They are nipping away at a humongous hunk of cheese in the kitchen or munching on candy bars stashed in a row of drawers and all the time talking computer software talk.
One lonely soul, hungry for mental and physical inspiration in the heart of the workday, occupies the company exercise room, which sits amid a warren of eclectically designed, dormitory-like offices, where dozens of Generation X members intensely clack away at computers.
Jeans-wearing Todd Wyder, 39, vice president of Geneer, a rapidly growing 13-year-old software development company in Des Plaines, has a collection of favored toys arrayed across his desk. They serve purely administrative purposes, he explains: distractions for those workers who come to him with troubles on their mind.
In the company’s way of thinking, these and other people comforts–wine tastings on Friday afternoons, hallway golf matches with Wiffle balls, free meals–are ways to nurture creativity among its more than 130 workers.
Keeping up a spirit of creativity, company officials explain, is especially critical in a firm that sees itself as a constant pioneer while growing by leaps and bounds, expanding its work force almost 50 percent annually for the last few years.
And so the rapid growth has meant finding ways to translate the company’s culture to a constant stream of new hires. One way has been to begin a two-week “boot camp,” where new employees are given an overview of the company’s ways of doing things.
Despite the difficulty in getting everyone together, the company still holds open meetings for all workers every other week. The privately held firm also makes its financial records available to all employees.
At the start, the company searched mostly for workers with the best skills, says Doug Grimsted, its 36-year-old CEO, who founded the company with Robert Kehoe. Kehoe has since left the firm. Grimsted has just graduated from Purdue University with an industrial engineering degree.
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Initially, the company was called RDI Software Technologies, reflecting the partners’ first names. Eager to cast itself as a brand product, however, the company recently dropped its old name and, with the help of consultants, renamed itself Geneer.
Grimsted has learned, he says, that it pays to hire young workers and mold them to the company’s culture. And so the average Geneer worker is about 30 years old. Grimsted says he also has learned that focusing on people comforts is not enough to stir creativity.
“What really matters,” he says, offering his ideas in a rapid-fire delivery, is “giving them a sense of mission, purpose.”
Striking a bargain? Now that contract talks between Caterpillar Inc. and the United Auto Workers union have emerged into the daylight from months of low-key dealings, a major question hangs in the air: Is there a driving force that will bring the two to a deal?
Since the company and union acknowledged progress last week in their contract talks, UAW and Caterpillar officials at local factories have been holding parallel talks.
The last time the two sides came up with a deal, in December 1995, the UAW’s nearly 13,000 workers rejected the proposal from the Peoria-based manufacturer. At the time, Caterpillar clearly felt it didn’t have to bend markedly. The result: UAW members halted a strike to return to work under the company’s imposed contract.
Burying the dispute has payoffs for both sides, but the UAW has far more to gain. .
As thousands of its members become eligible for retirement in coming years, the union wants to provide a sense of contract certainty for them, and it also wants to assure its presence at Caterpillar. Having weathered chaos within its plants, and a series of strikes by the UAW, Caterpillar would gain from the certainty of a union agreement. But the question for both is at what price.
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Stephen Franklin can be reached at [email protected].