Surge of Employees at Gates Foundation Brings New Challenges

At the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation here, staff members have adopted a new motto: “Elbows in.”

The phrase was one the chief executive’s mom used when guests crowded the family dinner table,

but these days “elbows in” has become Gates’s catch phrase as it hires new employees at a rate of almost five per week.

In the year since Warren E. Buffett announced his plans to give more than $30-billion to the foundation, Gates has been on a hiring spree, bringing in 156 people and raising its total number of employees to 402. And more employees are expected soon.

The Gates foundation is building a 12-acre campus near the Seattle Space Needle, a move that was planned before the Buffett gift, but it won’t open until 2010. So for now, the staff surge has made for cramped quarters.

“We’re packing people in,” says Candy Marshall, the fund’s chief human-resources officer.

Like many Gates personnel, Ms. Marshall shares her office with a colleague, and the foundation has moved the team that oversees its global-health grants to a building five blocks away from its headquarters on the shores of Lake Union.

But while that move has relieved some of the strain, it raises another problem. With the staff more spread out, Ms. Marshall says, it is important to maintain a sense of camaraderie. To that end, the foundation created the “holy cow” awards. During monthly wine-and-cheese gatherings, staff members give black-and-white bovine statues to colleagues in other departments for “acts of inspiration,” says Ms. Marshall.

The award’s name is another phrase stolen from the fund’s chief executive, Patty Stonesifer. After Mr. Buffett’s announcement, Ms. Stonesifer described her reaction as, “Wow, Warren has made an incredible statement. And, holy cow, we have a lot of work to do.”

In another attempt to build team spirit, the foundation created a three-day orientation, called “Starting Gates,” for newcomers. It includes a film produced for the 80th birthday of the father of Bill Gates about the family’s values, a visit to a charity that has received Gates funds, and a class on how to craft a grant — which is attended even by people who will work in administrative positions unrelated to grant making.

“In days past I would’ve called [orientation] ‘Nuts and Bolts’; it was where the pens and pencils are and how do you turn on your computer. Today, it is very much what is the work of a foundation,” explains Ms. Marshall.

One of the reasons for Starting Gates is that most of Gates’s new employees have little foundation experience. They usually come from charities, government jobs, or pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.

Gates is not averse to hiring people from other philanthropies, but with its diverse needs, it says it wants to bring in employees from a broad range of backgrounds.

While the fund receives about 2,800 job applications a month, it usually recruits people through “very targeted searches,” says Ms. Marshall.

Thanks to its well-known name and prestige, the Gates foundation says it has no trouble attracting talented candidates. But it does have difficulty at times matching the salaries of, say, top business executives it wants to woo. “We’ve lost some great candidates because of that,” says Cheryl Scott, the group’s chief operating officer, who says the salary disparities can be “hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Like all nonprofit groups, the foundation is required to set compensation at a level that is commensurate with peer organizations. Gates officials also say that, beyond the legal requirements, as the nation’s wealthiest nonprofit group the foundation has a responsibility to keep salary figures relatively modest.

“One of our guiding principles is to stewardship within our social sector and not artificially raising prices. We’re very conscious that if we at the foundation start paying large salaries it could be really detrimental to other foundations and nonprofits,” says Ms. Marshall.

Tadataka Yamada, formerly GlaxoSmithKline’s chairman of research, who now oversees Gates’s global-health giving, earns the largest amount, $613,000.

Visa Demands

Another obstacle to the hiring spree has been obtaining work permits for foreigners. The majority of Gates grants are to aid poor nations, so the fund wants to employ people from those areas. But the huge demand for visas for highly skilled workers, so-called H-1Bs, has stymied the effort. This year, the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Service reached the quota on H-1B applications on the first day it began accepting them.

“We are now in this awkward situation where we have positions where we know we need and want people with developing-country experience and at best in today’s situation, we won’t be able to do a visa application for them until April of 2008 and actually have them come to work for us until October 2008,” complains Ms. Marshall.

Aside from meeting its own needs, the foundation says it is trying to make sure it is responsive to grant seekers despite the changes behind the scenes. “You are always balancing aspirations against the realities of getting the work done,” says Monica Harrington, a Gates spokeswoman.

According to Holli Jordan, a fund raiser at Catholic Relief Services, Gates’s effort has paid off.

“Our experience has been that they offer timely feedback and notice of whether our proposals are under consideration,” she wrote in an e-mail message to The Chronicle. The organization, in Baltimore, has received more than $5-million for disaster relief from the foundation.

Despite the challenges, Ms. Marshall and Ms. Scott say the Gates Foundation is well prepared for the future.

Having studied companies that have expanded quickly, such as Starbucks, and relying on their own business experience — Ms. Marshall previously worked at a technology company, Ms. Scott at a large health-care corporation — the two officials say Gates has a strong “chassis” on which to add new parts.

“We can’t find a malaria vaccine, for sure, between the two of us,” says Ms. Scott, “but we can help the organization think in a systematic way about how to build itself.”