Channel execs give their top tips on how to cultivate a positive workplace

Bosses from Natilik, Softcat, Chess and ANS tell MSP audience how to create a positive environment and why free fruit isn't enough to ensure high staff morale

Supporting departing employees, taking risks to recruit diverse skill sets and understanding that achieving staff satisfaction requires more than just a ping pong table in the office are all ways to ensure a positive work culture in your business.

A panel of execs from Natilik, Chess, Softcat and ANS - all of which have garnered accolades for being top places to work - spoke to an audience of MSP bosses at CRN' s Channel Conference MSP event earlier this week, offering advice on how to build a positive work culture that will help your business' performance.

We highlight the top tips from the panel on why being a positive place to work is so important for companies.

Key elements that contribute to a positive workplace

Mike Danson, CEO at Natilik, appreciates an absence of hierarchy and "BS" in his company, but his major concern is maintaining the camaraderie of a small company as it scales.

"My biggest concern, as an organisation, is that the success kills the culture," he explained.

"The more people you end up having, the more bureaucracy comes in and you stifle the thing that you want in the first place, which is an amazing place to work. I'm acutely aware of the need to maintain the ability to offer that to people, whether we're a 20-person company, a 200-person company or a 500-person company but the need to have that top of mind will keep us being a great place to work."

Kate Wood, former director of culture at Chess ICT, added that trust and transparency at all levels of an organisation are vital, but that this can only be established by good communication between all layers of the business.

ANS' CTO Andy Barrow elaborated on comments from his earlier presentation with CEO Paul Shannon about the effect the decision to change from a reseller to an MSP almost overnight had on employees.

He stated that giving staff the responsibility to make decisions - rather than constantly referring to management - cultivates a sense of involvement in the company.

"When you feel that staff aren't empowered and they have to go upstream to make a particular decision - because of cost implications or customer implications - they don't feel empowered in some part of the decision-making, you can actually lose the culture because everybody feels that there's no decision-making and people go a bit brain dead.

"If you remove the hierarchies and empower people to make the right decision for the customer, I think that's massive because it puts the decision-making and personal responsibility on that individual. Yes, you get mistakes, but at the same time, you get an amazing amount of knowledge sharing."

Culture is the fabric of your business

The success of a business is not just reliant on the success of the people in it, but how those people feel treated by management, and if they feel like they're just cogs in the machine then they will stop caring about providing a high level of service to customers, stated Natilik's Danson.

Chess' Wood agreed, adding that there is a difference between employee engagement and employee happiness and that having ping pong tables isn't enough to quell feelings of unhappiness with their work.

"Culture's not a fluffy thing for me. If culture is not going to have a great output on performance and for the customer, then it shouldn't be happening," she stated.

"I think that's something people sometimes forget, and they think that culture is like a ping pong table or some free fruit and it isn't at all. If you're going to be happy at work - which is different to being engaged - you're going to want to feel like you work for a successful business, and that's a high-performing business."

ANS' Barrow elaborated on his previous point that by giving employees the responsibility to make decisions, that the results of those decisions are a good indicator of the culture.

"Strategy doesn't happen without culture and businesses don't survive without a good strategy. There are a few things I think need to mesh to get everything in the right space," he said.

"From a cultural perspective, take a view that the decisions that are made when senior management isn't around as a good judge of culture because it shows people are individually making the right choices and the right decisions for the business.

I'm not saying you shouldn't have perks, but they're not representative of culture; some other businesses that do that are known to have terrible cultures."

An employee's experience is the best recruitment

As a new generation of recruits enter the workforce, they are placing importance on a number of factors that their predecessors didn't, including flexitime and work environment. The majority of young workers today live online, and that is where you have to show off your company to be noticed.

Lillie Davies, HR business manager at Softcat, said that the reseller is "OK" at social media but that its online presence is mainly pushed by its staff who tag each other and the company in their social media posts.

"We had a company event a few weekends ago, and all the staff were posting on Instagram and Twitter and everything like that," she said.

"It's actually our 1,400 employees, who are all addicted to their mobile phones - as most people are - who are putting up the photos and the videos and then it's also supported by our marketing team.

"If we find out one of our employees has done a charity run or something like that, then we as a company will support that on our social media, and I think that gives a vibe for our culture as well and that's a good driver for us.

"We could sit here and tell you that our culture's really good, but if you actually see it from an employee's point of view, then people are seeing what it's really like."

Both Danson and Barrow said that in recent years they have taken recruitment in-house as the company is the best entity to know exactly the type of person they are looking for, as well as being a good cost-cutting exercise.

People leaving is a good thing

Employees leaving is a fact of life when it comes to business, and employers shouldn't take it too much to heart. It is often not a reflection on the company, but rather that the person is looking for a new direction, the panellists agreed.

Davies said that the best thing to do is be supportive of a departing worker, because in such a small industry there is a likelihood they could return to your company with a set of new skills.

"People leaving is not a bad thing, especially in the tech industry, because we usually see it come back around," she stated.

"We end up having this connection with them when they've left on good grounds and it feels good to keep in contact because they sometimes come back to the business as well. So they might go off and develop their skill set and then come back."

ANS' Barrow introduced the concept of the ‘Business Jerk' to the audience during his earlier presentation and reiterated how unhealthy it is for a company to be dependent on one or two people who are exceptionally good at their jobs, but who aren't good for staff morale.

"It is completely preposterous if your whole business revolves around the ability of one person and you're throwing money at them to make them stay…you're just masking an underlying problem there," he stated.

"Sometimes it's good to have a flush - it is something to be celebrated. The worst thing, though, is when you leave a hole, and you haven't got a natural successor who can fix it.

"When the business is built around too few people you don't really have a business."

(Video L-R: Marian McHugh, panel moderator; Mike Danson, CEO at Natilik; Kate Wood, former culture director at Chess; Lillie Davies, HR business partner at Softcat and Andy Barrow, CTO at ANS)