Create a Great Place to Work

National Instruments believes in providing a work environment where creativity and innovation flourish. The open cubicle environment at NI, which includes all management, has no closed doors. By maintaining access and communication, employees not only share their input with management but also maintain a consistent view of the company's mission and vision.

Employee Collaboration Tools
In 2010, NI groups across multiple departments upgraded systems to increase collaboration, streamline employee access, and boost company information resources.

NI Talk
NI Talk has been extremely successful. In 2010, NI sought to help employees collaborate more efficiently across teams worldwide. At the request of Phil Hester, senior vice president of R&D, several collaboration tools were tested and evaluated. In May, the company selected a tool called Social Business Software from Jive, internally branded as NI Talk.

In the first nine months of use, NI Talk had more than 3,200 users, more than 1,700 groups, 15,589 documents, and 7,119 discussions generating more than 26,000 responses.

NIWeb
NI Talk added collaboration tools to the company's already robust intranet site known as NIWeb. NIWeb houses information about groups across the company such as frequently asked questions, contact names, and processes. Significant facts about NIWeb include the following:

• More than 85,000 unique pages
• Approximately 160,000 visits to NIWeb search each month
• Exactly 339,354 unique page views in just one month
• 21,576 new pages created in 2010

Systems Upgrade to Introduce Employee Self-Service
The Oracle Applications are a set of configurable software applications used at NI to run a large portion of the business. Nearly 3,000 NI employees, including those in marketing, sales, manufacturing, finance, R&D, and support, use the applications. In July 2010, NI upgraded the Oracle Applications system to the newest release. The system upgrade was essential to ensure software and hardware support and increase capacity to enable the company's future business growth.

A significant portion of the upgrade was to the human resources application to enhance employee self-service and introduce manager self-service capabilities. Employees and managers are now able to update their personal information and view work-related information more efficiently. These features are the foundation NI needs to move closer to paperless operations and provide additional self-service capabilities in the future.

Employee Events
NI offices worldwide celebrate the traits that make NI unique – innovation, generosity, playful spirit, teamwork, and pride – during internal events throughout the year that help employees share successes, mark significant milestones, and just have fun. Employee Appreciation Week kicks off the year in January at NI corporate headquarters and throughout the spring in other regions of the world including NI United Kingdom & Ireland, NI Germany, and NI Switzerland. These events focus on the NI culture and its employees with events such as external speakers, a health and wellness fair, panel discussions, playful spirit days, and a traditional NI deck party. Employee Appreciation Week is a great way to celebrate the NI culture and begin a new year.

NI includes the employee's immediate family in several events to help shape the culture. NI corporate headquarters hosts an annual company picnic for NI employees, friends, and family. In 2010, the picnic was held at Six Flags Fiesta Texas amusement park in San Antonio and NI reserved the entire park exclusively for the enjoyment of the NI community. To keep the event environmentally responsible, the NI Green Team created a website to coordinate carpooling to the park. Also in 2010, NI Hungary held its annual family days event where nearly 1,000 employees and family members enjoyed a variety of games and entertainment.

NI corporate headquarters also offers the biennial “Bring Your Kids to Work Day” event as an opportunity for employees to show their children where they work and give them a glimpse of NI. The day includes science and technology presentations, educational demonstrations, a campus tour, and fun games. A similar event, called Kids Day, is held annually at NI Hungary while NI Germany invites employees' families to the office for a summer party.

Global Employee Engagement
In 2010, NI branch offices in Mexico, Venezuela, and Colombia met in one central location to raise awareness about Planet NI activities in Central and South America. Through the Planet NI program, employees worldwide are helping provide access to technology to thousands of engineers in developing countries to help them achieve economic prosperity and sustainable development. The purpose of the meeting was to ensure all branch offices in this region knew about the Planet NI initiatives and were given a chance to participate.