IT Exec Shares Passion for Cars with Employees
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While some executives may use vacations, dinners or even cash as rewards to employees who perform exemplary work, Eldad Matityahu believes in providing employees with a rewarding experience.
Always looking for ways to keep his workers motivated, Matityahu, president of Net Optics, a manufacturer of network access and monitoring solutions, recently started a monthly reward program that gives employees a chance to drive one of the company's stable of Mini Coopers.
"I wanted to give my employees some fun and excitement," Matityahu told ITTechNewsDaily. "This is just our way of trying to bring some fun into what we do everyday."
Each month, two employees — the one deemed most productive by management and another chosen by colleagues — are selected to forsake their regular vehicles for the opportunity to drive the Net Optics Mini Cooper every day for a month. The cars bear the Net Optics logo and are painted red, white and blue in an Evel Knievel theme.
"It shows we will jump through hoops for our customers," Matityahu said.
Being able to drive the cars, that sport license plates with phrases like "CyberIT" and "SpyNet," seems to be revving up the company's 120 employees, Matityahu said.
"They love it," he said. "It lets them know we care about them."
Net Optics, which has more than 10,000 clients, offers a comprehensive suite of monitoring access solutions that enable complete and permanent visibility into any network link.
For Matityahu, who founded the Santa Clara-based company in 1996, creating a reward program around cars was only natural.
"As a kid, I always played with cars, and then I started collecting them," he said.
Today, Matityahu owns 15 classic and luxury automobiles, including a 1955 Chevy Bel Air, a Ferrari 612 Scaglietti, a 1914 Buick Speedster and a Koenigsegg CCX.
"They are all very unique and different," Matityahu said of his fleet.
In another effort to combine his passion for autos with his work, Matityahu recently had employees help rebuild a 1923 Ford Phantom Roadster while at the office. The car was taken apart, and the Net Optics staff spent time drawing schematics and developing their own parts.
In the end, the team was able to rebuild the car, which now goes on display at trade shows to lure in new customers.
"They look at the car and from there they start asking about what we do," Matityahu said, of the value it has brought to the company.
While the car rebuild didn’t fully relate to their daily activities, Matityahu said that the project — and others his team has done — helps his employees stay creative.
"It teaches them how to think outside of the box," he said.
And those skills, Matityahu said, are critical as the company moves forward with creating innovative solutions that enable customers to gain complete visibility into their networks using intrusion detection and prevention systems, protocol analyzers, firewalls and network probes.
Matityahu believes the effort is paying off.
Since 2008, he said business has increased between 30 and 40 percent each year.
"We are growing and doing really well," he said.
