Employment Security

Analysis of SAS Institute's HR practices and their contribution to firm performance:

1. Employment security: SAS Institute employs very few external workers or contract programmers. Full-time employees feel stronger loyalty and safety without worrying about their working conditions, so their sense of teamwork increase correspondently. Moreover, although avoiding outsourcing may not save short-term costs, it helps to guarantee high product and service quality, which benefits the company in the long run.

2. Selective hiring of new personnel: With outstanding reputation, SAS is able to select applications prudently from abundant candidate pool. Major recruiting criteria include fitting southern-style cultural, willingness to help others - both colleagues and customers, and capability to be independent and creative. This guaranteed its fun office and harmonious working environment, as well as highly talented workforce.

3. Self-management teams and decentralization: SAS Institute's organizational structure is both flat and informal, and the decision-making pattern is bottom-up. Vice presidents of each functional department and director of project teams can report directly to the CEO, Dr. Goodnight. Since the company's product strategy is quite broad and long-range, and every product idea is welcomed even if it didn't tightly fit the existing product line, self-management teams can respond to customer's need more quickly and specifically, realizing the customer-driven development process.

4. Comparatively high compensation: Besides competitive base salaries and emphasized internal promotion opportunities, SAS provides munificent retirement plans and annual bonus. The bonus is not entirely based on company's financial performance, but sometimes also serves as a tool to support certain department. It is also not judgment of performance during the last months or few weeks, managers filed bonus form at the end of each quarter. High and fair compensation encourages SAS people to not only stay with loyalty but also perform efficiently. For instance, financial rewards are less stressed in the sales organization and account representatives are not paid on the basis of sales commissions. Without burden pressure of sales quotas, staffs can better undertake an orientation toward taking care of the customer and building-long term relationships, which in part accounts for SAS's amazing high customer renewal rate and fairly small cancellation rate.

5. Extensive training: New employees are offered orientation programs on the company history and its vision. Abundant internal technical trainings are given specifically regarding their assignments and position, while very little outside training is given,