Catania Enterprises’ company culture is based on the premise that freedom begets creativity.
Ray Catania, CTO, of Catania Enterprises, is a mechanical engineer who has always been passionate about creating innovative solutions. He and his wife, Stefanie Catania, CEO, started their business to help other small business owners and inventors turn their ideas into functional products with an artistic flair.
Before leaving his corporate engineering job in 2018, Ray recognized that the traditional 9 to 5, 40-hour workweek (which has morphed today into an 8 to 6, 50-hour workweek for many technical companies) breeds stress in employees, from the “TGIF syndrome on Fridays” to “I hate Mondays” attitude. After his first son was born, Ray was permitted, by the company he was working for at the time, to reduce his schedule to a 36-hour, four-day workweek, giving him more time to spend with family. A nice by-product of that decision was that he was much more efficient in his work, and a lot happier, too.
The Catanias realize how a happy work-life balance sparks creativity instead of putting out the fire. Having learned firsthand how much more efficient and happy employees can be when given a flexible schedule, the couple encourages employees to design their weekly schedules in order to be more successful in both their work and their personal lives. Because employees are more productive with this type of work arrangement, customer satisfaction is often exceeded.
Therefore, balancing employee flexibility with meeting customers’ needs is key.
“We will never put our employees in a situation where they are being worked to death or aren’t being treated fairly by us or one of our customers,” said Stefanie. “On the other hand, we will never let a customer down and we always ensure their needs are put first whenever possible”.
“Most importantly, we want our employees to feel the freedom of the job. If they want to work from a mountain top somewhere in Colorado for two months to go skiing, they can. We will work it out.”
Sometimes face-to-face meetings are necessary, or assemblies need to be made in one location. Many times, however, meetings can be held via Zoom.
The couple has always enjoyed traveling and realizes that changing the scenery once in a while can trigger creativity. Not sitting at a desk every day at the office.
“A lot of the ideas that we have, we get during travel. We will see something in a museum or see a part on an airplane that can give us an idea on how to solve a problem for a client. Or we will be travelling through an area of the country and see a shape of a building which could be the inspiration for the next design of a product we will be working on,” said Ray.