I think it's transferable because you've got to realize—. I think a
recent Harvard Business Review article, a guy from Stanford wrote the
article, he estimated that we save fifty million dollars a year in
turnover costs. The idea [is] that if we did not retain as many
employees as we do, that we would have to have loss of productivity,
loss of function, while a person is out or after a person has left. We
would have to spend money training people, hiring people. Then that
person, once they're on board, you're paying them for the first six
months, and you're not getting any value out of them. If you add up all
those costs that it costs to replace people, it makes very good business
sense to try to set up a program that encourages people to stay. I guess
I look around at some of our benefits. I think one of our best benefits,
to me, that makes a reminder to people
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that SAS cares about them is our break station areas. Every floor has
got a small kitchen area that's got free soft drinks in it, juices,
coffee, tea, some crackers four or five types of crackers, peanut
butter, things like that. People can go to any time of day to get a
drink or a cup of coffee. They go down the hall and get one and go back
to their desk and work. This is no charge to the employees for that, and
yet it costs us less than a dollar a day to supply that, which is
extremely cheap. The soft drinks we pipe in, every building has miles of
pipe, plastic pipe that we actually have a large syrup room in the
basement. Well it's a logistics problem, if you think about it. If we
had canned or bottled drinks, it would be a logistical nightmare hauling
it up the elevators into the breakrooms everyday, which is how we
started. As we began to build buildings out here, we realized that that
was very impractical. We used to have these big syrup containers that
they would haul up and stick under the sinks to pump up. When we built
Building J, we came up with the idea—somebody came up with the idea, it
certainly wasn't me – of having a syrup dispenser in the basements that
just piped up syrup up the pipes and have a CO2 dispenser that pumps up
CO2. That's how we do our buildings now. It's very, very inexpensive
once you get to the size that we are, to be able to have a lot of cost
savings that you can bring into these break stations. Those break
stations are a daily reminder that SAS cares about them.