never going to
be enough. If they're not making $1 million in a year, they
leave.
I ran a company for 16 years that was very successful, but
we had a hard time attracting people because we didn't have
the promise of an IPO. Some of our employees who had been with
us 14 or 16 years did very well when we were aquired. But people
we had hired in the year before the acquisition were trying
to figure out ways to get their options accelerated because
they wanted to get rich quick. There was some behavior that
I thought was pretty ugly reprehensible really. The intent
of an option is to motivate people and have them make an investment
for the long term. It's not a get-rich-quick scheme. In some
ways, the point of options has backfired; we see less employee
loyalty.
We did a lot of thinks to try to create employee loyalty. Every
time we met a goal, we would take employees and their families
on these trips. We gave them expensive [gifts]. Then, as we
began to do well, these prizes started to come a lot closer
together than we had expected. For example, we went from $5
million to $10 million in revenues in one year.
Came Thanksgiving, and the question came up, "What should
we do for the employees this year?" In the past we had
given out $50 dinner gift certificates. I said, "This year
let's give them See's candy." I had a guy come into my
office and say I didn't care about my employees anymore because
I only gave them See's candy. I said, "How can you look
at it that way? What about the $50 sunglasses, the wine, the
trip we're sponsoring in January that will us $1,500 plus per
employee?" He couldn't see that. This was a guy in his
early twenties that we had promoted three times. He was making
about $100,000 a year. He ended up leaving ShareData for [another
company], and you know what happened? He got laid off. I guess
that was a lesson he needed to learn.
On the other hand, we had an employee who wanted to be a vice
president, but we decided not to give him that position. I sent
him off for some counseling because I knew it was a disappointment
to him. He came out of that and realized he really didn't like
managing people and there were other opportunities for him at
ShareData. When we went through our acquisition,...he was working
all night long to make the thing happen. He didn't stand to
gain nearly as much as some other employees, but he was negotiating
for the team. He was absolutely there for everybody to win.
I suppose there are two ways to look at it: Employees move
around from one company to another, and they want to be responsible
to their own careers. I come a little more from the old school
that says you have to make an investment in the company and
learn. It will eventually pay off, but not right away.
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