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The best ever: P. Bradford Cheney President and CEO of CME (Hot Firm #36 for 2018), an engineering firm headquartered in Connecticut that refuses to be affordable and mediocre.
By LIISA ANDREASSEN Correspondent
“I f we cannot grow fast enough to provide someone with an opportunity to grow within CME, I am willing to write a letter of recommendation to help them move on to the professional role they deserve,” Cheney says. “I get a lot of disbelieving looks when I say it, but I mean it.” A CONVERSATION WITH P. BRADFORD CHENEY. The Zweig Letter: Benefits are evolving. Are you offering any new ones due to the changing demographic? P. Bradford Cheney: The greatest change we’ve made in our benefits was to go to an undefined vacation policy. Every- one in the firm is expected to take at least three weeks off each year. You can take more with the approval of your su- pervisor. Taking less than three weeks is discouraged. As we started to grow coming out of the 2009 meltdown, our staff, on average, got younger. There were a couple of issues that started to pop up regularly. Young people would join us straight out of school and struggle to get a few days earned to take a summer or Christmas vacation. As younger staff
got engaged, they would stop taking vacations for a year, to allow for a honeymoon. Talk about adding stress to an al- ready stressful change! Two things became obvious to me. First, it was unreason- able to think that young people didn’t need or deserve vaca- tion time as much as senior staff; and secondly, if we wanted to put our money where our mouth was regarding a focus on delivery of value as opposed to quantity of perspiration, then why shouldn’t we allow people to coordinate leave with their supervisor, rather than some arbitrary additional one- and-a-half days off for every additional year worked? Think about that, the people whom you pay the least you expect to work the most. With a onetime payout for all outstand- ing vacation, it permanently removed a big liability from our balance sheet and more importantly stopped the feel- ings people had of being cheated if they lost vacation time for not using it by the end of the year, or just as undesirable, jamming in vacation days at times that may be bad for proj- ect delivery just so they didn’t lose them.
THE ZWEIG LETTER Febru
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