Forem: Salli Figler

Company Culture?

Salli Figler — Sun, 10 Nov 2019 23:13:09 +0000

So much talk about having the right culture. How to create a positive culture, how to change a company culture, how to fit into the company culture. Executives go to training and have personal coaches to help them create the right culture for their employees.
I recently started a new job at a new company. A bouquet of flowers was waiting on my desk when I arrived on my first day. My manager works so collaboratively. We spend hours together in a conference room on calls, reviewing data and figuring out problems together. The other people in my department are friendly and helpful. We all go to lunch together almost every day.

When I needed to get information that would help me do my job more efficiently, I was welcomed with open arms by the other departments in the company.
The CEO is already shortening my first name and calling me by my childhood nickname, the CFO meets me in the coffee room and teases about how much (too much) coffee we are both drinking. Every other Thursday lunch is brought in for everyone.

The week of Halloween we had costume, cubicle decorating, and pumpkin carving contests. There will be a big holiday party coming up in a few weeks that everyone is looking forward to.
I haven’t worked in a company with this great of a culture in a very long time – maybe even never.
I knew a colleague of mine from one of my prior companies was unhappy and looking for a new job. The perfect job was open, so I recommended her. Within weeks, she had the job. Although we worked in different departments, her desk was close to mine.
I was happy to have her at my new company and she seemed happy as well. She described her old boss at the old company as a “nightmare”. I was so glad she was here now in this new company and new culture. Our lunch group expanded as she joined us almost every day for lunch. She was getting to know other people in the company and came in with a smile every day.
After about a month, she was fired. My manager knew that she and I were friends and gave me the news with sympathetic words. I was so surprised; what went wrong? She seemed happy.

That evening on my ride home, I called her. She told me she was so unhappy and now relieved that she was no longer working for my company. The company with what I think, is the best culture I have ever worked in. And then she said it, “next time you want to bring me in somewhere, make sure you really know the person I will be reporting to”. She then went on to tell me how terrible (even worse than the boss she left) her new boss was. He put up a wall, he wasn’t giving her work and when he did, he did so with no instruction. She felt like he really disliked her. She added that she was already planning on leaving if things did not get better in a short time.

So, what is company culture? Apparently, it is not how the CEO or CFO acts, it is not the free coffee and parties; it is how you are treated by your direct supervisor. The CEO may think they are the one who is setting the tone for all to follow, but not all supervisors and managers do follow. Many probably don’t even realize that they may be making someone’s life so miserable. Your direct boss is the one who is setting the culture for you.
So yes, if you are thinking of recommending your company to someone else, be sure to know more about the boss than the general company culture. And when you are interviewing, ask more than what the company culture is like. Ask about the boss and their management style and their temperament. Company culture doesn’t always get embraced by everyone in the organization and it is often different for two different employees, even if they sit right next to each other.

Nature or Nurture?

Salli Figler — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 18:18:49 +0000

I recently helped my husband move his business from rented office space, back into our home where it all started – a long time ago. His office was located on the second story – no elevators. His business has a great amount of audio equipment, desks, chairs, cabinets, computers, etc. that all needed to be moved out of the rented space.

He had been working on this for a few weeks, knowing the exact date that he had to be totally vacated from this space. I wasn’t really paying much attention and hadn’t even gone to his office to see how he was doing, knowing he was “working on it”.

The weekend before the big move, he and I cleared and readied the space in the house in anticipation of the business occupying the larger room of our lower level. We got rid of most of the furniture, doing a great deal of rearranging and getting rid of items that we really did not need. I felt like we were ready. He lined up his good friends to help on a Saturday, took care of renting a truck, bought a case of water for the “workers”.

I went to his office after my workday on the Wednesday before the Saturday move. When I walked in, I felt like nothing had been done. It looked like a complete mess. Papers and equipment everywhere. I saw very little organization and couldn’t tell the difference between what was going to the dumpster and what was coming home.

Being in this chaos made me uncomfortable. I looked around and talked with my husband about having a better plan. My concern was that his Saturday helpers would be standing around waiting for boxes to be packed. From here, I got much more involved with the move. We had to be ready by Saturday when the truck and friend helpers were coming.

I came to his office after work every evening that week and we worked late into the nights. Since there was empty office space next door, the first thing we did was get everything out of his office that was not being moved – it either belonged to someone else, could be donated, was paperwork that was being stored offsite, or was garbage. We organized these items into different areas of the empty space. This helped us see what was really left to deal with.

