February 20, 2004 8:00 PM

Employer good will = Employee happiness = Employee retention
Posted by at 8:00 PM

As the job market turns around (however slowly), many employed workers will be examining their job situations and their current work environment. One thing that employees will be looking at is how happy they are in their current position and company. In Inc Magazine's February issue, there is an article which examines how Happiness Pays at one company.

PaeTec Communications is fiercely dedicated to two things: worker contentment and inexorable growth. The company's relentlessly focused CEO takes personal responsibility for both....

Its dramatic growth is the product, in part, of a corporate culture that has remained the same from day one. Everything at PaeTec revolves around respect for the employee. The word customer may be a little more prominent in the mission statement, but PaeTec puts employees first--and then watches them voluntarily put customers before themselves....

If you put in a day, or a week, or a month, at PaeTec, you begin to realize what people are actually trying to keep alive here. You can list off all the elements of the company's success, but the intangible assets are the ones that matter most to people here. Everyone knows that, in some way, the company is still in its infancy, unspoiled, a small and fertile garden. They tread lightly through it. It isn't just the financial ownership that drives this care. It's the sense nearly everyone has that he or she is working in a place with an unusual kind of goodwill that flows down from the top and then rises back up from the bottom. You have the sense that each employee is doing everything possible, going to any length, not to spoil that goodwill.