I. Using the competing values framework as a point of reference, how would you describe the current organizational culture? Provide examples to support your conclusions.
2. What type of culture is desired by Mr. Goodnight to meet his goals? Discuss.
3. Which of the II ways to embed organizational culture has SAS used to create its current culture? Provide examples to support your conclusions.
4. Does Mr. Goodnight want to create more of a mechanistic or organic organization? Explain.
5. What is the most important lesson from this case? Discuss.
Employees at SAS certainly feel kneaded. Every week, several dozen of them get massages at the on-site 6 6,000-square-foot recreation and fitness center. You have to pay, but it's only $55 for an hour, and that's with pretax dollars. And the convenience is priceless: right up the stairs from the gymnasium, weight room, billiards hall, sauna, hair salon, manicurist, and aqua kickboxing in the Olympic-size pool. (Posted etiquette rules: "A bathing suit is required " and "No cell phones in class.") There's classic massage, Swedish massage, orthopedic massage, and my official release-all designed to make workers "more aware of their bodies, move with greater ease and freedom," and "have increased energy, reduced feelings of pain, and feelings of relaxation and well-being." ...
Though companies in Silicon Valley get lots of press about perk-friendly workplaces, it's here in the less go-go South that employees reign supreme. SAS is not only the world's largest privately held software business-with revenues of $2.3 billion, it's about the size of public Intuit-but also the paragon of perks. In fact when Google, a SAS customer, was putting together its own campus freebies some years ago, it used SAS as a model. SAS (pronounced sass) has been on Fortune's list of Best Companies to Work For every one of the 13y ears we've been keeping score. But this is the first time SAS is in the No.1 slot. While its pampering of employees might give corporate scrooges a coronary, CEO Jim Goodnight says the policies make estimable business sense. "My chief assets drive out of the gate every day," Goodnight likes to say. "My job is to make sure they come back ." His motives aren't charitable but entirely utilitarian, even a bit Machiavellian. The average tenure at SAS is I 0 years; 300 employees have worked for 25 or more. Annual turnover was 2% in 2009, compared with the average in the software industry of about 22%. Women make up 4 5% of its U.S. workforce, which has an average age of 4 5. ...
The notion of easy living frustrates those on the inside. " Some may think that because SAS is family-friendly and has great benefits that we don't work hard," says Bev Brown, who's in external communications. "But people do work hard here, because they're motivated to take care of a company that takes care of them."
For SAS's 4,200 employees at its hilly North Carolina headquarters (there are roughly another 7,000 employees elsewhere, mostly in other countries), the work environment is preternaturally civilized.
The typical week is 35 hours; no human resources troll monitors sick days (the average taken annually is two); and many employees can set their own schedule. "What we don't do is treat our employees like they're all, you know, criminals," say Jenn Mann, vice president of human resources. Unless you work at the front gate or in maintenance, nobody much cares whether you show up at 9 or II. Once you're there, you're not likely to leave for the day-which is much the point. SAS, as some have put it, is a "golden cage "; there's a very old cemetery on one corner of the property, so the joke goes that you really never have to depart. There are two subsidized day-care centers for 6 00 children, and then summer camp. Plus there's dry cleaning, car detailing, a UP S depot, a book exchange, a meditation garden, an in-season tax-prep vendor, and an orthotics store. There are also three subsidized cafeterias, which serve 500 breakfasts and 2,300 lunches a day-and provide takeout to bring home for the family; one cafeteria has a piano player, and he takes requests. If you have a child in day care, it's fine to bring him or her to lunch. Hungry later? In kitchens throughout the 20 nondescript buildings around campus, there are free snacks galore, including Krispy Kremes on Fridays and M&M's on Wednesdays. To help work off the sweets, there are extensive on-site workday sports leagues.
The best perk for many employees is the centrally located health-care center, which, like other SAS buildings, is set back from the giant, colorful outside sculptures. Operating 8 a.m. to 6 p.m . most days, it has a staff of 56, including 4 physicians, 10 nurse practitioners, nutritionists, lab technicians, physical therapists, and a psychologist (who will do short-term therapy for such conditions as depression or sexual addiction) ....
Last year 9 0% of SAS employees and their families-Goodnight included-made 4 0,000 visits. SAS says the center, with a budget of $4.5 million still saves the company $5 million annually because employees don't kill time in waiting rooms and are more apt to seek care when they should, and SAS's medical care is cheaper than outside the gates anyway. ...Off-campus are SAS family nights at the rodeo, circus, and Monster Jam Trucks. Work/life programs also venture into family issues, providing seminars on such topics as adoption, divorce, special-needs children, raising teenagers, and picking a magnet school. SAS has a "caring closet " that supplies wheelchairs and walkers, and even gets consultants to guide families on long-term elder-care issues. Soon-oh, boy-is the Valentine's swim! Seventy percent of SAS employees take part in at least one of these activities. The challenge, of course, is actually managing to get your work done amid all this . . . . With a "billion dollars in the bank " and another big building going up on campus, Goodnight is continuing to invest. ln a company of elite quantitative analysts, he devotes more than a fifth of revenue to R&D. For 33 straight years, SAS's revenues have gone up-reaching $2.3 billion in 2009 .... It may be that such stability and success allows Goodnight to be so free with the goodies, particularly when there are no shareholders to carp. Yet the SAS egg came before the chicken. In its inaugural year, the company established flexible 35-hour workweeks and profit-sharing, as well as fresh fruit on Mondays and other employee perks. Company sponsored child care started four years later, prompted by an employee who planned to become a stay-at-home mom after her maternity leave. And when SAS had revenue of barely $50 million 1984, it began creating the infrastructure of the current culture, with the recreation-and-fitness center and the first cafe. "Very early on, it just made sense, " Goodnight recalls. Or as he once told someone, "Contented cows give more milk." He also liked the idea of pumping would-be profits back into the company. "I'd rather spend the money on my employees than send it to Washington as taxes. " . . . But he says that individual peculiarities hardly make SAS the prototype of Silicon Valley East. For one thing, his talent is populated with statisticians rather than engineers or MBAs. They're in offices rather than cube farms. More important, he says, he runs a sane shop that disdains dormlike all-nighters. While folks check their BlackBerrys at home and analysts stay late to meet a deadline, most are home by dinner or tuck-in time. If they've grown bored with their job, they have great freedom to move horizontally instead of having to hunt for another employer.
Most critically, Goodnight says his values produce constancy and continuity and commitment; the boom-and-bust cycle is a foreign concept at SAS. Whereas people in Silicon Valley are so often on the make-ready to join the hottest, coolest start-up around the corner, and preferably if it's yet to go public-SAS employees, gloriously isolated, are typically in it for the long haul.