Employee Appreciation at Kronos

Just about 15 years ago I was still a newbie at Kronos. Sure, I had successfully deciphered my first boss’s hand signing as he spoke like the fast-talking FedEx guy, but I still had a lot to learn about workforce management. Come to think of it, I’m not sure we even called it workforce management back then. Anyway, we were a $200-million-dollar software company and our big product ran on Windows. We also were introducing a client-server product called Workforce Central. The cloud wasn’t even a twinkle in the sky’s eye yet…

One day during that Spring of 2001, I received an inter-office paper memo congratulating me on my one-year anniversary with Kronos. Shortly after that I saw the author one late afternoon while leaving the office. He stopped his car and I thanked him for the note. He said “thank you for the work you do.” Simply thanking employees for the work they do has been going on here for a long time, and that guy wasn’t the CEO. Then. He is now, and he was just recognized as the 18th highest-rated CEO of large organizations in the U.S., based solely on employee reviews, and as a top 10 CEO in information technology. It’s a little surreal to think “I work for one of those CEO’s” like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn, Marc Benioff of Salesforce, Sundar Pichai of Google, and Tim Cook of Apple. Yeah, we work for one of those guys…

Aron, congratulations and thank you for the work you do at Kronos!