6
How to Win the Talent War
Picture this: A major financial services organization has an information technology (IT) staff of 1,500 across multiple locations. While management wants to reduce costs and boost performance, there is dissatisfaction in the ranks. This scenario is so typical that it could apply to half the readers of this book, maybe more. This particular company's previous attempts at transformation didn't work, leaving its employees disengaged and cynical about the future.
Management still had high hopes. Through process transformation, it revamped all project management and IT processes, leading to efficient and consistent ways of working, which led to confident and predictable IT service delivery. Management also wanted to initiate a high-performance culture while raising the bar on expected skills and behaviors, especially increasing IT professionalism and knowledge sharing. Finally, it hoped to build engagement in its transformation program.
With the help of consultants, management settled on a strategy to create specialized communities of practice within IT. It brought in key stakeholders and identified the areas of high potential as communities of practice targets. The idea was to deliver business benefit as soon as possible. These communities of practice would then be integrated with the business's usual processes.
Right off the bat, management realized it had to identify and engage the right people fast to lead the practice communities. It knew many were already in demand elsewhere. It also needed to secure initial buy-in and support. Once up and running, it wanted to keep the community agenda manageable and business-focused. Finally, management insisted on the inclusion of all employees into at least one community.
This was at least the company's second pass at revamping its IT workforce, and it didn't want to replay previous failure. Fortunately, this time it achieved results it was happy with. Specifically, it
- Replaced inefficient processes and earned external accreditation
- Improved throughput of service delivery
- Significantly increased knowledge sharing between IT professionals and the various teams
- Experienced a 10 percentage-point improvement in levels of employee engagement and satisfaction
- Improved recruitment and rebalancing of permanent-to-contractor roles
- Achieved strategic workforce development and proactive management of talent
- Enabled transformational change
This company's experience leads me to wonder why its previous efforts at workforce transformation failed. I'd also like to know how it is doing since these initial results were reported. Their experience shows how difficult it is to gather and organize a collection of individuals to perform the mission of the organization. Getting it right is not a sure thing. Remember, you're dealing with people here. As I noted previously, workers have lives outside of work; lives that impact their performance for better or worse.
Many industry pundits contend that data is the most valuable asset and one that is continuously growing by the hour. I'm a huge believer in the value of data; we rely on it all the time. Still, talent—the people you hire to staff your operation—is by far the most valuable asset a customer-obsessed business can have. And unlike data, it is not an asset that is continually growing. To the contrary, there is a global competition for the best talent, a competition companies like yours probably want to win. Customer-focused companies have an insatiable craving for the very best talent they can find and then become maniacal in leveraging that talent through social collaboration.
Talent is an all-encompassing term for your ideal employee—technically, culturally, in every way that is important to your team and to your customers. You will have to pin down what the term talent means for your organization—the textbook definition from human resources probably won't suffice for a dynamic, customer-driven organization. Better to work with your recruiting team, those who are actively engaged in finding and attracting talent, to understand specifically what that means for your company. While the term talent is intentionally general, your application of it needs to be specific to your needs, culture, and values.
Everybody has an opinion on talent. Let's get the caveats and disclaimers out right up front. Everybody may be created equal in principle, but that is not the case when you are looking for talent to staff your operation. You need people who not only bring the specific skills to do the job, but the outlook to mesh with and contribute to your organization. This will not be just anybody.
Similarly, there is a difference between a gifted employee and an engaged employee. No matter how gifted an employee may be, if he or she is not engaged in what your organization is doing and how it works, the value of that employee's gifts will be reduced. In short, don't settle for skill sets at the expense of a cultural fit. In the previous chapter, you read about the dangers and costs of a disengaged employee. In this chapter, you'll learn why you want to seek employees who will be engaged or, at the very least, who are gifted and can become actively engaged.
Don't just look for really smart people, the high IQ and extremely high IQ folks. Sure, it makes for exciting TV shows like Scorpion, but it doesn't always translate well to the office. Instead, aim to hire for high emotional intelligence. People with high emotional intelligence make better team players, managers, and leaders. According to research conducted by Annie McKee on behalf of Harvard Business Review, they are better able to deal with stress, overcome obstacles, and inspire others to work toward collective goals. In the same way, people with high emotional intelligence manage conflict with less fallout and build stronger teams.1 Finally, they are generally happier at work.
What McKee describes as emotional intelligence can also be seen as basic good social skills and manners. This was the kind of stuff we all should have learned from our mothers as they shipped us off to kindergarten. Does anyone still remember a book that came out over 30 years ago—All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum? It's actually still available on Amazon; apparently its lessons have withstood the test of time.
However, many managers, McKee observed, lack even basic self-awareness and social skills. (They obviously didn't pay attention in kindergarten.) As a result, they don't recognize the impact of their own feelings and moods. How then are they supposed to adapt to the demands of today's fast-paced world? Even worse, they don't demonstrate basic empathy for others. As a result, they don't understand people's needs, which means they are unable to meet those needs or inspire people to act. Does that sound like any managers you've ever worked for?
