Compaq trusts in people power

By ADAM GIFFORD

Compaq New Zealand has put 160 of its contract workers on to the permanent staff, boosting it to 380 people.

The move is a victory for managing director Russell Hewitt, who took over in November after heading systems integrator and service company Computerland.

It took six months to get Compaq's international management to agree - head count is a closely watched measure in IT companies.

Putting employees on a permanent footing makes good sense in today's competitive market for IT talent.

While the Employment Relations Bill was a factor in Mr Hewitt's thinking when he began the process in February, he said it was a minor one.

"I did that to create a culture of creativity. If you are going to have a culture, you have to treat people with fairness.

"We want to treat them as if they are absolutely critical to our company and we want to treat them as one. I don't want to have a split voice when I speak to my people."

Cultural factors were also taken into account in designing Compaq's new headquarters at the Viaduct Basin, which Auckland staff moved into yesterday.

"We've taken 240 people from two buildings and put them into one with an open staircase right through the building.

"I think that will create open communication. Rather than using e-mail or phones, people can just jump down the stairwell," Mr Hewitt said.

"We also decided we needed to be more nimble, more flexible, quicker in our decision-making. That is facilitated by having virtual teams for our accounts."

He said e-business was creating new challenges for management. Projects and decisions which 18 months ago might have taken six months or a year must now be finished in two or three months.

"There must be speedy decision-making, quick assessment of risk, creative thought about what is possible - Is this sustainable? Is this scalable? Can I move it on quickly?

"We need people who look outside the dots - the why as opposed to the how. We have guys who can do the how."

Mr Hewitt said corporate and Government customers were looking for e-business solutions, after a slow start to the year when Compaq's sales were carried by strong growth in the consumer and small and medium business sectors.

"The corporate customers are starting to get more demanding. There's a sense of urgency out there.

"Projects put in place last year had a specific Y2K goal. Now the companies are saying they've made these investments, make them work.

"The application development centre in Christchurch is really busy, with projects for companies here and in Australia.

"It's advertising for staff overseas, which it has never had to do before."

Mr Hewitt says Compaq New Zealand, which has a turnover of more than $250 million, is being given considerable autonomy to develop as a New Zealand company.

"I've been given a free hand to organise the business. The markets are moving at pace and the advantage of coming from outside is you're not bringing any baggage - you can walk in, see the situation, see how the market needs to engage you and get it done."

That autonomy relies on credibility bought by making the numbers each quarter - which Compaq has achieved by some cost cutting, lots of hard work and a strong product portfolio from the high-end Himalaya servers to handhelds.

But while the company has regained the overall No 1 spot in the New Zealand PC market in the last quarter figures, it is still - with 18.3 per cent market share -just behind rival Hewlett Packard in desktop PCs. In the server market, one in two Intel-based servers sold is a Compaq.

Mr Hewitt said staff had performed miracles to bring products into the country when huge worldwide demand was creating shortages of some components.