Invest in your people
In addition to investing in your products, Xie says that investing in people is absolutely critical, even during downtimes.
“We’re still hiring people and giving the salary increases,” he says. “That’s the best time to build a better team and make the current team more happy. That’s more important than saving a little money right now. We want to invest the money into the future.”
By investing in hiring and keeping good people right now, you’re positioning yourself to have a leg up on your competition when times get better.
“It’s easy to cut some costs by laying off some people, but the people know the company, know the product, know the customer and have been with the company for quite some time — it’s valuable,” he says.
With so many larger organizations cutting people, Xie says right now is also a great time to snag talent that those large organizations have unloaded.
Simply having a job isn’t enough though to keep people truly happy. Give people the authority to make decisions and don’t micromanage them. For example, the business model Fortinet set up is designed to do just that. For every dollar that comes in, 30 cents can then be used. So if the sales team needs money for marketing, they can only spend 30 cents on the dollar, and they can’t use it until it actually comes in, but they get to choose how to spend it. With operations in about 100 countries around the world, it’s important to give them some leeway.
“For certain countries, marketing is more important, or some other countries, support is more important, or in another country, you have to invest in another channel,” Xie says. “We give the people the freedom to allocate themselves so they have the best model to fit in to their local environment and have the maximum input so the more they can generate the revenue, the more money resources they can spend.”
This kind of model can also promote teamwork as people collectively make decisions, and teamwork is something that’s very important to Xie, who used to be a professional volleyball player.
“From my point of view, to be successful, you have to work together, whether it’s in engineering or any team sport, you have to work together,” he says. “Team play is very important as opposed to how he does for himself.”
One way to encourage a team atmosphere is showing employees how they can contribute to the larger team in the future.
“We do a lot of promotions internally so people feel they have a career path and are taken care of,” he says. “I think building a team environment, that’s an area that we try to focus on.”