human resourceof dell

Human resource of dell

Dell's been a results-driven company for a long time. For many years, we were results-driven almost to the exclusion of everything else! In many ways, that has accounted for our success in the marketplace. One of the things I discovered is that when your stock is going up 300 to 400 per cent a year, no one pays a lot of attention to issues around "effective management" or making people feel like they're on a career track; and people are willing to work really hard for really long periods because the payoff is so huge.

Our crisis of conscience came in 2001 when, for the first time, we had to lay people off. In mid to late 2001 we went through a self-discovery process where we started to ask, "If we aren't going to be a company where you can come in and be rich by noon tomorrow, what are we? What do we aspire to? What kind of company do we want to be?" Late in 2001 our president Kevin Rollins and CEO Michael Dell began a dialogue about the need and what it really means to be a "great company" and a "great place to work."

In the end we came up with what probably looks to outsiders like a beliefs-and-values statement. We call it "The Soul of Dell." In truth it is a statement of our aspirations as a company. There are five aspects to the Soul of Dell: the Dell Team, Customers, Direct Relationships, Global Citizenship and Winning. We shared early drafts of the documents with all of our Vice Presidents around the world, and had some great dialogue about what we together aspired to become.

The biggest gap was between where we were and where we wanted to be with the Dell Team. So we started to talk about what it would mean to be a winning culture. What that came to mean for us was that we would have to broaden the definition of what we cared about, beyond just results. We continue to care very much about what was accomplished, but also how it was accomplished. As you might expect, when you come out with a beliefs-and-values statement after focusing more on the outcome for the last 15 years, employees are going to be a little bit skeptical. In the first year, we had a series of programs, town-hall meetings, brown-bag sessions and other discussions to talk about what we were aspiring to do-all of which were met with great enthusiasm and great skepticism at the same time. The enthusiasm was driven by the common view that we needed to do more to become a truly great place to work over time. The skepticism was driven by a concern about whether or not we believed and were committed to what we were saying.

Last year, we put some teeth in our effort to improve the quality of management and improve the culture of the company. We have an employee opinion survey, "Tell Dell." We decided to administer the survey twice a year, and we asked that every vice president and every director get 20 percent better results than in the survey before. In some parts of the organization, it was driven down to every manager. But we wanted to send a signal: The results are important, but how you get results is also important. At first people said, "Yeah, that's nice. Will they really pay attention?" But the major change we made was to identify metrics, based on responses by employees at every level, that measured how well managers managed and how well leaders led. In short, we decided employees would vote on whether or not we had made any progress.