How Centorrino Technologies improves employee experience through an “office nonna”

Centorrino Technologies CEO and chief of people and culture discuss how their values are lived and breathed by their employees.

When it comes to making life as easy as possible for employees, Adam Centorrino, CEO at Centorrino Technologies said leaders should think outside the box, and for the company, it means having an “office nonna”.

Centorrino explained to CRN Australia how the creative idea came about.

“We introduced an office nonna, her name's Barbara, and she's awesome. She's loved by the team,” he explained.

“But the way I looked at it was, we have an external contracting company coming in and cleaning our offices.

“I'm like, let's take that money, instead of having the external cleaner, let’s hire a team member who gives a shit about the company and wants to be here, and now she bakes lunches.”

He said Barbara does everything a real nonna would do like bake lasagnas and be a friendly face to staff when they’re in the office.

"She's creating and fostering a part of our culture, and it's not actually costing much more.

"It's something that employees go, ‘You what? that's awesome, no one's done this before’,” he added.

Centorrino encourages other business leaders to think outside the box.

“Just think of things, do them differently, you will end up with a better result. But if it doesn't work, we would have gone back to commercial cleaning, but it seems to be working just fine,” he said.

Lived and breathed values

Centorrino Technologies makes sure their values are lived and breathed and not just hung on a wall.

Julie Kirk, chief of people and culture explained how the virtues are embedded into Centorino Technologies’ workplace culture, especially during tougher seasons.

“When things get tough and you have to make decisions by virtue of how the business operates and from Centorrino’s leadership as well, those values come front and centre,” she said.

"People start to use that lens to make decisions around am I creating the world that we want together? Am I going above and beyond to service my client? How does this exceed expectations? Those things are coming through.”

“That's a starting point, because that gives people the guard rails about expectations and what is valued around here,” Kirk added.

Kirk explained at the end of the day when people come to work, they want to put in an effort and do a good job.

“For me, people talk a lot about everyone wants different things in work. There is truth to that, but underneath it, everyone wants to belong,” she said.

“They want to come to make a difference. They want to succeed. No one gets up in the morning to do a bad job.”

“If we can tap into that and help people understand how they make a difference and they play their part in the bigger picture, then that ultimately drives a more self standing culture anyway, because people can self orientate and make decisions well informed.”

How to better employee experience

Centorrino said there are two ethos that he tries to live by, the first being that businesses don't seem to understand that friction can cause issues, and work to remove friction.

An example he uses is timesheets.

“In the MSP world, everyone does timesheets and every engineer hates the damn timesheets,” he explained.

“My MSP engineers don't do timesheets because it doesn't matter. There is no value that comes out of those timesheets because they are half fabricated anyway.

“We have found better ways to get the information that we need, so we remove that friction and gone. It's not fun. It's not something we need. So why do it?”

The second piece is not penalising an entire company for an individual’s actions.

“I've heard post COVID, so many of our competitors have reintroduced mandatory office. We still have 100 percent flexible policy,” Centorrino explained.

“You can work from home five days a week. You can work from the office one day a week. You can do it from you can work the office five days a week. You choose; I don't care.”

He said some of his competitors why they are bringing their staff back and they said due to lack of efficiency.

“I'm thinking, ‘where did you get that data from?’. Is it a few people are not as efficient, in which case your tooling is probably crappy, and you need to have better tooling or deal with those individuals, don't put that impulse on everybody just because of your preconceived ideas,” he said.

To improve employee experience, Kirk said leaders should be listening and not shying away from issues, and leaders should be data-led.

For example, Kirk went out to some of the company’s embedded sites to speak to their teams to understand some of the data they received.

“From that [data], we created things like hubs, so that they can go locally and watch Town Halls together and have a pizza and network with each other because they're on site,” she said.

“The ideas are there, sometimes it's hearing them and enabling them. Half the time, my job is to get out of the way and make sure the right people are getting heard to enable things.”