Bill Oesterle, CEO of Angie’s List Inc., doesn’t take the culture at his company for granted. Oesterle has made it a priority to preserve the values that have helped the contractor referral service for consumers grow since it was founded by Angie Hicks in 1995.
Oesterle says a reverence for culture and the ability to carry it on will be instrumental in fulfilling the 130-employee company’s plan of adding 23 cities to its 26 markets over the next 18 months.
“We have to execute clear and simple plans, and in order to do that, we have to have people who will buy into the philosophies we have around here,” says Oesterle.
Oesterle delegates authority generously but takes plenty of opportunities to personally keep the company’s goals and culture in front of its workers. Employee lunches to introduce people from different departments, pairing new employees with veterans and the old-fashioned suggestion box are a few of the tactics that Oesterle uses to tap into the minds of the workers to foster cohesiveness and spread the message of the importance of teamwork and creativity.
The strong employee culture pays off, says Oesterle, by perpetuating itself as new people are hired. When it comes to recruitment, employees can quickly spot both the people who will fit in, as well as those who aren’t a good match, Oesterle says. As a result, turnover is low, and morale is high.
Oesterle talked with Smart Business about how he sustains the corporate culture at Angie’s List.
How would you describe your management style?
I’m fairly effective at delegating. My philosophy’s always been to bring in the best managers I could and give them bottom-line objectives and let them go out and achieve them. So I spend most of my time checking in with my managers to see how they’re coming with those objectives, and while that’s probably half of my time, the other half I spend making sure that I’m reinforcing the culture of the business and some of the themes that keep us working together.
How do you keep your employees focused on the big picture?
There are a lot of old adages that actually hold true here. You try to develop very simple strategic themes and goals, write them down, look at them a lot, and you talk about them a lot and you work that into all of your interactions day to day, so you’re just constantly repeating them.
Whatever the issue, let’s talk about that and why this is important to one of the simple, guiding overall objectives. I’m spending a lot more time doing that this year deeper into the company because I think it’s unbelievably effective.
It’s remarkable how smart people are when they know what direction they’re going, how productive they can be when they know what the goal is.
How do you stay in touch with your employees?
I’m spending more and more time on direct employee interaction. I’m finding that to be the most rewarding, productive time.
Every Friday, I have lunch with a portion of a department. We’ve broken the whole organization into six- or seven-person units. Sometimes that’s a whole department. We go out to a greasy spoon restaurant and we have the ‘Bitch with Bill’ session.
Two things take place here: I get to see the whole department, not just the management, and I get to talk about the themes. And then we get to talk about what they’re doing, and I get to hear about how it’s going, and all of that is in the context the bigger goals. I inevitably come back from those with two or three really good ideas, improvements or refinements.
And I think they go back to their jobs with a sense of, this is what we’re trying to do and by what time. These have gone really well.
How will you maintain that direct approach as the company continues to grow?
There are ways to leverage that. First of all, you’ve got to create apostles and not just your managers. To the extent that I’m having interactions with groups of people from around the company, then I’ve got people who can go out and be representatives, and that’s what these lunches are so good for.
In addition, we have a number of other activities like that, so when we get new employees in, we try to get them paired up with people that have been around awhile and give them an opportunity to interact.
Somebody started up the age-old suggestion box awhile back. I read all of those, and then I respond by e-mail to everyone in the company, so they all get to see what people are talking about and how I’m responding to those things. I use those as an opportunity to reinforce certain themes.
In that way, I am talking to everyone at once. I’ve got to get it infused down into the organization in the same way that, when we’re talking about recruiting, get a culture of high standards for people coming in the door.
I don’t have to interview everybody. We’ve got people who take care of that.
All of these activities that I’ve described are, in essence, training sessions. What I’m really happy about is how well that’s getting carried out when I’m not talking about it, when I’m not here to talk to the people.
It’s very gratifying to me to see managers who are buying into those techniques and talking about them and executing them. My job is to go out and reinforce them all the time. So far, so good.
How do you foster cohesiveness in your work force?
We have pretty formal procedures in place, even though they seem kind of informal. We have these lunches where employees are selected at random to go to lunch with one another and they have to take pictures and report back.
We run four or five groups like that every week. Your job is to get to know other people in the company, and your job is to be open and understand them, break down barriers. It’s a simple activity, but it’s scalable. It works really well.
We’re doing more and more of those things. They have no other purpose than to perpetuate a culture that we think is important.
What do you look for in people that you hire?
I look for energy, creativity and a constructive attitude. I look for people that are inclusive of other people and that instill trust in their people and are effective at motivating other people. Those are qualities that I respect and have come to rely on in people, so I would look for them in just about any business.
For instance, I took a leave of absence to run a gubernatorial campaign last year, and I was looking for exactly the same type of people, and it worked pretty well. My experience here helped me there, primarily in identifying people who could come in quickly, adapt and work together toward a goal.
How do you find those people?
It’s a little bit self-perpetuating. I don’t know that there’s any particular trick to finding them other than we spend a lot of time on the front end and after a time, you get a sense of characteristics, the answers to questions, experiences and trends and people’s lives that correlate to the kind of characteristics in the people that are here.
Once you get a batch of them together, they tend to recruit others like them. They’re all good at identifying those characteristics in other people.
What other tactics do you use to recruit?
We use the standard instruments. We post on Monster. We have just about everybody keeping their eye out for potential employees.
We always have a wish list of employees that we maintain, and we keep an eye on them for awhile. We may identify someone, and it might take two years before we hire them.
Our CFO’s an example. We’ve know him for a long time, and we said if we ever get the opportunity, we’re going after him.
We did, and we couldn’t be happier.
How to reach: Angie’s List, www.angieslist.com
