Finding and keeping great people
Finding great people is hard. There is a short supply to begin with, most people flock to the large cities, and there is a lot of competition there. Keeping people is even harder some companies would say. Luckily we don’t have that problem.
Our company is located in one of the lower population areas of the Netherlands, which poses its own set of unique challenges. It means we had to get very good at recruiting people right out of university. We hire people when they are still flexible and before they decide to move to the big city to find a job. But luckily, once they join, they tend to stay a long time.
Great people join us every month this way, however we always have to train them ourselves. Recent graduates have a lot to offer, but also have a lot to learn which takes a long time. Sometimes I look with envy at the top tech companies that attract superstar talent from all across the world, seemingly without even trying.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be in that situation? What if we could also attract these people? And what if, with us, they ended up staying? If I look at those big tech companies, I don’t think we are far off from what they offer. We have a beautiful building, talented people, a nurturing culture, the Dutch work-life balance, and most importantly: interesting and meaningful work.
Same as with other companies, people come and go. Some of our ex-colleagues who have since moved on to the likes of Google, Facebook, or Spotify still stay in touch and visit from time to time, still say that working with us was a special time in their life. Most would be willing to come back if it wasn’t for that one thing…
That thing is different for each of them; some would miss the scale the top tech companies operate at, others would miss the little perks like the free food and massages, or just living in a big metropolitan city. Whatever it is, there is no reason we can’t fix those. But where do we start?
Changing company culture is hard. This week, I’ve been thinking about that while working remotely, visiting some friends in London, and trying out something that is gaining a bit of popularity called Roam.
A while back we decided that remote working could be a good fit for us as a company (Also see: Changing the way we work). Finding experienced talent is hard for us, but we also needlessly limited our pool by looking locally. We decided to start looking for remote employees but given that we had some negative experiences in the past, we wanted to do it with care.
Simply adding remotes to a company doesn’t work. Adopting remote working culture requires buy-in from the teams they will be joining. We had remote workers join before and become isolated. So we thought up a plan: anytime a team chooses to adopt a remote worker into their team, we would offer one of the key people from that team to be sent out into the world for three months to live remotely. Best of all, we would cover most if not all of the expenses for those that chose to go.
This worked wonders. The key players got things done remotely, they made changes to the way the teams operated, and the newly added remote workers didn’t feel alone anymore and are thriving.
Surprisingly, offering a three month long all-expense paid remote working experience wasn’t as popular as we expected.
Unfortunately, not everyone was willing or able to be sent away for three months. Some thought three months is too long, didn’t want to bring their kids, feared the solitude, or dreaded making all of the arrangements. Since the core concept of the plan was so effective, we started looking for alternative ways to open up the experience to a broader set of people and make it more inclusive. Which is when I stumbled onto Roam after talking to a friend.
Roam is sort of like a co-working space where you can also live. Or maybe the other way around, I guess it depends on who you ask. The concept is relatively new and still in flux, but it’s basically a building in a great location filled with interesting people. They also offer a sort of prepaid budget for companies where employees can just pick a place and head off there to live and work for a couple of weeks in one of their locations.
We are hoping that this will allow more of our people to experience the remote life. Roam makes it less likely you will be lonely (because of the social structure that feels a bit like a family), it takes care of most of the arrangements, and it will drop you right into the remote lifestyle allowing the period to be a bit shorter. We are hoping that this will attract more people to the idea and thus allow us to sustainably add more remotes to our teams.
We’ve also been playing with the idea of organising off-sites at Roam locations though I am a bit more skeptical of that. The price point (ranging from $500 to $2000 dollar a week per person) make this an expensive endeavour and having a whole team there may disrupt the social balance of each location too much, which would be a shame.
All-in-all we are still very much in the process of change. Apart from attracting remotes, we also have to work a bit on getting closer to offering the same big tech perks. Allowing people to be autonomous and do meaningful work should always remain our number one attraction, but as we grow it’s becoming apparent we also need to compensate for the size of the group. It’s in the little things to make people feel appreciated. We won’t start opening twelve restaurants that serve free food 24/7 right away, but being able to just grab some healthy snacks and drinks all day round would be a nice step in the right direction.
It’s an interesting journey to shape the future of how we work.
Interested in helping us at Nedap change our culture and work with one of our teams? We are looking for a broad range of tech roles, both remote and on-site. We also offer relocation and visa support if you would prefer to move to the Netherlands.
