GuildQuality Zip Lining Adventure at Historic Banning Mills

May 14 2012 by Erica England in Culture, Miscellaneous, Not In Archive, ,
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The GuildQuality team embarked on a day-long zip lining adventure at Historic Banning Mills, located on Snake Creek in Carroll County, Georgia. Take a look at our slideshow to see how brave we are. Our team bonded and brainstormed across 1,000 foot-long zip lines, 200 feet in the air!

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Results Only Work Environments for Builders and Remodelers

Feb 28 2012 by Geoff Graham in Articles, Culture, , ,
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I recently learned of the phrase “results only work environment,” first via some discussions with fellow entrepreneurs here in Atlanta, then via references in the books Delivering Happiness and Drive. I was thrilled to hear the concept articulated, in part because ROWE describes the environment we’ve been cultivating here at GuildQuality since sometime around 2008.

Here are a few of the ways ROWE manifests itself in our business (lifted from the Careers section of our blog):

  • We run GuildQuality with an open book.
  • Our people work from wherever they’re most productive — whether that’s at home, in the office, or in a coffee shop.
  • We don’t keep track of sick days or vacation days. If you need time off, you take it.
  • We value initiative. Our company is a great place for people who are action-oriented and prefer to work without a lot of oversight.
  • Every person at GuildQuality moves the needle. We have no “dead weight.”

For us, ROWE isn’t a management philosophy, but rather an anti-management philosophy. When I’m at dinner with friends, and everyone’s lamenting their various vacation policies, people are generally astounded at hearing about ours (or, more precisely, our lack of a policy). They ask something like, “With all that flexibility, don’t your employees slack off?” The answer is a resounding “No,” and I believe it shows in the comments from our members.

ROWE requires that we focus on recruiting exceptional people and making sure everyone is clear about the direction the ship is headed. If we neglected either one of those imperatives, we’d likely have some trouble. But in the four-ish years we’ve been operating this way, no one has taken advantage of it, and productivity (as measured by revenue and profit per employee) is way up. Having a ROWE wasn’t the silver bullet that scored us those gains, but it was certainly one of the innovations and strategic decisions that pushed us along.

I’m sure we’ll eventually run into some sort of flexibility/empowerment/transparency-related issue. When we do, we’ll address it as the isolated incident that it is. Some people might say, “That can work for a small business, but my company has a thousand employees, and I could never see it working for us.” Well, the folks at Best Buy, Gap, and Banana Republic would disagree.

Last night, I was wondering what ROWE might look like for builders and remodelers, so I did a little Googling. I couldn’t find much, but I did come across Hunter Residential Development in the most recent issue of Canadian Builders Quarterly:

After renaming the company Hunter Residential Developments, the Ungers changed the company’s approach, inside and out. “We used to be fairly traditional in our managerial, building, and marketing strategies; now we’re more in tune with what employees and customers want,” Priscilla says.

Internally, for example, the company implemented a results-only work environment: a human-resource management strategy wherein employees are paid for output rather than the number of hours worked. “In a traditional work environment, employees work from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m.,” Priscilla says. “In contrast, we’re a group of telecommuters: our administrative and sales staff, who can tap into our corporate software from anywhere in the world, get their work done when and how they want to. In doing so, we’ve become one-third more productive.”

I’m curious: What do our members think of ROWE? Have any of you gone ROWE and what have been your experiences?

Building a library: What are your favorite books?

Feb 10 2012 by Geoff Graham in Culture, Miscellaneous, ,
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We’re starting a library here at GuildQuality for members of our team. What would you suggest we include?

Some background (from an email exchange with Mark Miles, our COO):

What are your favorite books (and articles or whitepapers) that you think our team would find most interesting and relevant to the work we do here at GuildQuality? I’m contemplating building our library, and making a game or sorts for people to start checking books off.

Zappos did this, and found it to be a really positive thing for their team. I believe that Highgroove, here in Atlanta, does it as well. In both cases, they’ve set it up so it’s not a burden for everyone, but rather a perk for those who are so inclined.

Here are some books and articles to get your juices flowing:

What would you add?

Please share your suggestions in the comments! (We’re specifically looking for business-y books and articles, but please share any book that significantly influenced your life.)

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Update: Everything below this is an update to my original post.

Here are the books and articles folks have shared with me directly via email (we’ll go through and add links to everything later).

Alan Pinstein also shared a link to this short list.