Check out what Bil Harmer, VP of Security at SuccessFactors, had to say to ZDNet about his job here!

By Gabriel Marusic, Account Manager

I joined SuccessFactors in August of 2006 as a Lead Gen rep serving the mid-market (Lead Gen, or Lead Generation, is our team that calls companies and introduces them to SuccessFactors). I interviewed at a number of different companies but really had my heart set on joining SuccessFactors from the get-go. I felt that SuccessFactors’ products enabled companies to better apply top-notch management practices that I learned in college, and I knew that I wanted to be involved with this company. So I was thrilled when asked to join the mid-market Lead Gen team as a starting point in my new career in sales, and was pumped with ambition to learn and grow. Since then it has been a fantastic experience for me both in personal and professional growth. While in Lead Gen I had the opportunity to learn about our products and the needs of our potential customers prior to them coming on board. This really created a very solid base for me and provided an introduction to the workings of sales and marketing which would facilitate my growth here. I also had the honor of attending President’s Club for 2007, which recognizes top performers in sales, and was able to go to Mexico! After a successful two year position in Lead Gen, I was able to take part in a development program that SuccessFactors was offering, which provided training and mentoring to allow me to move up into an account management role here on our small business team—what an opportunity. Now I’m in a new role working with our existing customers and I’m happier than ever. I’ve got a great manager who started in sales and like many others here was able to take his career up a notch and now leads his own team.

In addition to my professional growth, I’ve also enjoyed some great personal moments here at SuccessFactors. I’ve made some lifelong friendships along the way–one of my fellow Lead Gen team members who was promoted with me was also a groomsman at my wedding. I get to play on our company soccer team and join other SF’ers on amazing company events (did I mention Mexico?). Without a doubt, this is a fantastic place to work and I’m looking forward to the road ahead here.

By Hilary Terrell, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Picture this…

You’re a 28 year old HR associate at a prestigious academic institution. You’re young and energetic, and eager to influence the people you work with in a positive way. You send out a friendly email thanking employees for turning in their timecards on time, because you appreciate their efforts and, well, what’s wrong with saying thank you. Your boss, however, does not appreciate your efforts. You get reprimanded for sending out an email that is outside of the standard bureaucratic emails that usually come from this HR department—a department that is very set in its ways and with employees that have been there for years, many for decades. “I can’t say thank you??” you think, “and try to boost people’s moral?” You are left baffled and frustrated by an institution and department that does not seem to embrace gratitude, change, or individuality.

This isn’t a fabricated example, but something that happened recently to a very close friend of mine. When she told me about it I thought it really touched upon two timely topics in the world of work—embracing change, and the clash of generations in the workplace.
The former is something I’ve seen numerous articles on recently, from NPR to BusinessWeek. As a recent BusinessWeek article put it,

“…every generation is different and shaped by the events of their formative years. Yet every generation is alike, as they all bring new energy, new ideas, and new beliefs about work and life in general. Historical and technological forces have always combined to bring the generations together in some ways and to draw them apart in others.”

“Generational” gaps are a natural occurrence in the workplace, but not something to be wary of or to apply an “us vs. them” mentality to. I believe it’s less of a clash between generations—a fuzzy generalization at best—and more of an issue of differing beliefs about work and the way things *should* be done on a day to day basis. In the example above, the older manager felt that the HR associate’s thank you email was not something that they, or the other employees of their experience level, would have sent out. So was the email flat out wrong to send, or did it rub the manager the wrong way because it was atypical?

Right or wrong, younger employees crave independence and creative thinking—and discouraging this at all turns will turn them off from a work environment. And when a younger employee is discouraged at work, they’re also of the mind to believe that other opportunities are within their grasp and won’t put up with a culture that stifles them. Right or wrong, younger employees crave feedback and constructive criticism, and a slap on the hand when you’re displeased with their work won’t do the trick. Perhaps in the story above, the manager could have acknowledged, even praised, the HR associate for doing something outside of the norm by personally thanking other employees. And if this was not protocol for the institution, aside from evaluating why this would be, perhaps the manager could have suggested what would be more appropriate in the future. Instead, she got a firm “don’t-color-outside-the-lines-again” warning and nothing more. Now she walks, and emails, on eggshells each day.

This leads to the second issue the story brings up—the unwillingness to embrace change. HR departments (the only department with word ‘human’ in it!) have the opportunity to be some of the pioneers of embracing change in a company, as they have their pulse on the kinds of employees the company is hiring and nurturing, the direction the company is generally headed in, and a direct hand in shaping a company’s culture. A company that fails to adapt to change at the HR level seems doomed to hire the same kinds of people over and over again until they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, and doomed to do things the exact same way they’ve always done until someone at the C-level trickles down the necessary changes (or worse). HR departments have the ability to influence the corporate culture, the morale of current employees, the interest of potential employees, and much more, in a very powerful way. And doing things the way they’ve always been done just doesn’t seem to cut it anymore. The HR associate in the example wasn’t asking her manager to change the corporate communications policy—she was trying to connect with the employees she communicates with in a more human way than she had seen up until that point in her department. Change in that direction could be quite good.

I’m happy to say that this is something that would never happen here at SuccessFactors—quite the opposite. We are all lucky to work in a place that embraces individuality and doing something against the status quo, especially if it achieves great results. We aren’t the small startup we were 6+ years ago, as we now have hundreds of employees around the globe and sound business processes in place. But we’re still a company where doing something in a new way—whether it’s through email communication, marketing strategies, the design of the product, or the ways that we interact with our prospects and customers—is encouraged and rewarded. We’re coloring outside the lines and proud of it!

We are also a company where I have yet to see any clashing of generations in the workplace, and I believe this is in large part due to our open, collaborative culture. We have employees that range from fresh and green out of college to seasoned professionals, and are fortunate that everyone is able to learn from the range of people they work with each day, and that we can truly find the place where we fit best in this company—no trying to fit square pegs into round holes here. No matter you’re position, you’re going to work closely with employees with varied backgrounds and from across the organization, whether they sit right next to you or on the opposite coast. And with close connections fostered each day between employees—be it through our Employee Directory, or a cross-departmental project—we are all the more prepared to deal with change as it comes our way and ready to face the future as a cohesive SuccessFactors team. Q4, here we come!

Reply to this post—tell us how your organization is prepared for change and/or embracing generational gaps in the workplace!