I’ve read more than a dozen books about how to manage employees, but nothing they preached has ever been as effective as this: hire great people; then trust them to do great work.
Collegewise now has 16 counselors working out of 12 offices. Most of those offices have one or more counselors working without a traditional on-site manager. We’re not with them every day to see what time they get to work, how they spend their time or how late they stay. But every counselor we’ve hired has a track record of doing great work long before they came here. They’ve left legacies at the schools, colleges and companies that were lucky enough to work with them before we did. Why would we treat them like kids who need us breathing down their necks every day?
Our employee handbook is pretty short by company standards. And our first paragraph explains why:
We hire smart people who have good judgment. We don’t think you need a dress code to tell you that while we don’t wear suits and ties, it’s not a good idea to wear a t-shirt and shorts when meeting with a family. We don’t think you need a vacation policy to tell you that while everybody deserves to take a vacation, you can’t repeatedly disappear from the office for weeks at a time without your customers, your co-workers, and your boss wondering what you’re thinking. And we don’t think you need to be told that you should treat your fellow employees with respect, even when you disagree with them. Be smart. Be respectful. Use good judgment. It makes for the kind of place where we’ll all love coming into work every day.
Here’s our policy about sick and personal days–we don’t have a specific number of allotted sick or personal days. If you get the stomach flu, stay home and throw up in peace. If you have to get your car fixed, or your washing machine breaks and you need to wait for the repairman, or your best friend from college is arriving at the airport and you want to leave early to pick her up, you should be able to do these things without using up a precious allotted “personal day.”
Even our policy about reporting expenses leans on trust first. Rather than give employees an exhaustive list of what’s OK and not OK to expense, here’s our Collegewise rule of thumb that’s always worked well for us—if someone submitted this expense to you, would you be annoyed? If yes, please don’t submit it.
In fourteen years, I’ve had very few instances of an employee abusing these policies. Yes, we could have prevented those with more rules and micro-managing. But that would just punish everyone for one person's actions. Instead, we can deal with those isolated incidents and continue trusting people we work with. In return, we’ve enjoyed fourteen years working with people we like, respect, and most importantly, trust. It’s a great trade off.