by Donna Deeprose
Can this be the right place?
you ask yourself as you drive up to the SEI Investments headquarters
in Oaks, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia. It certainly doesn't
look like a financial center. What it resembles is a factory complex
-- its two buildings, a one- and a two-story, both of brown and
gray clapboard, are studded with red-trimmed windows and joined
to each other by flyways spanning pedestrian walks.
What's inside is a real eye-opener. Each building
is a vast open space, filled with furniture on wheels grouped in
various arrangements; each desk topped by a computer whose cable
hook-up dangles in red coils from the soaring ceiling. The entire
space is bathed in natural light streaming through the windows that
seem much bigger from the inside.
The physical plant is designed to make rearrangements
easy. To move one person or a whole group requires no packing --
just unplugging the equipment, rolling the furniture off to its
new location, and plugging it all in again. With SEI's investment
services and asset management businesses constantly growing and
evolving, that happens often.
But even more important is the message the open
environment sends to employees and visitors.
"The physical plant is saying, 'Look, we're
open-minded,'" declares Mark Samuels, senior vice-president
of Corporate Marketing and Communications. "You work with a
team, you can arrange your desks however you want. If you are going
to take a temporary assignment, we'll make it easy for you to move
your stuff. If a group bulges, maybe the group next to it can contract
a bit to make room," he explains.
While open environments are almost de rigueur
in high-tech industries, SEI's set up is a trailblazer in the financial
services world. And, it's a lot more than trendy icing on a traditional
cake for SEI, which has over 1,000 employees worldwide and annual
revenues of close to $400 million. At about the same time as it
moved into its current office space, SEI dropped six or seven layers
of management from its organization chart and scrapped the position
of secretary entirely. So even executives type their own letters
and no one -- not even the founder and chairman, Al West -- has
a "gatekeeper" to hide behind. Speaking of the chairman,
his desk is out in the open with everyone else's.
SEI people relish the opportunities for communication
that the environment provides. "It used to take two meetings
-- back and forth between secretaries -- to set up a meeting,"
Samuels says, "Now, I can walk over to the person's desk and
have that meeting when I think of it. It's way more productive."
But what about privacy? "It's true, you wind
up foregoing privacy for efficiency," he admits. But you get
used to it, he says, and live by different rules of etiquette, which
include tuning out what is none of your business. If he needs to
give negative feedback he'll probably take the employee into a conference
room, but he says he's comfortable at his desk talking about salary,
cutting a deal, or even discussing a remodeling project with his
wife.
The different rules of etiquette also mean not
abusing the open space. Just because you can see people doesn't
always mean you can talk to them. If someone is busy, Samuels uses
hand signals, gesturing, "Call me."
The open space; the clusters of desks; the sitting
areas and conference tables, dropped here and there; and the casual
way of communicating all reflect another important part of the SEI
culture: the emphasis on teams. At SEI, when people talk about teams,
they are usually referring to ad hoc groups formed to solve a problem.
Important changes at SEI can start with something
as simple as people getting together at lunch and coming up with
an idea. After such casual brainstorming, the group pulls together
enough resources to make a case for its point of view and finds
the right people to sell it to.
Samuels has plenty of illustrations. After a couple
of banking clients expressed an interest in taking their investment
vehicles onto the Internet, a team formed to investigate how widespread
that interest was among the whole client group. That led to building
a web site that can be customized to each client.
Another team recognized and tackled a problem
of restricted career options for service employees in the Mutual
Funds Services Group. Made up of a cross-section of employees with
different backgrounds and at different levels of seniority, the
team developed a career path for service people in that discipline.
Samuels is currently part of a team that is creating
a new research position. This team originated when Samuels and others
shared their frustration over a lack of research in the company.
First, they pulled together a larger, still informal group to confirm
their concern. Members of that group developed what Samuels calls
a point of view -- a statement of the problem as they saw it. In
brief, they contended that not enough research occurred and what
did occur was underutilized, inadequately shared, and in the hands
of people without the necessary experience to analyze it. On that
basis, they pulled together the cross-functional team that is currently
drawing up a job description for a new research function to be funded
by pooling resources carved out of the budgets of team members.
Project teams at SEI run the gamut from formal
groups, mandated and staffed by the executive committee to teams
that arise spontaneously out of shared need. Some of them have formal
leaders, others don't. "If you asked the research team who
the leader is, I guess they'd point to me," Samuels says, "but
we don't really have a need for that. Someone else stepped forward
to organize meetings and get meeting rooms--things like that. I'll
lead discussions, but the group makes the decisions. The leader
is a facilitator in our culture."
The notion of consensus is deeply embedded in
SEI culture, Samuels maintains, although that doesn't mean there
won't be strident debate within a team. But in the end, he insists,
you know you are there to reach a conclusion, so you have "the
good spirit to go where the majority, modified by expertise, suggests
it's appropriate to go."
Perhaps, the most surprising thing about SEI Investments
isn't the open physical plant, the easy communications or the team
culture. It's a word Samuels uses to describe the attribute of the
people.
"People at SEI," he states emphatically
and without embarrassment, "are nice."
Now that's a word you don't expect to hear in
business anymore. Maybe SEI has discovered something truly radical
-- that nice guys can finish first.
Donna Deeprose is a business writer and training
consultant.
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