I knew that the strangelyExcellentISP company would be different from any place I had ever worked. While waiting for my job interview I overheard an employee complain to another saying, "Man, they used to let us drink and smoke anything we wanted. Now we can just have beer."
WTF??
I got hired that day for Tier I tech support, worked up to Tier 2 and also handled responsibilities in web hosting, supervising teams, and training.
I was not overly perplexed about the employee's alcohol and smoke comment, which I thought must have been his own incorrect interpretation of company policy. However the strangeness of this company stepped up a level on my first day. During my employee orientation day, the call center manager said, "And now I want to talk about our drug testing policy. Bring them in...we will test them." I knew I had signed on to work for a very different kind of company. What this company allowed employees to do would not be considered in a typical corporate environment to be odd. It would have been considered insane. Tier I techs were allowed to have refrigerators at their cubicles stocked with alcohol. Smelling the pot that someone had smoked was not an uncommon occurrence in the building (apparently they were not too interested in enforcing the policy that the employee complained about). One day, I was working a call at my cubicle and a supervisor tapped me on the shoulder asking, "Do you want some." I turned around and there was a large cart full of free pizza and a keg of beer. Techs were allowed to use the company network and hardware resources for their own personal purposes, work in a bathrobe, have keg parties in the building, and do whatever the hell they wanted on the phone (as long as they were doing their job well). They had no sick leave policy at all and no limit on sick days. The freedoms given to employees were beyond any company I had ever worked for (or even heard of). Stranger still is that, by the time I worked there, the company was actually more restrictive than they used to be.
None of the above make up the strangest part of my experience with strangelyExcellentISP. The strangest thing is that in an environment that was closer to resembling a wild festival than a corporate business environment, they succeeded at being absolutely excellent. When I first saw the tools they made available to techs to get the job done, I was amazed. I have never seen employees more personally motivated to do their jobs well. The tech support services they provided to end users of this ISP was the absolute best. In sharp contrast to all consumer ISP tech support today, strangelyExcellentISP did not care if it took all day to complete one call. Just make sure it was not your lack of knowledge and skills that caused the lengthy call. We were expected to help any internet user to backup their data, and reinstall their OS if that is what it took to fix their issue. There was no issue related to the customer's internet needs that was excluded by company policy. I even heard a training supervisor once brag in an employee training session about how he helped a customer fix their lawn mower over the phone. Our customers loved us.
I learned from strangelyExcellentISP that personal freedom and performance excellence were not incompatible realities.
I do have to make one qualification on the relationship between freedom and performance excellence. All employees received stock options. Those who got in early enough (and I am still talking about Tier I tech support employees) saw their stock options pay off enough to buy cars, houses, and in one case retire. These early employees were fanatical about doing their best. However, even employees with much less valuable stock options were also much more personally motivated to do well than I have ever seen at any other company. Another interesting fact is that this company became profitable in a market that was difficult for them at the time.
The strangelyExcellentISP believed in giving people the opportunity to express their own responsibility. The freedom granted to employees by this company was based on a philosophy that believed if people are given responsibility, they can step up and be great. Company politics was not invested in maintaining the policies and ideas of a select and empowered few. They were devoted to a company ethic that believed in implementing any good idea that made sense. Employee ideas were eagerly sought and used. Employees felt like they made a difference to the quality of how the whole company functioned. This was not just a feeling, it was the truth. This sense of valuable participation in affecting the company, more than the stock options, made a difference on how most employees felt about giving their best. Any innovation or discovery an employee made (many of which were done out of sheer enthusiasm rather than company request), from discovering a bug in their email system to writing a software app to help techs to a modification in training procedures, would gain serious attention relative to the merit of the contribution. It did not matter if this meant the company had to change a major policy or method of performance. It did not matter if the innovation was related to your assigned job or came from the call center janitor. They would also throw an employee into the deep end of the pool if they thought they could swim. I was asked to do things for which I had little or no experience. I was expected to teach myself to do it as I did the work and to do it right. I learned from strangelyExcellentISP that what you know now is not as important than what you can learn in the next ten minutes. This was a valuable lesson for my later independent work.
One day we got the news that strangelyExcellentISP was being taken over by a larger company with traditional corporate values. Very quickly the immediacy of connection between employees and company decision makers was cut down, and problems with employee motivation and performance began to rise. The preservation of existing corporate policy and method took precedence over innovation. The number of calls completed took precedence over the scope and quality of performance. And the keg parties were right out.
The first day I logged onto the tech support resources page of the new company, I saw the unbelievably inferior tools and resources that constituted their vision of what it means to run tech support. I knew it was all over.
I left strangelyExcellent ISP for work as an R&D project manager. A year later the call center was closed by the new company to outsource tech support to India. My exposure to the philosophy, work ethic, and focus on innovation of strangelyExcellentISP made it possible to embrace my new work with a greater depth of enthusiasm and performance excellence. My love of seeking creative innovation to get work done was taught to me by strangelyExcellentISP.
R.I.P. strangelyExcellentISP. You were a great teacher.
Submitted July 14, 2015 at 09:16PM by filosophikal http://ift.tt/1LeYuC9 talesfromtechsupport
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