POSITIONING

A COMMUNICATIONS MANAGEMENT NEWSLETTER

How can corporations and agencies keep top talent in today’s extraordinarily competitive playing field? It’s a question we’re asked all the time.

Fundamentally, we believe there is one overarching answer: Make the right hiring choice and the employee will stay with you. Do the hard work up front, not later.

We’re so convinced that the roots of retention lie in quality hiring that we’ve outlined six strategic steps that we believe can lay the foundation for long-term employee relationships.

Candidates who are truly top talent want to be wanted. But, not by just anybody. They will examine you and your business just as closely as you examine them and their resumes. They will be asking tough questions, both of the HR professionals who play a key role in the hiring process and, ultimately, of the person who will be their immediate supervisor.

Truly top talent can pick and choose. So if you want a certain candidate, you will be obliged to "romance" him or her--make the candidate feel not just wanted but important.

A sign-on bonus, packs a powerful psychological wallop. It’s nice to be able to say: "I received a sign-on bonus as part of my new job offer." It may turn the tide your way.

Time and time again, the candidates tell us they want to do compelling, challenging work for a company or agency that looks like a winner. Other issues, such as compensation, appear much lower on the hierarchy of needs.

That means that before you go after top talent, you need to be honest with yourself about your organization. Is it admired and respected for the quality of its work? Does it have a solid reputation in the field? You can be sure that your prospective new hires will be taking a solid long, hard look at this. That means you should too.

Before you meet with a candidate, prepare for the obvious questions:

What corporate projects or agency accounts will I work on?

What is a typical workday?

Whom will I work with and for?

What is my promotion potential?

Also prepare a preemptive conversation that addresses questions candidates may be reluctant to ask but definitely want to know. For example:

What happened to the person who had this position before me?

Does your agency or department have a high turnover rate?

Is the client or team leader I’ll be working for "tough"? In what ways?

Is there a chance for an equity position in the company?

Above all, have a detailed job description at your fingertips. You can’t have a productive discussion without it. (Yet many interviewers overlook this obvious point.)

You have a need. You want to meet it as quickly as possible, so you push the candidate you want as hard as you can. Then the whole process stops. You have other things to do. The candidate will just have to "understand" and wait.

That’s a mistake.

In hiring top talent, it is always important to focus on the candidate and his or her issues. That person already has a job, commitments, a career. Job change decisions are not made lightly. One of the best ways to lose a top candidate is by pushing too hard. Another is by temporarily disappearing.

Give the candidate a clear idea of how long the process will take from first interview through decision-making to hiring, orientation, and start date. Doing so will put you ahead of anyone else who may be trying to recruit that person.

Top talent is always looking for opportunities to grow. That means you need to make your professional development opportunities truly attractive. Make them real.

The more you can assure them that they will be able to move freely within your organization, to have both domestic and international transfers (if possible), to be exposed to new ways to grow, the better chance you will have that they will join you and stay with you.

Hiring is no longer done cookie-cutter fashion. The days when filling a banking job meant finding a banker are gone. Agencies today are hiring from the corporate side. Fortune 500 companies are hiring former entrepreneurs. Internet and software development companies are signing on the best and brightest, with little concern for their previous job or even educational experience.

Taking an open-minded approach gives you a much broader palette of people to choose from. The challenge is that it may take longer to find the best possible candidate in this expanded talent pool.

You’ll find, however, it is a worthwhile effort. Making a time commitment at the start of a new employee relationship, and maintaining an awareness of what top candidates want and need, will result in a hiring choice that promises not only success in the short-term but also that sought after long-term relationship.

A team approach is on top of the list in terms of employee retention. In fact, we only want to retain people who are a good part of a team, both within the department and in the larger agency-staff team environment. In fact, to underscore that point, I’ve recently changed the compensation in my department so that 20% is related to teamwork behaviors with the agency and other vendors.

It becomes self-reinforcing. High-performing teams create the best work in the business. That enhances their marketability, of course. They will get offers. But as I saw when I was at Levi’s, employees will choose to stay because they feel they can’t do better than being part of a powerful team that is doing cutting-edge work.

