Lend support. If there’s a really tough issue, a complex issue — it could be with a customer — instead of me saying, ‘Well, you’ve got to figure it out,’ I’m not scared of a situation. I think it’s good for me to go in and say, ‘Let me help you on this one. Let’s go see this person and iron this out.’ If I have to be the bad guy, I can be the bad guy. You can’t abandon your employees and say, ‘Well, you screwed that up, now you’ve got to figure it out.’ … I think the CEO has got to take on the tough issues.
Give people freedom. I grew up in an environment when work was everything. You missed your son’s birthday because of work. The world’s changed. The younger work force — they have friends. They have karate class at 6 o’clock, and by God, they aren’t going to miss karate class. I respect that. They have a life. What we really try to do at work is accommodate that. We tell them what we need to get done, and you know that they come in on the weekend, because they want to, not because they have to. I trust them to do that, and they can trust that we’re going to be flexible and they’re not going to have to be concerned if they are trying to improve their lifestyle or their health by coming in a little bit later.
Promote wellness. I noticed six months ago up in our Baltimore operations center … the vending machine had chocolate doughnuts and all that junk. We still have it in there, but we put stuff in the vending machine that costs nothing. We just said, ‘If you want to pay a dollar for the doughnut, that’s fine, but if you want a fruit bar or a granola bar, it’s nothing.’ We are really big on wellness here. We make sure every employee knows that they don’t have to show up here at 7 a.m. if they want to go to the gym and show up at 9:15 or 9:30 a.m., I’m all for that. We’re really into that at the company, because they’ll put a good day’s work in.