You may think that some positions, usually technical in nature, don't really require emotional intelligence. Yet every position to some extent is social. Most employees are not trapped in their cubicles; usually, they are part of a team and are expected to attend meetings. All of this involves collaboration, conflict resolution, compromise, and similar social skills. If you are aspiring to become a customer-focused organization, you want people with higher emotional intelligence. Finding them can be tricky. It requires sufficient emotional intelligence on your part and then guiding personal interviews that can make these capabilities apparent.
Up to this point, this chapter has focused on what a customer-focused organization wants in terms of talent. That's only half the equation. The other half entails what people want most from a good job. A good job, as Gallup defines it, is one that gives a person the amount of work he or she needs, but also defines their relationship with their community, their city, their country, and their whole world as they understand it. That definition, however, was researched and written over 10 years ago and the results published five years ago. A good job now has to include so much more: work-life balance, giving back, the ability to make a difference, and the list goes on.
A 2015 report on millennials from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that three out of four millennials reported that work-life balance drives their career choices.2 And many companies are indeed starting to offer flexible work schedules, work-from-home policies, and job appraisals based on outcomes and deliverables.
However, in an article published in the Harvard Business Review in February 2016, author Tracy Benson found that even flexibility may not be enough to motivate and retain millennials.3 Businesses will have to go further to keep these workers truly engaged, she continued, starting with adapting management and communication styles to engage millennials and improve productivity and outcomes across the board.
As it turns out, it is rare to find millennials who intend to spend their entire career with one company. Chalk this up to the changes between the career-oriented workers of the past and the self-identified millennial change agents of today. Most young workers focus more on what they can achieve for themselves—and, as important, for the world around them—than on building a corporate career. Clearly, these are not the self-centered, self-absorbed, selfish young people as some have characterized them. They like to take risks and make bold moves forward, and just as important, they care about their community. But whether you agree with them or not, they are the key to winning the crucial coming jobs war, according to Gallup. How key? Eighty million plus, the largest census cohort size in history, and bigger by far than the baby boomers, whom marketers spent decades wooing.
Meeting millennials' interests in socially relevant work is not difficult. verynice, a Los Angeles-based design agency, engages in 50 percent for profit and 50 percent pro bono work, a business model that its founder, Matt Manos, developed as a senior at UCLA. It's about more than donating money. verynice asks a challenging question, which is a very millennial thing from the start: Which is worth more—donating $100 to charity or five hours of your expertise (which took years of effort and training) to help them build something better? Of course, not all companies can make such an effort sustainable, but the verynice model for giving back has huge potential. Another model to admire is Salesforce's Pledge 1% initiative, of which Bluewolf is a member. These types of programs are about supporting a stronger community and serving beyond yourself, an idea that resonates strongly with today's incoming workforce.
As a member of Pledge 1%, Bluewolf has an internal initiative called “Pack Gives Back” (as in Bluewolf Pack—our employees—give back) to support those types of efforts. In response to the growing talent gap of technical skills training in local communities, Bluewolf has committed to dedicating 1 percent of our resources to educate, empower, and enable youth through digital literacy guidance, personal and professional development, and mentorship. To drive the message further, we encourage employees to contribute 20 volunteer hours per year toward Bluewolf-sponsored activities. Of course, we've added a gamification twist to spur employees to contribute more of their time; Bluewolf will award a matching grant to those who have contributed the most time to their chosen nonprofit, and billable employees can earn utilization hours for their time spent volunteering.
Before we started this program, many of our employees were already volunteering. Pack Gives Back is a way for us to amplify their individual efforts and make an even bigger impact on our community.
Attrition: Curse or Blessing
Sometimes attrition can be a blessing, such as when an employee you didn't want decides to leave, hopefully giving you ample notice. More often, attrition can be a curse, as when carefully cultivated employees leave for someplace else. Either way, attrition costs you. It is expensive to find, onboard, and train employees and nurture them to the point where they are fully productive.
Attrition is also inevitable. Some managers mistakenly think they can prevent attrition by blocking contact with headhunters, thereby stopping them from raiding their best employees. They don't realize that anybody worth hiring already has their résumé posted on LinkedIn and other social sites. If you really want to fend off the headhunters, run a great operation that truly engages its workers. It's not all about money; it's about engaging your employees and being responsive to them.
If you need confirmation, a Gallup study released in 2015 found that about 50 percent of the 7,200 adults surveyed left a job to escape their manager (Figure 6.1). In other words, they were driven away not because they were underpaid or not promoted, but because they had a bad manager.
Figure 6.1 Gallup's “State of the American Manager”
So what do bad managers do or not do to drive away employees? They fail to communicate with their workers personally, sincerely, and substantively, and not just about target goals or revenue targets. In short, workers want real communication.
The researchers found that workers whose managers hold regular meetings are three times more likely to be engaged—that is, feel involved in and enthusiastic about their jobs. Workers said they want to be in contact with bosses on a daily basis, and not just about sales targets or an upcoming presentation. They want their manager to take an interest in their personal lives, too.
