Page 205 - How America's Best Places to Work Inspire Extra Effort in Extraordinary Times

192B RE-ENGAGE

to talk to a helpful person, it pushes them to an FAQ on a Web site or
tells them to send an e-mail somewhere.
We realized there might be significant opportunity to turn 180
degrees away from the denial of service model to one of world-class
service. But if we flipped our service delivery on its head, we needed
to hire the right people and create an environment where they really
wanted to work hard for us and our customers.
Jackson: Even though we are a capital-intensive company, we are really
a service company. When something goes wrong for a customer, technol-
ogy doesn’t matter . . . it’s people that matter. We’ve never had a call sys-
tem—push one for this department, two for that department. We invite
customers to call us at four in the morning and see that a smart person
will answer the phone within three rings. That’s Rackspace.

Q: Part of your approach to employees is to create what you call
a “volunteer organization.” What does that mean?
Weston: We want Rackers to volunteer to work hard for us and for
our customers. We want them to find great satisfaction serving our
customers. We know it’s impossible to have angry people doing great
service for a sustained period of time. In the fall of 1999 we coined the
3
term “ fanatical support,” which we initially used as an employee
brand, but then turned into our market brand.

Q: You’ve grown from a start-up to over 2,600 Rackers, includ-
ing adding 1,000 in the last 18 months. How do you continue to
maintain high levels of engagement as you’ve moved from that
initial passionate group 10 years ago?
Weston: I think it starts at the work-group level. That’s the
wellspring—that’s the place to start. You can have a great corporate
culture, but if a Racker has a bad boss, the corporate culture doesn’t
matter much. We also realized that senior leaders have a role to play
in creating and maintaining a high-engagement workplace. Lots of
permission is given to employees to be productive in ways they think
best. This is a company that trusts people, and the senior leadership
here has a lot to do with creating that culture of trust.