He had a massive amount of wires coming through holes in and out of walls and the furniture. He wasn’t sure what was what. I went underneath the furniture and pulled every wire individually, so he could follow it to its source. That took a few hours but at the end, he knew which wires he needed to keep attached to his equipment and which could be cut.

He needed to take apart some of his furniture so it would fit out the doors and down the stairs. When it came time to disassemble some of the furniture, he was ready to just start unscrewing everywhere. I instead studied each screw to see what its purpose was and then knew exactly which screws to take out and which to leave.

He had cabinets that had been placed under a counter, sitting on wooden boxes. He was ready to take a sledge hammer and knock out the boxes so the cabinets would come out. I took out the top drawer and saw how the cabinet was attached to the counter – two screws. Once those screws came out, the cabinets could be pulled away, leaving the cabinets and the wooden boxes intact.

On Saturday, the troops arrived, everything was organized and ready to go. It went better than I (and my husband) ever expected. The truck got loaded, the office got emptied, the trash got moved to the dumpster and the business was moved to our home. That evening my husband expressed his gratitude to me and said he never could have done this without me.

A few days after this, I was thinking about my approach (versus my husband) and comparing it to how I would approach writing a computer program. Think first about the end result you need to accomplish, plan it out before you write it, be meticulous with certain parts and breeze though others, if something doesn’t work right, look at it carefully to see the obvious before trying something else.

I then asked myself this question: Did I become a computer programmer because I had a natural instinct to do tasks in an orderly fashion or did being a computer programmer give me this characteristic that has carried over into everyday life activities? Do others with a technology background, approach everyday life activities the same way they approach coding a new application?

I would love to hear what others think about this question.

Promoted Out of Programming

Salli Figler — Mon, 26 Jun 2017 17:05:28 +0000

How it all started

It all began in 1976 with my mother saying I should be a lawyer. There was no way I was going to spend the time to go to law school after college. “You should go to business school”; there aren’t a lot of women in business school which means there will be jobs when you get out. Hmmm. Ok, I will go to business school and study finance. After all, I did get the “shorthand award” in high school for having the highest grade in shorthand and I do like calculating numbers and am pretty detail oriented…

So, I picked a small college in Rhode Island that focused on business as a major. Well that was pretty boring so after a year I transferred out to the University of Georgia (yes, the very large state school in Athens Georgia). They had a business school with a good reputation and housing on campus that I could live in. At this point, I wanted something different than finance. The program at UGA which combined business with computers sounded pretty good and so I became a business information systems major.

I didn’t really know much about computers and it was a bit overwhelming to go to the basement of a huge building where the computers were housed. They took up the entire 10 or maybe 20,000 square feet of the building with big windows that we could peer into with hopes of seeing our job running on one of the computers. It looked like many large metal boxes with small dials and lots of lights that often blinked – I had no idea what was going on inside. I spent hours in that building and hours with my nose pressed against the glass of the windows that looked in at the computers.

I would do my COBOL programming assignment and bring it over to the computer center on paper and somehow, it was run to see if it worked.

My first job

I graduated from UGA and was hired by New York Telephone. I had the job a few months before I graduated and my roommate was very jealous of my starting salary of $17,500. That was a great salary. I was going into a program for new college grads in the IS department – Information Services Department. Looking back now, “the phone company” was very progressive. The head of the IS department was a woman. Her reputation was that she was tough and you didn’t really want to cross her. I don’t think I actually ever met her.

In this position, I used punch cards that fed into a computer. I was working with Job Control Language (JCL) which was the code that told the computer (a large IBM mainframe) how to allocate its time and space resources among the total number of jobs that have been started in the computer. These jobs ran in the background and were called batch jobs. The code told the computer when to run these types of jobs without the user interacting. A print job would be an example of a batch job.
I got to take my first business trip carrying 3 large boxes of punch cards to a company building in Albany, NY which housed a computer that needed a JCL change. Three of us went and each of us had to protect one of the boxes of cards and make sure they did not get out of order. We slowly and carefully fed then into the computer about 2 inches of cards at a time. The testing took us 3 days.

Programming school

After 6 months, I felt like I wasn’t really programming and didn’t want to lose the COBOL programming knowledge I had gained in college, so I had a frank chat with the boss and talked about how my computer programming skills were being wasted. Next thing I knew, I was in the NY Telephone boot camp program for Cobol programming. That was so much fun; it was like being back in college but getting paid. A group of us went a more casual building in downtown Manhattan every day for 4 months learning Cobol. On Fridays, we got out early which was great since it was summer. I made some great friends in that program. In fact, one of them introduced me to the guy who is now my husband.

