SAS has perfected the art of employee management. It has been ranked on Fortune magazine’s best places to work list every year since the list was first published. Historically, employees seem to genuinely enjoy working at SAS and are unusually attached to the company, resulting in a turnover rate that is less than the industry average.
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One thing SAS does well is giving its employees opportunities to work on interesting and challenging projects. The software developers have the opportunity to develop cutting-edge software to be used around the world. The company makes an effort to concentrate its business in the areas of analytics, which add the most value and help organizations best analyse disparate data for decision making, creating opportunities for SAS workers to be challenged. The management aims to challenge its workforce to realize their creative potential and achieve positive results for SAS. Additionally, the company removes obstacles for employees and provides extensive induction training as well as encourages observing existing employees. SAS used to award the most innovative software developer with a small prize at the end of each quarter, however, recently they have stopped doing this to save costs.
The company has a reputation as a pioneer when it comes to the perks it offers employees, but these perks are not given with a mentality of “offer everything but the kitchen sink.” There is careful thinking and planning behind the choice of perks the company offers. SAS conducts regular employee satisfaction surveys, and any future benefits and perks offered are planned in response to the results. The company wants to eliminate stressors and anything that dissatisfies from people’s lives. More recently, managers have noticed that the productivity of some individual workers in the team has fallen over a period and this has created conflict amongst the team members who feel that the workload is not equal.The company understands that employees have a life and encourages employees to work reasonable hours and then go home to their families. In fact, a famous motto in the company is, “If you are working for more than 8 hours, you are just adding bugs.” The managers at SAS believe in allowing their employees to take charge of their projects and contribute freely to organizational strategies with regards to the work environment and overall business growth of the organization. They ensure this by giving autonomy to their staff, but control is maintained through quarterly appraisals and employee surveys. Through these surveys, it has been identified that some employees have been complaining that there have been no fresh ideas/activities and this has reduced their motivation to innovate and be creative. Recently managers have also found it hard to implement an organization wide culture that is standardised.
Case study material taken from Case written by Berrin Erdogan and Talya Bauer to accompany Bauer, T., & Erdogan, B. (2009). Organizational behavior (1st ed.). New York: Flat World Knowledge. Based on information from Doing well by being rather nice. (2007, December 1). Economist. Retrieved April 30, 2010, from http://www.financialexpress.com/news/doing-well-by-being-rather-nice/247090; Cakebread, C. (2005, July). SAS…not SOS. Benefits Canada, 29(7), 18; Florida, R., & Goodnight, J. (2005, July–August). Managing for creativity. Harvard Business Review, 83(7/8), 124–131; Karlgaard, R. (2006, October 16). Who wants to be public? Forbes Asia, 2(17), 22.