Interestingly over the past 6 weeks, three employees left the company. They left for similar reasons and the 31 remaining employees are more aligned and stronger because of this healthy transition process. These three employees were in dual-roles to provide an opportunity to grow into an area they were passionate about, but there wasn’t enough work in the new area to sustain a full-time position. These employees were excited about creating their own job descriptions for half of their job, but ultimately lost the passion in the core area of the other role of their job. Furthermore, all three of the employees that left saw how aligned the whole company was becoming. The collective motivation to make our mark on the world and do amazing quality work meant a renewed commitment to the company, more attention to detail and more hours, in some cases. These were some of the subtle reasons why a couple of the employees chose to become freelancers. Here is an excerpt from one of the former employee’s blog:

“I resigned from my job about two weeks ago and I wanted to wait until everything was finished before I started blogging again. It’s been a really emotional (ahh damn I’ve gone emo) and stressful last few months for me. I’m sure many people have left jobs before and have gone through similar scenarios. You start getting really combative, you aren’t easily motivated; maybe you’re even unmotivated, you start affecting those who are around you. It can get ugly, and while I was definitely in a bad state of mind, I would like to think I pulled myself together enough to leave on good terms with my former company. After all, it was they who gave me my shot and fostered my learning for all of this stuff.”

Results and Ongoing Measurement
The pain we experienced over the past couple months has made us stronger. I’m glad to report that this story has a happy ending, although you’ll need to drop me an email to see if we have sustained our sense of internal alignment and emanating blissful exuberance. Here’s some of our results:
• The Process Team has implemented improvements between and within departments including ways to give each employee more ownership and voice in our client projects, operations, and company direction. In fact, we used these new processes to involve people at the very beginning of these three new projects. The results are phenomenal. I’m amazed at how much our strategy, usability, functionality, and creative has improved when everyone involved in the project is on the same page:
o Konami – www.musicineverydirection.com/americanidol
o Widmer – www.lemonyourwidmer.com
o CircleHoe ecommerce site – www.circlehoe.com
• Through the internal branding workshop, we found our brand voice and incorporated into the new www.eroi.com to launch 7/15/07
• The company all chose a community service project to get our hands dirty at an all-company urban farm clean-up and planting party at Zenger Farm on 7/6/07
• My favorite result is a personal one. As a business owner, I have an enormous amount of pride and satisfaction of reaching the next level of synergy of this growing family of connected employees accomplishing work we never thought possible.