2. Look through the article again. In which lines are these ideas mentioned?

1 money is a less important motivator than a caring company

2 giving employees more choice how they organise their time away from work

3 the disadvantages of offering perks

4 creating an atmosphere and culture which employees feel they belong to

5 examples of up-market perks offered by technology companies

6 the increased benefits being offered to employees

3. Look in the article to complete these word partnerships.

For example: personal problems

1 personal …………….... 5 common.....................

2 financial..................... 6 social.....................

3 top..................... 7 corporate.....................

4 general..................... 8 employee.....................

4. Complete these sentences with word partnerships from Exercise 3.

1 He has resigned after having a lot of..........................................this year.

2 Building up..........................................is important with unemployment at a record low.

3 Our..........................................is in charge of running the company and for

making joint strategic decisions with the CEO.

4 The new CEO transformed the bureaucratic..........................................to

profit-minded entrepreneurship.

5 Companies who pollute the environment are ignoring their ethical and …………….. …………… .

6 The..........................................should get the biggest bonuses.

7 We need to use logic and..........................................not our emotions to

make this decision.

5. Discuss these statements.

1 Companies should be fully involved in the lives of their employees.

2 ‘Sick days’ are a perk.

3 A pay rise is better than a job in a caring company.

READING 3

1. A) Look at the headline of the article. What do you think it could be about?

b) work in a group and think about unusual motivators that a company could use.

c) read the text and compare your motivators with those which are used by SOL company.

Dirty business, bright ideas

Walk into SOL City, headquarters of one of northern Europe’s most admired companies, and it feels like you’ve entered a business playground. Located in renovated film studio in the heart of Helsinki, the office explodes with colour, creativity and chaos. The walls are bright red, white and yellow. Smart in yellow uniforms, staff hurry about in $60 million-a-year cleaning company carrying laptops and the latest Nokia mobile phones, as well as heavy-duty vacuum cleaners. Laptops and cell-phones are standard equipment for all supervisors at SOL, freeing them to work where they want, how they want. Inside the offices there’s almost no room for paper. So the company stores all critical budget documents and performance reports on its Intranet.

Few people dream about becoming a cleaner. But that doesn’t mean cleaners can’t find satisfaction in their work. Liisa Joronen developed SOL Cleaning Service 11 years ago, out of a 150-year-old industrial empire owned by her family. Slim, charismatic brunette of 50, back from a 90-mile keep-fit cross-country ski run in Lapland, says that she has thrown out traditional management styles and hierarchies in favour of people motivation and the strict auditing of targets. She believes that fun is the key to satisfaction. She has brought fun to the workplace in a nation noted for its engineering innovation, but also for its people’s shyness and introversion. This most extrovert of Scandinavian business leaders sometimes dresses as a sunflower and sings at sales meetings if it will help. The company’s name is from the Spanish for sun, and its sun logo has a curved line turning it into a smile. This yellow happy face is on everything from her blazer to the company’s budget reports.

Individual freedom is another point that brings satisfaction to employees. Freedom means abolishing all the rules and regulations of conventional corporate life. To help staff towards independence of mind, Liisa has abolished territorial space, such as individual offices and desks, and organized a communal area similar to a social club. It has a colourful playground, with trees, caged birds and small animals, a nursery, a billiard table, sofas and modern art kitchen corners. Staff sit anywhere. There is not a secretary in sight. The boss makes the tea if everyone is on the phone to the field teams. The company has eliminated all perks and status symbols.

This is a company in which people work when they like. Headquarters can be empty in the day and busy in the evenings and weekends. One headquarters worker, keen to go to midweek tango classes, was switching tasks with a colleague. The person supervising the cleaning of Helsinki’s metro was working from home. ‘People’s creativeness is restricted by routine and traditional office hours. As work becomes more competitive, so we need more flexible, creative and independent people,’ Ms Joronen says. Liisa tells 3,500 staff at 25 branches to kill routine before it kills you. At SOL Days, Japanese-style motivation sessions, she has the whole hall dancing, and urges staff: The better you think you are, the better you will become.

Lots of companies talk about decentralizing responsibility and authority. At SOL it’s a way of life. The real power players of the company are its 135 supervisors, each of whom leads a team of up to 50 cleaners. These supervisors work with their teams to create their own budgets, do their own hiring and negotiate their own deals with customers.

Liisa Joronen believes in autonomy, but she’s also keen on accountability. SOL is fanatical about measuring performance. It does so frequently and visibly, and focuses on customer satisfaction. Every time SOL lands a contract, for example, the salesperson works at the new customer’s site alongside the team that will do the cleaning in the future. Together they establish performance benchmarks. ‘The more we free our people from rules,’ Joronen says, ‘the more we need good measurements.’

Lifelong learning is among the key points that the company pays attention to. SOL’s training programme consists of seven modules, each of which lasts four months and ends with a rigorous exam. Of course, there are a limited number of ways to polish a table or shampoo a carpet. That’s why SOL employees also study time management, budgeting and people skills.

Half the country sees Liisa as a revolutionary boss, and several television programmes have been devoted to her. The other half thinks she is crazy.