NetApp - Dave's Blog: Fortune Magazine says NetApp Is A Great Place To Work

For the sixth year in a row, NetApp has been in Fortune’s annual list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. This year we are #14.

To generate the list, Fortune works with Robert Levering, who is the founder of The Great Place to Work Institute, and last year I had a chance to hear him describe his research. He believes that the most important factors for measuring a good working environment are that employees:

Trust in the people they work for
Have pride in what they do
Enjoy the people they work with

Dan once told me that getting into the Best Companies list gave him more satisfaction than any other award or accomplishment at NetApp. When Dan first joined NetApp, creating a healthy corporate culture was one of his highest priorities. (I’ve described some of the things he did here and here.) I think he believes that a healthy company culture is the foundation for everything else a company does.

Sometimes people talk about “building a corporate culture”, but I think that’s the wrong metaphor. To me, the word building implies something mechanical that you can design exactly the way you want it. I don’t see culture that way. Culture is more like a plant. You can water it, pick weeds from it, maybe fertilize it, but you can’t really control it. Culture is something that you nurture, care for and worry about, not something that you design or build.

People who like NetApp’s culture often worry about how to keep it from changing. I think that culture should change! Culture is like a baby: it’s cute when it drools and spits food out of its mouth, but imagine if it were the same at age 21. The best culture for a startup with a handful of employees is probably completely wrong for a large company with tens of thousands of employees. On the other hand, I want the core values at the heart of our culture – like teamwork, trust and integrity – to remain constant even as the culture grows and evolves.

It’s interesting that Robert Levering does not focus on the kinds of employee benefits that you often see in articles about good places to work, like volleyball courts, yoga classes or nap rooms. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with cool perks! (Google with its free gourmet lunches is #1 on the Best Companies list.) The point is that these things aren’t what create long-term employee satisfaction. I think that Levering is right on target. It’s much more important that you trust the people you work for, take pride in your work, and enjoy the people you work with.

This blog entry is very NetApp-centric, but I think there is a benefit for customers in working with employees who take pride in what they do and trust the people they work with. Tom Georgens, who runs all product operations at NetApp, put it like this:

Great milk comes from happy cows.

As one of the cows, I have some discomfort with Tom's analogy, but I do agree with his basic point. :-)