Angus Dorney, director and general manager of Rackspace Australia, says values are the heart and soul of the company’s success and great net promoter scores

Hiring people based on values fit, skills and capabilities – in that order – is an important key to achieving great net promoter scores (NPS) within managed cloud computing company Rackspace, according to its local director and GM, Angus Dorney.

Rackspace stringently adheres to its values in the recruitment process, and it looks for values-fit first when interviewing candidates (it hires only one person for every 17 interviews it conducts) followed by skills and capabilities.

Dorney affirmed that HR is the “most important” shared service within Rackspace, as it plays a key role in maintaining its culture of customer service through finding and keeping the right people.

“We are absolutely a culture-driven company,” said Dorney.

“We take our values very seriously, and those have been the heart and soul of the company’s success over the past 17 years that we’ve been in business.”

Since the company set up in Australia with its first local data centre a few years ago, it now employs close to 100 people (which it calls “rackers”), and Dorney said it leverages the expertise and the technology that Rackspace has globally to help build capability locally, to help establish itself as a leading cloud provider in the market.

“We’ve deliberately built this business in Australia and New Zealand using a mixture of longer-term and experienced rackers globally, who can help establish and maintain that entrepreneurial culture of a well-funded startup, our institutional knowledge and focus on fanatical support, as well as new recruits who have the same approach and share the same values.

“We are absolutely a culture-driven company”

“Our survival relies on being able to provide a great customer experience,” said Dorney, who calls customers its “army of supporters”.

As a result, Rackspace benefits from a “very high” rate of referrals from existing customers locally and internationally, in particular, while its net promoter scores globally and in Australia range from 50 to 60 per cent.

Rackspace has experienced massive growth since it was founded in 1998 by three Trinity University classmates.

Today, it generates US$1.8 billion ($2.3 billion) in annual revenue and employs almost 6000 people across four continents to service some 300,000 customers across 120 countries.

Against a backdrop of increased commoditisation of the cloud over the past 12 months, with cloud price wars between very large global technology organisations like Google and Amazon, Dorney said this has forced Rackspace to zero in on its competitive advantage.

“We probably lost our way a little bit about 12 to 18 months ago, when we started to value the product and the technology too highly compared to service,” he said.

“So over the past six months we’ve really pulled our focus back to our vision, which is to be the greatest service company in the world.”

For the full interview with Dorney and story on how Rackspace creates a culture of competitive advantage through its people, see the June – July 2015 issue of Inside HR magazine. Image source: Hayden Brotchie

Similar Posts