Diversity & Inclusion, Employee Experience, Leadership & Management
When Aron Ain takes to the stage this week at the Great Place To Work® For All™ Summit, he’ll be revealing a few of the secrets to the success of his company’s award-winning company culture.
The CEO of the Boston-based Kronos, which makes human capital management software used by businesses to manage workforce logistics, says that establishing trust is the first thing every business leader needs to do if they want to improve their company culture.
Trust also happens to be one of the key pillars of Great Place To Work’s mission to help every company become a great place to work for all. It’s one of the guiding principles that Aron has used to lead his company and help it get rave reviews from Kronos’s employees each year.
These same employee reviews helped land Kronos onto the list of the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For®, as well as the Best Workplaces in Technology™, which Great Place To Work compiles in partnership with Fortune.
Enabling your employees to trust management is so important, Aron says, that he has devoted an entire chapter to it in his book WorkInspired, which was published in 2019. The book is not just a how-to manual on creating a winning organizational culture, but it’s also one of the best leadership books to be published in recent years.
“Deep, abiding trust among team members is vital to building an engaged workforce,” Aron says in the book. He reveals a story about an employee who came to him with news a recruiter contacted him for a very attractive job at one of Kronos’s competitors.
“Deep, abiding trust among team members is vital to building an engaged workforce.”
Aron gave the team member his blessing and advised him to schedule an interview. The reason? Aron trusted him and wanted that employee to feel that he could trust him, too. As Aron explains, “we believe that we don’t own people’s careers, even if it means leaving them free to leave Kronos and pursue opportunities elsewhere.”
That philosophy has helped Kronos keep employee retention rates extremely high—and it also informs a unique approach to talent management by seeking to re-hire former employees, which it calls “Boomerangs.”
Says Aron: “We have hundreds of Boomerangs at Kronos. Giving them the freedom to seek out their own career path establishes trust, and ultimately makes them more loyal and committed to the company.”
Learn more about how Kronos has created its unique culture of trust by reading WorkInspired, or by tuning into the livestream from the mainstage of the 2020 Great Place To Work For All™ Summit at greatplacetowork.com at 11 a.m. PT on Wednesday, March 4, 2020.
