Focus on core values
In addition to focusing employees on your company’s mission, vision and strategy, another key component to attracting and retaining the best talent is your company’s core values.
Your core values are central to your culture. Employees need to know what your company stands for and, in turn, what they need to embody when representing the company to outside entities.
At Cymer, Akins was a part of the founding team that sat down and put the company’s core values in writing. The values are part of the personal belief system of everyone who founded Cymer.
“Over the course of several weeks, we sat down to discuss and write down the values that we shared personally as the company founders,” Akins says. “We took those, determined which were most applicable to the corporate team environment, and made a list of values that everyone has placed on the wall of their office or cubicle.”
New hires are given a set of five values that they are expected to embrace and represent in all corporate activities: integrity, teamwork, driving innovation, passion for success and balancing work with humor. They are values that form the backbone of many organizations, but just because they are commonplace does not mean they can be taken for granted. You can’t simply assume that new hires will completely understand or practice all of your core values from their first day on the job.
“Obviously, integrity is the most critical value,ȁ
D; Akins says. “When I talk to my employees, I basically say that at the end of your working career, you’ll be sitting on your front porch in a rocking chair. You may or may not have made a lot of money, but the most valuable possession will be your reputation. If you were financially successful but did not maintain a high level of respect, you’re not going to be very satisfied. You need to keep integrity in mind in everything you do. People will respect a company they can trust, a company that operates with a high sense of integrity.”
Fun and humor are becoming an important staple of modern business culture, but it might be less popular as a stated ingredient in a cultural foundation. The reason Akins made humor a core value at Cymer is because it’s no different than integrity, teamwork or passion — you need to work at it in order to make it a success.
“We work extremely hard to support this fast-paced global business, and we use humor to blow off steam and kind of center ourselves individually and corporately as much as we can,” Akins says. “I tell our people that even if they’re in a serious meeting with a customer that has been going on for hours, don’t be hesitant to work in a little laughter. If you can think of something funny to say that is in good taste, use it. You need to break the ice sometimes.”
With the values established and introduced, you need to let them take root with your employees. Building the values within your work force takes top-down communication from your office but also a great deal of lateral communication among employees.
Akins conducts quarterly management meetings that bring the management team together for three to five days. The first half-day of those meetings are spent reviewing the mission, vision and core values of the company.
“I’ll take some time during those sessions and talk a little bit about the importance of the vision of Cymer,” he says. “As management grows over time, you might gain people who don’t have some of the history of the company. By having some of the less-experienced people in that kind of a meeting, getting them involved and allowing them to ask a few questions, people will start to take more of a personal ownership of the values.”
Once or twice quarterly, Akins and his leadership team take the vision and values to the Cymer masses with a large teleconference involving all of Cymer’s locations around the world. On top of that, Akins and other Cymer leaders frequently travel to reinforce the message on a face-to-face basis.
“I and all of our senior management team travel frequently,” he says. “Whenever we’re in various regions, we always take advantage of that time to not just visit our customers but to visit our own facilities and sit down with our people. We’ll have a face-to-face review of the state of the company, where we’re going and why, and how we’re going to conduct ourselves in the execution of that.
“In the end, if you can do that and you can conduct yourself in a way that is consistent with those values, if people can observe that behavior from you, you’ll go a long way to helping the culture take root with all your employees. Our industry is cyclical, but even when we have a reduction of force, I still talk to our employees specifically about how important it is that we treat each other with the utmost respect and sensitivity.
“When people do leave the company, oftentimes individuals will come by my office, shake my hand, and thank Cymer for their employment here and thank us for the help we provided in finding new job opportunities.”
How to reach: Cymer Inc., (858) 385-7300 or www.cymer.com
