Kevin Price, Host of the Price of Business on Business Talk 1110 AM KTEK (on Bloomberg’s home in Houston) recently interviewed Jay Goldman.
About the interviewee
Jay Goldman is a managing director at Klick, focused on the company’s innovation mandate and on exploring opportunities in new channels and markets. He was previously head of marketing for Rypple, a venture-backed startup acquired by Salesforce in 2012 and now known as Work.com. Jay is also the co-author of the New York Times Bestseller The Decoded Company (Portfolio/Penguin) and the author of the O’Reilly Facebook Cookbook. He has been published in the Harvard Business Review.
Tell me about your firm (number of employees, location, type of companies you work with, etc.).
Klick Health is the world’s largest independent digital health agency, laser-focused on creating solutions help biotech and pharma companies bring their life saving therapies to market. Every solution hinges on Klick’s in-house expertise across the digital universe – strategy, creative, analytics, instructional design, user experience, relationship marketing, social and mobile.
Established in 1997, Klick has teams in Chicago, New Jersey, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Toronto. At last count, we had almost 400 full-time ‘Klicksters’ but we’re growing quickly. In fact, we expect to fill 100 new roles in 2014. For more information on Klick, go to http://careers.klick.com. Follow Klick on Twitter @KlickHealth.
Tell us how you show your employees that you care?
As a talent-centric company we’re focused on engineering our ecosystem and creating a center of gravity for brilliant minds.
We’ve designed our office to foster creativity and collaboration. Our railway-car-inspired Klick Café is a great example of that with its fully-stocked ice cream freezer, Starbucks coffee valet, and video games. We also have yoga, Muay Thai and strength training classes and we’ve just opened a squash court.
It’s important to customize the work experience for our employees, which why we built an enterprise operating system called Genome that provides a customized experience for workflow, goal-setting, reporting, and training. It also has a social media platform, peer recognition, and a philanthropic program called Klick it Forward that last year alone provided employees with credits to buy 265 malaria nets, fund 386 microfinance loans and donate almost 1,300 goats, pigs and chickens to African villages – almost $100,000 in donations.
What mistake do businesses MAKE? when it comes to cultivating a strong relationship with your employees?
I think many companies commonly confuse corporate culture with employee perks. At Klick, we don’t call things like free trips, free food and our in-office yoga studio as contributors to culture. We have all those things but they don’t define who we are as a company. They’re simply our way of showing gratitude to our employees and saying ‘thank you.’ If a company wants to cultivate a strong relationship with their employees they need to start with a culture based on an accepted belief system that shapes how they see the world, how they act on their beliefs and subsequently how the world sees them.
Why is it important for your firm to make employees feel valued?
We genuinely like our people and we want them to be happy and love coming into work each morning, so we can all do our best work. From Day One, Klick was designed as a center of gravity for brilliant minds that puts culture at the top of our hierarchy. By attracting and keeping the best people in an environment that allows them to do their best thinking, we’re consistently performing for clients. In turn, our clients reward us with loyalty and growth, which we then reinvest into our culture and future-proofing our business. It’s a win-win for everyone.
Contact information:
www.klick.com AND www.decodedcompany.com