I think equality is a big part of the equation. For instance, I don’t have a title because no one at Chandler Chicco does. Actually, we do have one title: "team leader," but different people have it at different times. We let the client help choose who the leader will be on an individual project.

People seem to like this ‘no titles’ policy, and because they are less preoccupied with promotions, they are more focused on doing what’s best for the client every day. That philosophy is also shown in our ‘no-walls’ office design. We have 25,000 sq. ft. of open space overlooking the Hudson River. Employees appreciate having a nice place to work.

Plus we do a lot of other things for them. We provide a free catered meal from a different restaurant every day. We bring in a manicurist and a fitness trainer. We offer massage therapy. In the last four years we’ve had only five-percent turnover, so it all seems to be working.

For us, a top performer is someone who demonstrates superlative professional skills in a way that is consistent with our corporate value system. In other words, it’s not enough that an employee be equipped with a strong work ethic, or even outstanding creativity. No person, no matter how skilled, can deliver full value for our clients unless they are capable of mobilizing the entire capability of the agency. And the only way an employee can do that is by buying into the values that have shaped our organization for more than half a century.

Certainly you can and should use such tools as bonus programs and training opportunities to retain your top talent. But first, last and always, winners like to win, and to be among other winners. We find the best way to attract and keep top talent is to create settings where our best people from around the world are brought together to sharpen their skills and rekindle their enthusiasm.

It’s also extremely important to manage the entire mix. You must clearly understand who your top performers are. Equally, when someone is dragging down the average level of performance, you have to be willing to make the tough decision and replace that person with someone better. Managing the overall mix . . . it’s a manager’s most important and most difficult job.

When we hire at Southwest, we look for people who can take fun seriously. All of the company’s recruiting and hiring practices are based on that, because, as it says in our book Nuts, humor can help people thrive during change, remain creative under pressure, work more effectively, play more enthusiastically, and stay healthier in the process.

We retain top employees by viewing them as real people, with real needs and real emotions, whose satisfaction is valued and respected. In fact, instead of having a Human Resources or Personnel Department, we have a People Department. The People Department hires for attitude and trains for skills.

Our company also believes strongly in rewarding, recognizing and applauding originality and individuality. Our philosophy in terms of employee retention involves saying ‘thank you’ often, celebrating our people from the heart, making heroes of employees who really embody the company’s values, and celebrating their contributions. And we really celebrate . . . balloons, photos, trophies, the whole nine yards.

We offer a deferred stock sharing plan as part of our year-end compensation. Everyone in the firm who has worked 1,000 hours gets shares, including receptionists and secretaries. We include everyone because we don’t have anyone who is unimportant.

Our auditors determine the value of these shares every year. We have a five-year vesting for the stock, but all shareholders get immediate voting rights, which means an immediate voice in the company. We also give year-end cash bonuses because I believe that good p.r. people are good entrepreneurs, and like performance-based rewards.

It seems to work. Our senior staff has average longevity with us of more than 10 years, and that figure is held down by the fact that we’ve grown and had to hire a lot of new people.

Basically, the way I view retention is that the assets of the company go down the elevator every night. If we want to keep those assets, we have to treat them right.

First, all our employees have the same title: "Storyteller." Second, we recognize that this environment is right for some, but not all, people. Consequently, we always let our Storytellers know that if they are not happy, if this culture doesn’t feel right to their soul, then they should leave and that we will help them any way we can. It’s like we used to say during the hippie days, "If you love something, let it go. If it returns, it’s yours forever. If not, it was never yours."

Most of the specific things we do are relatively small. For example, our start time is 8:30; however once a week everyone can take a ‘late day’ and start at 9:30. Also, our Storytellers get five "Summer Fridays," essentially days off with pay--however, they are on call. We don’t try to control our people with gifts. We have good computers, full-pectrum lighting, generous benefit packages, fair pay, and time off. We also offer a mandatory one-month sabbatical after five years of service."

