DMC: Putting Funds (and Fun) in Employees’ Hands
By Frank Riordan, Founder & CEO
I’m the founder and CEO of DMC, a custom engineering and software development company based in Chicago and with offices around the country. We’ve been in business since 1996, have about 170 people, and have received consistent recognition for our company culture.
I’m a big believe in the adage that culture trumps strategy, so there are many things we do here to create a great culture. For the purposes of this book, I’ll focus on two initiatives that have had a big impact on employees at DMC.
BFD: Starting off on the Right Foot
First would be how important the idea of BFD is. As I’ve given several culture presentations at conferences over the years, I’ll start with BFD and ask people if they know what it means. Of course I get the very predictable response, which isn’t completely wrong, but what it means to us is Best First Day.
Though named after an employee’s first day, the initiative actually starts as soon as someone accepts an offer. We send our newest team member a welcome package (lots of branded DMC swag in a very nice DMC backpack) and assign them to a mentor who will reach out to them to personally make them feel welcome and to answer any questions they might have.
On their first day, it is imperative that we have taken care of everything before they walk into our office doors. This means that their desk, PC, system access, business cards, phone, corporate credit card, etc. will all be 100% ready for them when they get to the office. We also have a very structured training and work plan for their 1st couple of weeks so they know what they will be doing and what to expect. Additionally, we have an office-wide company welcome lunch where they get to introduce themselves to the team and meet everyone else who is around that day. At that lunch, they get to ask an ice-breaker question (some recent examples include: What’s the best $20 you’ve ever spent? If you could have dinner with anyone, past or present, who would it be?) as a way of learning about, and making quick connections with their co-workers.
Every new employee gets their own welcome party (many times they will do joint parties as the budget increases) that they get to plan. The parties, like most events here, are inclusive, optional, and include +1s. Examples of new employee parties include Iron Chef Competitions, Cubs game from a Wrigley rooftop, Medieval Times, and even NBA Games.
The advantages of our onboarding process is that it sets the tone for preparedness and productivity from day one and also sets a strong foundation for building relationships from the beginning of everyone’s start here. I heard once that being able to state that someone has a friend at work is highly correlated to employee satisfaction and what we’re doing here is reducing the barriers to building relationships.
Activity Fund: Putting Funds (and Fun) in Employees’ Hands
The activity fund is a monthly use it or lose it budget that anyone in each office can use to do fun things with their colleagues outside of work. We implemented this system years back, when I had just started a family and my availability to organize social events was diminished (and never mind my life interests maybe were getting to be a bit different than the young workforce we hire). Our activity fund has some basic rules:
1. The activity must be legal.
2. The activity must include a minimum number of people from the office (varies depending on the size of office) and +1s are allowed to go.
3. The activity must be inclusive – everyone must be invited.
4. Pictures and/or videos must be taken, which can then be used in DMC promotional materials and website.
While the activity fund started to lessen my required involvement, it has developed into something that has far exceeded my initial expectations. I originally envisioned people would continue with the types of events that I had typically been involved with – happy hours, movie nights, bowling, etc. And while those certainly do happen, because everyone is given the autonomy to decide what they would like to do, the breadth of events has been exciting to see. People have indoor rock climbed, participated in axe throwing competitions, played bubble soccer, and so much more.
Though most of the events have been local, many years ago one creative engineer had the idea to use the February activity fund to help subsidize a ski trip. This was something that I was initially (and maybe irrationally) cautious of, but it has evolved into one of our strongest traditions, DMSki, an annual ski trip out west, which, in 2018, had 38 people from 6 offices staying in two houses in Summit County Colorado for 3 days of skiing and fun. Many people will fly in early and/or stay a few days afterwards, and will work out of our Denver office, thus building interoffice relationships.
A wonderful offshoot of the DMSki trip is that each office now hosts their own YOE – Yearly Office Event – where people from all offices are invited to visit another office for a long weekend of local fun. The events hosted so far have included beach houses at Cape Cod, Rodeo& South by Southwest in Texas, a lake house in Michigan, and NYC urban adventure.
The amazing beauty of this is that DMC provides a relatively modest subsidy for the trip and everything else is coordinated by DMC personnel on their own time and primarily paid for with their own money. I almost feel guilty about how little the trip costs DMC vs. the value of the amazing amount of team building that is created, but, I know that if this were a top-down initiative that people would be far less engaged.
We firmly believe that the costs of these and other employee engagement initiatives are trivial relative to the benefits realized. Benefits include being able to recruit the highest caliber employees, growth and profitability that far exceed industry standards and an extremely high retention rate - all for less than 3% of payroll costs. I am 100% certain that, given the option of a one-time 3% raise but losing all of our engagement benefits, that everyone would not even consider the raise option.