Payroll Programming

Upon completion of the COBOL school, I got placed back in mid-town Manhattan in the IS group who was responsible for programming the very complex payroll system that paid over 65,000 employees. I was responsible for the little piece that calculated pay for the non-conventional workers. People who either worked seasonal or temporary jobs.

After writing my program on paper and getting a cursory nod from my boss, I would sit at a bank of Wang terminals and data entry the programming into the “system”. A bunch of these terminals sitting in a row on a table. It was a social place to work but often distracting since you were sitting with other people programming something totally different.

This job took a lot of patience. There was no instant gratification. When I needed to make a change to the program, I would submit my change, then come in the next day to see how it went. If there was a high stack of paper with my name on the first page sitting on the floor, my change did not work. You would get a data dump from the smallest errors – missing comma, wrong slant etc. There were literally hundreds of pages and it often took hours to figure out what went wrong as I read through the stack. Oh, and everyone knew you had made a mistake. I’d correct the mistake and have to wait again until the next day to see if it worked. All the testing was run at night only because the live systems had to run during the day. In the morning, if you came in to a nice quarter inch to half inch stack of paper, you might be golden. You knew that at least your syntax was right and hopefully what you were trying to accomplish worked too. I doubt that some of the personalities who code today would have had the patience that was needed back then.

Looking for the next promotion

I moved around in the payroll programming department and learned quite a bit but after 2 years, I was looking for a promotion to the next step. Turns out, the "next step" was business analyst. This job entailed working with the business person and understanding their requirements for computer programs. It took me out of the actual programming and more into listening and trying to understand requirements. Over the next few years, as I went up the corporate step ladder; I got further and further away from programming and more into the general business world. It wasn’t long before I accidentally slipped into human resources.
My technology experience helped me become the Staff Director of Health and Fitness. The medical director loved the idea of someone who could track information and report out on it. I taught myself Dreamweaver and used it to create a monthly health and wellness newsletter. Same principal as programming – using symbols and not words to format and place text. That was a fun job until the medical director retired and after 18 years in New York Telephone/NYNEX/Bell Atlantic/Verizon, my job got eliminated.

Moving on

Having been a Cobol programmer for payroll helped me get my next job at Fujifilm. They needed someone who understood payroll. I understood the back end and the front end. The payroll system was going to be enhanced by being part of a bigger HR system. Perfect – I knew the back and front end of payroll and I had HR experience. I was now the Payroll and Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) manager. I liked getting back into the data and system work. I understood the concept of tables working together and key fields that tied those tables together. I implemented an E-Time system for managing people’s time. At the time, it was a unique system where the person clocking in had to scan their hand. It was called a biometric hand scanner and I led the implementation and then trained managers and employees on its use. It was implemented in distribution centers in New Jersey, Georgia and California.

I continued my career as a payroll and HRIS manager as I moved to my next job in the reinsurance industry. There was no HR system at all other than an excel spreadsheet that had column after column after column of employee data. After looking at many systems, it was decided I would be implementing the NuView system. It seemed like a great system and a great company to work with. The system got implemented, but it took a very long time. Just when I thought I had a module done, my HR department would decide they needed yet another customization. I was still managing the payroll and now the benefits for the company and trying to do this huge implementation with the software company. No one in the HR department had time to help or test, so I just kept plodding along.

Soon the job became too big for one person and a more technical and experienced HRIS manager was hired. I was happy to have that off my plate and kept my hand in the technical aspect of the payroll system and integrations with provider systems but most of all I was managing people.By the time I left that job, I wanted no part of payroll. Managing payroll meant celebrating Christmas and New Year’s in the office. It meant sitting with IRS auditors, smiling and offering them cake and coffee all day.

My next job was in managing employee benefits. A good job with good people. Not very technical at all, but I was able to use some of my technology experience to put some tasks online like FSA enrollment.

As I write this article, I wonder what came first – the analytical and logical person who made a good COBOL programmer, or the COBOL programmer who learned to be very analytical and logical. Whatever the case, having the skills of a programmer has been a positive part of my life.

Every now and then, I see a job for a COBOL programmer. The pay is great and I wonder if I could ever refresh my skills enough to go back. There is something sentimental about this but the logical me moves off that thought quickly.