HR
Innovator Magazine
"Soak Up the Sun"
Sure, technology plays a big role in driving employee
recruitment and retention at a Silicon Valley innovator such as Sun
Microsystems. Yet, even some Sun managers were surprised by how quickly
employees clamored to take advantage of increasingly flexible work
arrangements made possible by Sun’s emerging iWork technology.
Surprised or not, they know a good thing when they
see it. iWork is handing Sun significant boasting rights, including
reduced costs, increased company agility, and appreciative employees.
The ace in the hole is iWork’s ability to measurably
tilt work/life balance in favor of employees—by giving them
the tools to manage their own time and tasks. Nearly a third of Sun’s
35,000 employees are 100 percent flexible. Internal research reveals
that Sun employees are happier with flexible choice. They’re
even generously giving back 60 percent of their saved commute time,
an average of three hours per week, to the company.
Because of iWork, which is a server-based system,
Sun is able to globally attract the brightest of the bright. Consider
the attraction—whether in their home office, in an airport,
or at a Sun campus or drop-in center, global employees are able to
connect within seconds to the Sun mainframe and to each other.
Bill MacGowan, Sun’s vice president of human
resources, confirms that iWork is positively influencing employee
recruitment, morale, and retention. “When we first rolled out
iWork it wasn’t really a choice program,” he explains.
“As it has migrated and evolved it’s very much become
a choice program. Seventy-five percent of employees would prefer to
opt for this. The news quickly spread about the lessened commuting
times.”
The real issue is about people, not technology, asserts
Ann Bamesberger, senior director of Sun's iWork Solutions Group; yet
Sun was clever enough to figure out how to combine the two. “The
difference between us and other companies,” she says, “is
our realizing that the world was changing; that talent was global,
that people wanted to be mobile.”
The Smart card
Sun has a famous saying: “The network is the computer.”
Put simply, this means that all Sun info resides on backroom servers,
not individual employee computers. To gain access to that data, employees
need only flip the right switch, so to speak, much like their household
water or power.
In this case, the switch is a smart card, which looks
like a credit card stamped with the employee’s photo. By inserting
the smart card into a simple, low-cost flat-panel computer monitor
called a Sun Ray and punching in a pin number via a keyboard, employees
authenticate their identity and gain instant access to their calendars,
files, and e-mail.
But how does the Sun Ray work? Well, it helps to think
of it as a simple TV set, suggests Bill Vass, Sun’s vice president
of IT. “Basically, it’s a dumb device. It’s an inexpensive
computing device that never has to be managed,” Vass explains.
“If your TV set got destroyed, you wouldn’t lose anything.
It’s the same for the Sun Ray. Why should a desk top be any
more difficult than a TV set to use?”
The Sun Ray is pure simplicity. It lacks an operating
system, doesn’t require upgrades or patches—and is immune
to pesky viruses. So, a single administrator can manage up to 2,000
iWork desktops as compared to the tech force required by most businesses
to manage their computers.
And it’s very employee friendly. If an employee
is working on a letter, for example, but realizes he needs to sprint
off to the airport for a meeting half-way around the world, he needn’t
close the document or shut down the computer. Instead, he need only
extract the smart card from the Sun Ray. Simply by reinserting the
smart card into another Sun Ray at his destination, his letter is
immediately accessible, just as he left it.
More than 20,000 Sun employees currently take advantage
of the iWork technology, using its flexibility as they need it. But
the Sun Ray isn’t the only way to go; some employees access
the Sun servers via PDA devices, such as their cell phones or airport
kiosks, when outside a Sun Ray environment.
Employee Categories
Sun opened for business in 1982 with four employees. The world headquarters
is in Santa Clara, Calif., but a global workforce operates from 170
offices. Employees have differing degrees of flexibility, and are
classified in one of three ways. They might require an assigned office,
or be able to utilize available office space but work from home one
to three days a week, or function independently from a home office.
Employees can reserve an office or conference area
on a Sun campus, or utilize unassigned work spaces in one of Sun’s
drop-in centers. There are currently 23 drop-in centers, the first
of which opened three years ago. The campuses are evolving into hubs
or “market places” and are where Sun invests employee
gyms and cafeterias. They’re also where managers bring their
people for face-to-face meetings. “The work comes to you,”
Bamesberger adds, “so the only real reason you’d go into
a place is to expressly see employees you want to see.”
A side benefit of needing fewer buildings has been
significant savings. In 2002 alone, Sun saved $70 million in reduced
real estate holdings. But Sun has no plans to become a virtual company;
there are anchor offices that employees can go into, five days a week,
if they want. Eric Richert, vice president of the iWork Solutions
Group, reiterates that for employees, “It’s about choice.”
Easing Manager Comfort
With the reality that some or all of their direct reports may be offsite,
Sun is developing training tools to help managers feel comfortable
in managing a team “across time and space.” Some of the
iWork curriculum topics available through SunU, which offers 700 web-based
courses for managers and employees, include: Working in Virtual Teams,
Communicating and Collaborating from a Distance, Running Effective
Dispersed Meetings, Project Management Fundamentals: Software Tools
to Manage Projects, and Fundamentals of Team Leadership.
“A lot of managers are comfortable supervising
employees they can see,” says Bamesberger. “It’s
difficult for HR communities to not be face-to-face all the time.
The real trick is teaching managers to manage this way. More and more
people are responding negatively to managers who aren’t synergistic.”
Richert himself manages 24 flexible people, and shares
there are explicit agreements in place about their availability. “If
a person signs up to work at home there is a written agreement about
structure and expectations,” he says. “It’s a manager’s
responsibility to manage his or her remote employees, but there’s
an obligation on the employee to stay connected. It’s a 2-way
responsibility.”
To help build the bridge of dialogue between employees
and managers, an online employee portal is scheduled for launch in
April or May. The online assessment tool will do a number of things:
it will help managers and their employees to select together how best
to work, determine what resources they require, and even make reservations
for office space. “Via the portal,” Bamesberger shares
with enthusiasm, “employees will do a self assessment based
on their work practices. They’ll do the test, their manager
will authorize their category, then the portal will create an order
form for a laptop and cell phone. It’s truly a service, an interactive
site that will allow them to set themselves up.”
Employee satisfaction, she further asserts, will always
remain central. Sun’s HR department, in fact, recently launched
an employee satisfaction survey to ensure that it builds future HR
programs around what employees want. The point, adds MacGowan, is
to fully understand the Sun culture, and what drives employee satisfaction.
Sun’s movement toward employee mobility has certainly been one
solution in that equation. “About eight years ago we started
thinking about an environment that allowed work to come to them,”
Bamesberger sums up. “The vision is not 100 percent there yet,
but it's close."
Copyrighted 2004. Not to be copied, borrowed,
or published without written permission.
This article is available for reprint. Contact Sheri by e-mail: Sheri@Rehwoldt.com,
or via phone: 716/946-7308.
