Posted by Kathy Zwickert, Chief People Officer and JoAnne Taylor, Sr. Director of Human Resources, NetSuite
At NetSuite, employee development is about far more than just promoting job skills and professional development. It’s about the entire employee experience.
It’s one reason our San Mateo headquarters was just named one of the Bay Area’s Top Workplaces for the fourth consecutive year. Conducted by the Bay Area News Group, publisher of The San Jose Mercury News, The Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times, and various other newspapers and digital media properties, the results are based entirely on feedback from an employee survey.
Indeed, soliciting employee feedback is a fundamental requirement to address the full employee lifecycle. We take that very seriously. In addition to the Top Workplaces survey, we survey all employees at least once a year for input into ways to improve their NetSuite experience and work-life balance. That feedback and the new programs we create to address it are what help us keep a culture of innovation and an entrepreneurial spirit even as we’ve added nearly 1,000 employees to the San Mateo office in the past year.
For example, the physical workspace is one of the most important facets of the employee experience and we’ve been hard at work in San Mateo, renovating all floors, upgrading conference rooms and adding new wall art. We have plans to add two new floors by the end of the year with two new kitchens.
Healthy Body, Healthy Workplace
Among the updates to the San Mateo office is a newly renovated workout facility, another step in our efforts to address another key component in the entire employee lifecycle – their physical health. This year, we’ve introduced a new smoking cessation program, free health and wellness sessions complete with biometric screenings, while continuing to offer flu shots, fresh fruit and healthy drinks in every office.
Something Bigger
Employees also seek to be part of something bigger than themselves, and while NetSuite continues to disrupt the traditional software industry and experience phenomenal growth, we also continue to encourage volunteer work by our employees and support nonprofits around the world through NetSuite.org, our corporate citizenship program, which provides free and discounted software to qualified grantees. You can see the evidence at our Hackathon 4Good program, where NetSuite employees and customers developed custom cloud solutions for our grantees during our annual user conference.
In September, our signature SuiteVolunteers pro bono program, which provides opportunities for our employees to provide technical and professional skills to NetSuite.org grantees, was honored with an All Star of Service Award. The award, given at the Points of Light and A Billion+Change 2014 Conference on Volunteering and Service, recognized the creative and comprehensive initiative and our overall engagement in the Billion+Change program. Similarly, our SuiteImpact team gives back to the community and we offer employees 16 hours a year to step away from the office and participate in SuiteImpact Team community service activities, or personal volunteering of their choice. It benefits our community while providing social interactions and team building.
We’re thrilled to have again been named a Bay Area Top Workplace and know that beyond the workspace, benefits and community building it’s due to the dynamic, hard-working and diverse group of employees that work here. We plan to keep promoting a workplace where creativity can flourish, excellence is recognized and people are invested every day in the work that they do.
For more on working at NetSuite, please see our NetSuite Careers page and NetSuite Career Opportunities.