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MARCH 17, 2000

NET JOURNAL
By Scott Kucirek

Getting to Know My Staff Is Making Me Fat
I eat two lunches a day with new employees -- and I end up digesting amazing information about them


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Building a company is murder on a guy's figure. Look, I never had a problem before. Then I started a campaign to build culture here at zipRealty.com by having lunch with each new employee. This was manageable until we hired a flood of people. Now I go to lunch twice a day to keep up. On 10 days in the last three weeks, I've had back-to-back lunches.

Actually, I'm happy to sacrifice my waistline. Now that zipRealty is growing so fast, these lunches are the only extended block of time I have with most newcomers. I relish these times and would never give them up. They make people feel valued and give me insights into remarkable talents and qualities I might not discover casually anymore. A recent double-lunch day is a case in point.

Last Tuesday, my first lunch was scheduled with Jennifer (not her real name). We headed to a great local deli. The trip over was my first chance to talk with her since she joined the company. She was a little nervous ("Lunch with the president -- I must be on my best behavior") till I explained the ground rules: no business talk, the employee picks the place, the company picks up the tab, conversation should center on the new employee's life, and the occasion should be fun.

While we ate, I discovered that Jennifer was a skilled pianist but hadn't played in a while because she couldn't afford a piano. Periodically, she had run off to the University of California at Berkeley's music school to use one of their instruments. That was her only chance to play. No one in the company had any idea she had this impressive talent.

We chatted for an hour and headed back to zipWorld, as we affectionately call our headquarters here in Berkeley. There, I met my second lunch guest, Karen (not her real name, either). Luckily, she wanted to eat somewhere else. All the restaurants around here know me. I feel it's rude not to eat, so I ordered again. I've become a master of the two-stage lunch: a salad and drink the first time, half a sandwich or soup for the second. I don't want to outgrow my wardrobe too fast.

Same routine. We start chatting, and lo and behold, Karen also turns out to be a classical pianist -- an instructor, in fact, who was planning to move her grand piano to her new place in the Bay Area from the Northwest, where she lived before. Bingo. I tell Karen about Jennifer's background. She had no idea that they had something so important in common. They worked in the same department and had even commuted together a couple of times. The subject hadn't come up.

After that, they started to talk about making music together. This budding friendship is nice for them, of course. It also furthers one of my goals: To avoid a hierarchical culture where some see themselves as kings -- and others as pawns. Jennifer is a recent college grad, while Karen is older and a manager. When colleagues build ties that transcend status -- and goodness knows, we try to keep our structure as flat as possible -- they're more likely to cooperate and not fall into an "us vs. them" mentality. There's too much work here for that. It's a pernicious tendency that plagues most companies, though.

After lunch No. 2, I headed back to the office, determined not eat until tomorrow. Alas, what should greet me but an invitation to dinner from a partner who was in town. What are you gonna do? Time to order that treadmill. See you in two weeks.


Scott Kucirek is co-founder and executive vice-president of people and culture of zipRealty.com, an online real estate brokerage. The company's Internet site and online real estate agents let people complete the entire purchase or sale of a house via the Web. The company's Web site is zipRealty.com, and you can e-mail Scott at Scott@zipRealty.com
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