Executive Suite Success Magazine: article by Harsh Mehta, Office Links

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Corporate Culture: A Strategy to Success
By Harsh Mehta, Co-Founder & COO, OfficeLinks, with invaluable input from Paul Carter, SVP, OfficeLinks

Marketing, sales, operations, legal, accounting and finance are all areas critical to the stability, success and long-term growth of all businesses. They are also sciences, for the most part. While various options and strategies exist for each discipline, they boil down to decipherable equations with specific relationships that make the outcome of the employed strategy somewhat predictable. Businesses spend a considerable amount of resources on each of these, vying to build an efficient, competitive and hopefully, profitable business.

Corporate culture, in contrast to the above, is an art – no exact science or formula exists that can provide a road map to creating, implementing and nurturing the “right” culture for each business. More often than not, it comes down to each business’ principals and the message they send, whether intentional or subconscious, to their team. It is through their actions that the priorities of the organization are set, especially in the absence of a direct conversation about the business’ expectations from the employees and vice-versa. I find it ironic then, sad almost, that most businesses, small ones especially, spend little time thinking about what their corporate culture is going to be and even less time on actively nurturing it.

Several factors can be attributed to OfficeLinks’ success over the years - sound financial management and a disciplined approach to risk being amongst them. In retrospect, however, it all came down, and continues to do so, to our team and the corporate culture we foster.

It began in April of 2007. We had just hired a team of eight people and after a grueling day of setting up a new center we went out for a round of drinks. After the first round, Paul, as he often does, ordered a second round for the entire team and in what has since become a relived memory at every OfficeLinks team event, declared “Look around you. We will eat and drink together many times in the coming years, but we will never be at a table with fewer people than we have today...” We haven’t! Five of the eight that were present that day are still with OfficeLinks and three of them have since grown to become Center Managers.

The various other pearls of wisdom that were imparted to a young, inexperienced team of highly-motivated, excited and driven individuals that night have formed the pillars of what I consider to be OfficeLinks’ operational philosophy as a business. A business that virtually runs itself while allowing me to work “on” it rather than “in” it.

1. Hire for ATTITUDE and TRAIN. Majority of the OfficeLinks team was hired young and inexperienced. We hire individuals that are smart, friendly and eager to learn. We train them all-around by coaching them in business and in life. Few schools and colleges instill into their students the workforce skills needed to thrive – business staples such as being socially aware, appropriately dressed etc… we cover these issues head on. All new hires go through a basic training course that covers all of our business functions, departments and technology. Nothing is common sense and we don’t assume it is. We go over not just what we do and provide to our clients but also why those clients might need our services in the first place. All new hires leave the training course with a customer service handbook – a bible containing every protocol, form and procedure they might come across.

2. “Systems” run the business and people run the systems. Most companies are structured so people run the business while imposed systems run the people – a method used primarily to ensure that employees’ actions and decisions are contained within parameters pre-defined by senior management. We do exactly the opposite. We empower each team member to do what’s reasonably necessary to ensure complete client satisfaction – the primary goal of the business. In Grace Hopper’s words, “It's easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission” and we teach our team this well – often with clenched teeth, I will admit.

3. Incentivize for controllable performance. In order to ensure practical decision making on part of the team, especially given the operational latitude they are allowed, we align their personal interests with those of the business’ overall objectives. Each team member qualifies for a quarterly bonus that is based upon their achieving measurable and pre-defined benchmarks that they can positively impact. A sales coordinator, whose primary responsibility is to book sales tours, does not get compensated for achieved sales, but rather on the number of tours booked. That keeps him/her focused on their task at hand – booking tours! The criteria and benchmarks can be adjusted quarterly to suit the business’ changing needs.

4. Benchmarking. Invented by Xerox, benchmarking is a simple concept utilized widely across all industries and most businesses in some way, shape or form. It is hard to know how a team or center is performing in isolation. So, at OfficeLinks, we benchmark centers against each other by comparing key areas of revenue and costs across them, highlighting the best and worst performers in each category. By doing this in a constructive manner, we are able to identify best practices and share them amongst the team. Further, it allows us to tailor each team member’s quarterly bonus criteria to reward behavior that will drive them towards achieving benchmark standards for their center. Regular benchmarking, single-handedly, has contributed enough money to our bottom line to have paid for the cost of opening our last center.

5. Sharing Information. The key to fostering a collaborative, client-focused “culture” where the entire team points in the same direction, that direction being the success and profitability of the business, is the sharing of information and creating a sense of ownership in the business for the team. At OfficeLinks, we promote information sharing from the top down. Through weekly meetings and the use of monthly and quarterly reports, the entire team is kept informed on the state of the business as well as our objectives. We host an annual event, where the entire team comes together for a day of presentations made by senior management that inform the team on how the business performed in the previous year. We discuss basic financial information, a road map for growth and an action plan for the upcoming year – this also includes an open discussion on potential challenges we face. We engage in an open Q&A with our team where no questions are barred – they are the business’ most important stakeholders, after all. The presentations are followed by an educational component and most importantly, a night on the town!

In closing, and to summarize the rationale for all of the above, training and coaching combined with transparent information sharing fosters belief. A team that believes in a business and its management sees opportunity, not barriers. More importantly, the belief fosters ownership – a sense of pride, accomplishment and purpose that garners a kind of loyalty that outweighs monetary compensation for most. Most importantly, customers find reassurance in the team’s belief and even I can’t come up with an equation to ascertain the value of that. Can you?

OfficeLinks (www.OfficeLinks.com) is a premier provider of all-inclusive, furnished & equipped, on-demand office space, meeting facilities and virtual office services with five class-A locations in New York City and Chicago. Each OfficeLinks facility is built to provide an environment for businesses to thrive.

Harsh Mehta (hmehta@officelinks.com) is the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of OfficeLinks. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Office Business Centers Association International (OBCAI).

Paul Carter (paul@officelinks.com), an industry veteran, is the Senior Vice President of OfficeLinks.

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