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Working Women: National Winner of Best Employer
Karen Boes Oman • President
Picture if you will a fairy tale land where workers’ pockets are filled with above-average wages and their families made secure by health insurance, 401(k) accounts (with a 25 percent match, thank you), even pretax health-car and child-care accounts. Workers can take as much time off as they want-even entire summers-without sacrificing the fruits of the good life. Should they require rest from their toils, they can fly off to one of the kingdom’s two outposts: a two-bedroom condo in Florida and a town-house with loft and fireplace on a bucolic Minnesota lake.
This dreamland does indeed exist – in Minneapolis. In just six years, Karen Boes Oman, the 46-year-old president of Certes Financial Pros, has built a $5.3 million temporary-help firm with a shockingly simple formula: Make workers happy.
The story began in 1990, when Oman, a corporate CPA, grew weary of 60- to 70-hour workweeks. “I would come home, cook dinner, then open the briefcase at 10 PM and work until 2AM.” She quit, hoping to do temp work, but found that local placement firms paid only $12.50 an hour. She instead struck out on her own, landing assignments through contacts at her former employer. Before long, she had more jobs than she could handle. She launched Certes Financial Pros, a placement agency for temporary accountants, in March 1994.
Along the way, Oman forged her own mold. She pays her accountants anywhere from $30 to more than $50 per hour, and they don’t fill out time cards-too demeaning, Oman says. Instead employees summarize accomplishments and hours in a brief monthly report. Benefits, including health insurance and 401(k) plan, stay intact even if workers take up to six months off. “It’s the lazy approach to management,” she says. “If you ask people what they want and give it to them, they stay with you.”
Oman says all of this generosity and flexibility actually saves her money. She estimates that she spends half as much as other temp firms attracting new clients because her stable employee base keeps accounting clients coming back.
Oman is clearly on to something. Daryl Strey began working for Certes Financial Pros in February 1997 as “a means to make a few bucks when I was between ‘real jobs,’” he says. He landed a full-time position that September, but missed the flexibility and variety. Less than a year later he hurried back to Oman’s fold. Says Strey: “This is on of the best ‘real jobs’ there is.”
Oman's Advise
“I ask prospective contractors how they plan to balance their work and home lives. Do they want a part-time job? Do they mind a long commute? Do they want to work overtime for extra money? Once you begin to help employees design the kind of work life they want. You see that different schedules can be just as much a part of the fabric of work as, say, different salaries.”
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