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🎙 Welcome to Rarified Air: Stories of Inspired Service, a podcast that takes you on a journey into the DNA of InterSystems. I will be your guide as we explore how our unparalleled commitment to customer service fuels limitless human potential.
🤝 Join us as we dive into the culture of InterSystems and share the stories of the people who make it all possible - our customers, partners, and employees. From helping healthcare providers improve patient outcomes to powering the world’s most important institutions, we’ll show you how our dedication to customer service excellence is in rarified air.
Welcome to Rareified Air, stories of inspired service. In today's episode, John Paladino will share how he leads a culture of respect and opportunity and how a great workplace can drive retention even in challenging labor markets. Here's John.
John Paladino:I don't look at it so much from an ROI perspective. I generally don't do that. And this isn't specific to a retention strategy. I think that this is more the right thing to do, the right way to treat employees and not just for retaining people, but because you want your employees to feel like you care. So my title is vice president of client services, but I'll tell you, it means nothing inside this building.
John Paladino:Around here, I'm John. To some, I'm John p, because we have more than a few Johns here. I sit right in the middle of support. I read through every single action on every support issue, if you could believe that. Sometimes it's on a Sunday morning while I'm having cup of coffee or my 3rd cup of coffee to read through them.
John Paladino:We do support surveys, and we get a pretty good response rate. We get about a 20% response rate, which I'm happy with. We don't spam customers with, you know, surveys. But anytime an issue is closed, we'll send that person, the customer that is, a survey, but only once a month. And we asked 3 questions.
John Paladino:Were you satisfied? Do you consider the issue resolved? And were you happy with the overall performance of the company? And we ask for ratings too sometimes. But skipping through that, the comments are actually more valuable than the ratings.
John Paladino:The ratings tend to be 97, 98 on a scale of 1 to 10. But the comments are fantastic. Like, give Aaron a raise. Or somebody stuck with me until 9 o'clock last night, and I'm really grateful. I write a note for every single comment.
John Paladino:And I go through each comment. I add my own comment. Sometimes we made a mistake. I don't care if we're perfect. I want us to be excellent.
John Paladino:There's an important difference between perfection and excellence. So if we've made a mistake, let's learn from it and move on. But I send back comments to that individual person in support, what I think about, the survey comment and how they performed. And I think that's the right thing to do. Does it help with retention?
John Paladino:I don't know. It's just an example of treating people like people. Not like I use the word employees, but we think of people here as members of our family. We're back to where we were in terms of retention approaches, retention principles, which is the culture of the company, be respectful, do the right thing for the customer, excellence in everything we do, give people the time and opportunity to learn, create an environment in which they can be successful. Managers here aren't managing tasks.
John Paladino:They're leading. So as a leader, what are the problems your staff are experiencing? What are you doing about it? As a leader, you have to anticipate what's gonna come up, what are the challenges gonna be next year compared to this year. So a lot of the things that we've used for the entire history of the company, we're back to really leveraging those to drive retention.
John Paladino:It feels like people wanna stay. It feels like people are enjoying what they do. It feels like they feel like the part of a a company that really cares. If I start back pre COVID and quickly summarize it, for software companies, which we are, there have been cycles where there are a lot of talented people in the market looking for jobs. And then there have been moments where it's highly, highly competitive.
John Paladino:You know, some of the .coms were coming out in the nineties. It was really hard to hire QD engineers. Really hard to find them. More recently, network engineers are in demand. So we've always had ups and downs in terms of competitiveness to hire people.
John Paladino:Retention for us was always pretty consistent at 6% per year for the last 10 years prior to COVID. For my area for product support, it was about 4%. So for a software company, that's dandy because market analysts, you can talk to Forrester, Gartner, and others. And the range of turnover, for other software companies tends to be 18 to 30% pre COVID, depending which analyst you talk to and which sector, which location. It can vary for lots of reasons.
John Paladino:But we felt great with the low level of turnover we had. And, of course, that includes people who retire out, people who move to another place, people who go back to school, a few terminations. But, you know, 6% is pretty good when it's all in. Then COVID hits. We all go work from home.
John Paladino:We all find a way to make it work pretty effectively. So thank god for Teams and, you know, the other products that have helped us get through it. No. It's not ideal. Other people that had childcare issues, you know, we had a lot of flexibility and understanding.
John Paladino:We never actually closed our office. People were allowed to come in, you know, with safeguards, of course, But most people didn't for a long time. And as we came back to the office and decided on how we were gonna do that, we learned a lot of lessons, quite frankly. Because understanding employee needs, but also understanding the employees' feelings about the topic, about whether or not they wanna come back and how they wanna come back. It was all over the map.
John Paladino:And we thought we were listening and really tuned in. And I'll just summarize that we could have done a better job of listening. And people made decisions regardless of whether we were listening or not. I had one of my best support people during COVID, he went up to Vermont. He had a cabin.
John Paladino:He just said, John, I'm not coming back. And I said, well, I understand. I understand. And I'm not sure what he did after he left, but we had people make decisions like that too. And other people just said, you know what?
John Paladino:I'm retiring. I'm not coming back. So the range of issues was really broad, complicated, to very diverse. It took us a while to truly understand what the issues were and to make decisions based on suggestions from employees. We made a huge effort to get as much employee input as we could.
John Paladino:Somebody just out of college, we talked about coming back to the office and asked for input. And he said, I'm 23 years old. I have no friends. I live in an apartment. I'd rather be in the office.
John Paladino:Every company has gone through this type of process. And, you know, we came through it successfully, ultimately. And we're in a hybrid model now with an anchor day. And we have some variations in different countries, but it's almost all hybrid, 3 days in the office and anchor day. And that seems to be working really well at the moment.
John Paladino:Our CEO signs off on all new hires and all transfers. Can you imagine that? For a company our size, that's how important people are to Terry, our CEO. And I think that's awesome. Every now and then, we'll wanna hire somebody, and he'll see something that we didn't.
John Paladino:So having that opportunity to learn about how to do a better job at hiring top talent is also great. Treat people like people. Give them respect and opportunity in every way. I think that leads to great retention. And that's what we've had.
Female Narrator:Thanks for listening today. If you have any questions or wanna hear from a specific guest, email us anytime at inspired service at inner systems dot com. And when you're ready to unlock the potential of your data and experience the transformative power of support done differently, go to innersystems.com.