Build a great environment
It was one of those first blustery, frigid days in a Cleveland winter. You know the ones — after it’s been relatively warm and then, suddenly, it’s as if Mother Nature turns the hot knob off while leaving the cold running at full blast, making you want to call in sick so as to not leave the warmth of your home and feel the cold creeping through your bones. Well, since most can’t call in sick, Carrabba decided to help his employees out by having an impromptu pizza lunch party so they at least wouldn’t have to go out for lunch and face the wind and cold.
It’s one example of building a better working environment.
“It’s just the way you treat people and the way you want to be treated,” he says. “It really is just as simple as that.
“You’ve got to start with people. That’s really what the business is. You’ve got to have respect for people and their work ethic they put out.”
Your goal is for people to enjoy coming in to your business every day.
“It’s got to be fun for people to come to work, and you’ve got to leave that opportunity in a business when you come in,” he says. “It’s got to be pretty easygoing. The tone at the top has to set that, and it can’t be a stiff organization.”
He says you have to do that if you want people intermingling and working as a team.
“You’ve got to have open doors, and you can have some fun, too,” Carrabba says. “It’s OK. It really is.”
Aside from impromptu pizza parties, he also tries to build fun around college football games, the company’s United Way goals and accomplishments, and some good, old-fashioned humor.
“You start by making fun of yourself, and from there, everything can loosen up a little bit,” he says.
You might think that with the economy the way it is that you don’t have time to have fun or you don’t have the money to spend on anything fun, but Carrabba would advise you to think twice.
“Life’s too short,” he says. “It’s as simple as that. You make your own environment. Nobody else makes it for you, so you can choose to work in a very good environment or a very bad environment. Nobody does that other than the people that are working on this floor or these two floors we have here, so why not make it a conducive place to work?”
