DEBUNKING THE SWEATSHOP
by P. Schneider, CIO Magazine

You're a sharp, motivated IT professional, you walk to work every day, eat catered-in food from a selection of great restaurants, work 40-hour weeks, have a month of paid vacation, and enjoy a stimulating environment of developing products for Fortune 500 companies. Is this a dream? Fifty employees of Motek, Inc., a Beverly Hills-based supplier of warehouse automation software, are living it and loving it. "The payoff is that I achieve my personal goals of fitness (staying healthy), family commitments, and am happier at work," says one Motek employee. "This positive attitude influences my contribution at work and hopefully affects my co-workers in a positive manner, too."

Turnover at Motek is next to zero, and the company is spending nothing on recruiting: candidates come to the company through the good words of its employees. This sort of commitment to keeping employees happy comes straight from the top: "The firm started with a great idea and I made the decision that we would focus on quality of life," says founder and CEO Ann Price.

When Price founded Motek, she was determined to eliminate the two-hour daily commutes she had endured as an IT consultant. She thought the idea of a telecommuting firm with a small office for meetings would fly with other road-weary folks. Yet after two years, every Motek employee had moved to live within walking distance of the office, as Price did. Why? "Ironically, everyone wanted to work together," she recalls.

Working at Motek is a refreshing change of pace in a fast-paced industry where 60 and 80-hour work weeks are the norm. Price discourages people from taking laptops home to work at night or on the weekend, and is adamant about time off. She is a strong believer that long hours and poor working environments in IT (she calls Silicon Valley a "software sweatshop") are the root cause of missed deadlines and buggy software. "After working 14 hours how can you not make mistakes?" she asks. "The Motek culture does not demand that you "posture" yourself an extra hour or two at the office each day just to "impress the boss," affirms a Motek sales rep. "If your work is on schedule, you are encouraged to go live your private life."

To encourage people to use their month off for rest, rather than projects at home, Price gives out $5,000 in travel dollars to all employees. (Motek's receptionist just returned from a trip to England.) Employees earn the money by an informal commitment to communicating with team members and respecting deadlines. Price even escorted two workaholic employees to Thailand one year after both had repeatedly skipped vacations. "One of them has now embraced vacations in a workaholic style," Price laughs. " I consider him a personal achievement."

Price also feels strongly about supporting her employees' career goals-even if it means leaving Motek. She once helped an employee write his resume and find a new job. He's been gone for four years, but comes back regularly to help out with projects. Another wanderer who left for jobs at Sybase and IBM has since returned. While Price says she can't compete on salary with larger firms, she does give her employees a sense of ownership in the company by giving everyone an equal vote on things like benefits, company and product direction, and market strategy.

But does putting employees first boost the bottom line? Price thinks so. "We're seeing incredible financial return. It has sent productivity through the roof." Motek was recently named one of Deloitte and Touche's "Fast 50" high tech companies for the Los Angeles area. The company has won the business of large corporate clients like General Electric, Heinz and Grand Auto, and was nominated for a Computerworld Smithsonian manufacturing award.

Price says Motek's employee-friendly culture helps foster better relationship with customers. Motek is also getting a good reputation in the industry for the way its people work. The CEO of a large company ("you'd be surprised who," Price says) recently brought a team of senior product developers to learn about Motek's project management approach.

The bottom line for Price is that her people come first, even if it means a project may suffer temporarily so someone can take their month of vacation. "In the long term, I'll make it back," she reflects. "I'm not willing to build an organization that's a modern software sweatshop. No matter what happens to these people later...while they were here they had quality of life."

About Motek®
Motek provides an advanced, Windows-based, user-configurable warehouse management system that helps mid-to-large sized companies in the retail, wholesale, and third-party distribution markets save money and improve customer satisfaction by streamlining their warehouse operations. Since 1991, Motek's Priya warehouse software and technology has been leading the market in innovation, implementation time and ease-of-use. Privately owned, Motek has garnered numerous industry awards for innovation, entrepreneurship, and technical excellence, and consistently ranks as one of Southern California's fastest growing companies. Information on Motek is available at www.motek.com