And while the participants' finance staffers generally viewed themselves as paid fairly, they tended to think of compensation on an equal footing with other components, such as job flexibility and management-aided career planning. "I believe in [psychologist Abraham] Maslow's hierarchy of needs," professes Cargill's Drake. "Pay is important, but if I dreaded getting up in the morning, there's no amount of money that would make it OK."
TRAITS OF THE BEST
In general, a few simple themes set the very best companies apart:
* A sense of finance identity. The best example is CFO Kim Patmore's "branding" effort within First Data's finance department, building employee pride in part by creating its own logo, and promoting the department with a steady flow of newsletters and through numerous performance awards.
* Openness to innovative ideas. In one case, Cargill has taken "option finder" wireless audience-response keypad devices, originally purchased for use in risk assessment within the audit process, and adapted the $12,000 systems to provide instant feedback on organizational effectiveness. It's a way "to find out what's bothering employees," and create action plans to correct the problems, says Johnson.
* Meeting problems head on. Departmental candor helped after FleetBoston Financial made the embarrassing discovery in April that its Robertson Stephens securities-firm unit in California had pumped $70 million more than necessary into its cash-bonus pool. CFO McQuade says he began a dialogue with his direct reports about how finance had caught the misallocation, and was dealing with it. "I had a staff meeting with my direct reports," he says, "and I encouraged them to talk with their employees about it."
* Commitment to the long term. Despite the current wave of cost reductions, leading CFOs in the survey wouldn't dream of paring their cutting-edge employee programs. "There's always financial pressure, and we're constantly trying to take costs out of the business," says Patmore. But these programs are "probably the last things I'd cut back on," she says, noting that such initiatives as mentoring "are very low cost, because it's the people that drive them."
CARGILL: 150 PERCENT RETURNS
What drives workplace policy at Cargill can best be described as "flexibility." "We don't like to institutionalize, mandate, or put things in hard writing," says Galen Johnson, a vice president and controller at the global food-marketing giant, whose 90,000 employees make it the largest privately held U.S. company.
Take telecommuting. When Johnson became director of worldwide audit in 1991, he started opening that department to employees working at home, and was supported by a companywide climate of experimentation. "No one in the organization said, 'No, you can't do that,'" he says. "As long as it produces increased productivity and job satisfaction, that's what it's all about."
It has produced both for Cargill, which is why such experiments as telecommuting, work-sharing, and job rotation for high-potential employees have now become widespread throughout the 950-employee department headed by Johnson and CFO Robert Lumpkins.
A byproduct of Cargill's openness to such arrangements has been strong loyalty. "People here say, now I want to give back so much more to Cargill, because it's done something for me; I want to give 150 percent," says Melissa Dykema, a worldwide audit team leader who works two to three of her five days each week from home, where she's only a short distance from the day-care program her two children attend. When it comes to flexible work arrangements, "the sky is really the limit," she says, adding that more than 70 percent of the employees in her department do some telecommuting after they've been on the job for six months. "And if you have so many employees who feel that way," she says, "you get a lot of value added."
Helping smooth the way for alternative arrangements like Dykema's are several HR liaisons reporting to Johnson's organization, including Lisa Drake. At Cargill--which ranked in the top quartile of the survey in innovation, employee satisfaction, personal and professional development, and quality of life--one liaison works primarily on internal moves within finance and job-posting, while others are more involved with recruiting, training, and salary administration.
Cargill maintains a 90 percent retention rate among salaried finance personnel. But even when an employee leaves, HR liaisons are busy helping improve the finance workplace. A team of senior financial leaders analyzes the departure, why it happened, and what can be learned. "It's not just a raw number that's thrown out" when a departing worker is discussed, says Drake. "I can tell you the ones that hurt and the ones that didn't."
FIRST DATA: MISSION IS THE MESSAGE
The branding of finance at First Data has helped set apart the department's 1,500 employees--across the company, and even nationally. CFO Patmore's so-called Extreme Teams, as she's dubbed these groups of people, are assigned to tasks that exercise "strategic thinking" at the $5.7 billion company. This program helped win her last year's CFO Excellence Award for finance leadership, training, and development.
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