Farbman Group employees
might feel the company’s care through the hands of an in-house masseuse.
It counts as a stress
management course at Farbman University, the development program that Chief
Financial Officer Andy Gutman helped implement to invest in the company’s 200 employees.
But really, the
employees fuel the program.
“Between having people serve as educators and crafting the
program around employee needs, we’re able to put together a good program that
is really well visited,” Gutman says.
Whether through
technical classes — like frequently used lease language — that enhance
professional skills or personal courses about investing and estate planning, Farbman
strives to give employees tools to succeed.
“We’re very focused on making sure that it’s not just a way to
get out of sitting at your desk and doing your work, that every class has some
meaning that ties back,” Gutman says. “We try to make sure that what we’re
offering really does add value.”
Smart Business spoke to
Gutman about creating a development program that builds better employees and a
better business.
Get buy-in with input. We know certain classes will happen
every year. Accountants get trained in depreciation out of necessity. So each
department has its own areas. Those are more of the hard classes that they have
to attend. Anyone can attend any of the classes; even if you’re not in
accounting, you can attend an exciting class on depreciation.
Then we try to tailor some of the others to be more about
personal growth. The big thing that’s been a topic for us is managing money. We
provide the staff with a variety of opportunities: wealth management, how to
deal with your 401(k), how to deal with the loss of a mortgage or potential
loss of your home. So we do some things that are strictly intended to improve
the quality of life for our staff.
We require them to engage in four classes a year — two of them
are required classes and two of them can be elective. That’s helped us with
getting the employee buy-in.
We do in excess of 25 to 30 classes a year. They get to pick
and choose, for the most part, which ones they go to. Some of them go to 10 or
more a year. They’re all done during the day so that they never have to
infringe on their personal time.
Usually about August of each year, I get together with our
supervisors [and] our HR director and we go through the current year’s courses.
We send out a survey to the employees to see what they think has been most
beneficial.
We take into account all the different factors: What’s proven
useful, what hasn’t, what areas we need new development in — [through] seeking
out supervisor input as to where their employees need assistance — and put that
together in a draft university schedule that we send around to the staff and
get their feedback about ones they might be interested in attending.