When good employees get scarce, employee satisfaction becomes a dominant issue. Almost every p.r. agency and corporate communications department is now talking the talk about employee satisfaction. But according to Thomas L. Harris, a consultant and a professor at Northwestern University’s Graduate School of Integrated Marketing, they aren’t all "walking the walk." His 1998 "Thomas L. Harris/Impulse Research Employee Satisfaction Survey"--which polled employees in dozens of leading p.r. firms--.revealed significant satisfaction gaps.

The "wish list" and the reality:

95% of respondents want challenging tasks and a sense of accomplishment; 87% said that they get it.

94% want a good working relationship with supervisors; 78% said that such a relationship exists.

92% want sufficient time for personal and family life; only 49% said they had enough time for the folks and home and personal interests.

85% want to be rewarded for extra work with an opportunity for higher earnings, but only 34% said that that opportunity existed.

As attracting and retaining employees has risen to the forefront several recent publications delve deeper into the issue.

In "THE CATERPILLAR DOESN’T KNOW: How Personal Change is Creating Organizational Change" (Free Press, 1998). Kenneth R. Hey and Peter D. Moore painstakingly trace the turnabout from a focus on wealth to one on quality of life priorities and issues to a massive social revolution that has been transforming the values and actions of employees, customers and even voters.

Along the way, they urge employers to rewrite "the social contract" with employees so that it will specify "more time to spend on family and leisure, a halt to excessive stress or pressure due to understaffing, and a chance for personal growth and development on the job."

Such rewriting, the authors say, has already led to: alternative work arrangements, including flex time and telecommuting; extended leaves of absence "to soothe anxious and overstressed employees"; long-term-care additions to company insurance programs to help employees care for aging parents; keeping the company cafeteria open late so employees can order food to take home.

Two other current books applaud work-related training; skills and knowledge can be taught and are transferable in "MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES FOR THE 21^st CENTURY" by Peter F. Drucker (Harper Business, 1999): and "FIRST, BREAK ALL THE RULES: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently" by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, (Simon & Schuster, 1999.) Both decry training aimed at "changing people." Great managers surveyed by the Gallup Organization over the past 25 years insist that "people don’t change that much" when it comes to inbred talents. "You cannot teach someone to be cool." [Or a self-starter, we might add.] "It’s potentially disastrous to suggest that the only way to become more effective is to try to change your first nature. Don’t waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in."

Management guru Peter F. Drucker basically agrees: "Waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence…the energy and resources --and time--should instead go into making a competent person into a star performer. Work on improving your strengths. Place yourself where your strengths can produce performance and results. Remedy one’s bad habits--things one does or fails to do that inhibit effectiveness and performance… Overcome intellectual arrogance and work on acquiring skills and knowledge needed to make one’s strengths fully productive."

Predictably (but plausibly), Buckingham and Coffman say: "The talented employee may join a company because of its charismatic leaders, its generous benefits, and its world-class training programs, but how long that employee stays is determined by his relationship with his immediate supervisor…"

"If your relationship with your manager is fractured, then no amount of in-chair massaging or company-sponsored dog walking will persuade you to stay and perform. It is better to work for a great manager in an old-fashioned company than for a terrible manager in a company offering an enlightened employee-focused culture."

Drucker also observes: "For the first time in human history, individuals can expect to outlive organizations. This creates a totally new challenge: What to do with the second half of one’s life?"

"In a knowledge society, we expect everyone to be a ‘success.’ But this is clearly an impossibility. For a great many people there is, at best, absence of failure. For where there is success, there has to be failure. And then it is vitally important for the individual--but equally for the individual’s family--that there be an area in which the individual contributes, makes a difference, and is somebody. That means having a second area, whether a second career, a parallel career, a social venture, a serious outside interest, all of them offering an opportunity for being a leader, for being respected for being a success."

To Drucker, "Managing oneself is a REVOLUTION in human affairs…For in effect it demands that each knowledge worker think and behave as a Chief Executive Officer…The emergence of the knowledge worker who both can and must manage himself or herself is transforming every society."

Are you ready for that challenge?

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