In fact, just over half of the survey respondents gave the highest agreement rating to the statement: “I feel I can approach my manager with any type of question.” These are the workers who are actively engaged. By comparison, roughly a quarter of respondents said they did not feel comfortable bringing up personal matters with their managers. They may otherwise be model employees, but somehow they feel a barrier between themselves and the company.
Jim Harter, chief scientist for Gallup's workplace and well-being research, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “Employees who feel they can communicate openly tend to place deep trust in their bosses.…[Those workers have] an element of certainty in the [supervisor-subordinate] relationship that's really powerful.”4
Setting job priorities and goals is another area plagued by problems, but with huge potential for improvement. Workers who feel like they're given little guidance or understanding about what's expected of them are uncomfortable. Just remember the lessons of the employee culture; your employees want certainty, and clear expectations have to be a part of that. In the Gallup survey, 12 percent of workers strongly agreed that their manager helps set work priorities, and those workers tended to be much happier than those who scored their bosses' goal-setting at the bottom end of the scale (Figure 6.2). Clarity of expectations is perhaps the most basic of employee needs and is vital to performance.
Figure 6.2 Gallup's “State of the American Manager”
Accountability, or rather the lack of it, is another area that bothers workers. “For engaged employees, accountability means that all employees are held to roughly to the same standards, and slackers will be exposed,” said Harter. That level of accountability translates into equity.
Remember, the employee culture has been conditioned by generations of bad managers to be cynical and skeptical of management. Deep down, however, the culture does want to trust managers and have an element of certainty. In effect, the employee culture needs that trust and certainty if it is ever to become truly engaged, which is what every manager should want, too. Trustworthy management, especially in the form of trustworthy direct managers, can go a long way toward increasing retention. But it only takes one mistake to violate that trust, which should be regarded as a very fragile yet extremely valuable commodity—hard to earn and easily lost.
So how do you satisfy your employees' need for communication and support, and increase retention? At Bluewolf, we've developed a standard program series to do just that: Ascend (onboarding), Management Academy, and Dashboards (measurement/accountability).
Ascend
Improving retention starts the day the employee arrives with a thorough, positive onboarding experience. At Bluewolf, we start by acclimating our new hires to our culture and fill them in on everything they will need to know about us from a community and resource perspective. Ascend is our formalized onboarding process, which is run by our Global Talent Management Team. Other teams that help in onboarding at Bluewolf are our recruitment team, HR, and IT.
You can be assured that when you start work at Bluewolf you will never be lonely, at least not in the first couple of months. God help you if you just want a quiet lunch alone. There will be scheduled meetings with your manager, your assigned mentor, and your team itself, and maybe a separate meeting with your team leader. In addition, IT will meet with you to set up your systems, and HR will want to connect with you to ease you through all the paperwork. Sadly, we have yet to find any way to completely eliminate all the bureaucracy. At those meetings and any other encounters, scheduled or casual, people will ask you how you're doing, whether you need anything, and how they might be able to help you.
Management Academy
I've talked quite a bit about the need for managers to communicate with employees and set a regular cadence of goal setting and review. But being a manager is about more than checking off boxes on an employee satisfaction chart; it's about leadership, and it's about empathy. To help our managers develop and improve those qualities, we offer a series of programs and resources. The first offering is Elevate, a three-day management workshop held twice annually. Broken down into three sections (managing me, managing others, managing the business), the workshop has our managers role-play difficult scenarios, refine communication techniques and strategies, and learn how to align their teams with Bluewolf's larger strategic goals. To support these workshops throughout the year, we host virtual Manager Moment sessions to help address any problems managers run into, and we also have a Manager Moments app, a custom app to access tips, tools, and resources from a mobile phone or tablet.
Remember, it's in your best interest to empower your managers with the tools they need to lead their teams effectively. Take the time to figure out what your employees need to manage better, and then put it into practice. In turn, their direct reports will feel better heard and more in control of their future with the company, leading them to want to stay with the company.
Dashboards
When trying to improve both talent acquisition and employee retention, data is your best friend. When you are losing employees, which departments are bleeding the most, and which are the healthiest? Are you experiencing greater attrition rates at particular times of the year? What's the year-over-year average? What's the gender ratio?
If you don't have access to this data, you won't be able to improve retention, plain and simple. Bluewolf has a standard retention dashboard that is updated daily so that we can see improvements, challenges, and problem areas in real time (see Figure 6.3). While our HR and Global Talent Management teams maintain the dashboard, managers no longer have to rely on them for access to retention metrics when trying to improve the strength of their teams. Everyone is empowered to own their employee-manager relationships, from equal access to data to our mobile resource app.
Figure 6.3 Example of Employee Metrics Dashboard
As a manager, if you communicate with your employees, you will have less attrition, or at least you won't be caught by surprise when somebody leaves. Like customer churn, employees who depart leave clues that your data collection and analysis should pick up. If you made a point to keep in touch with employees, you could probably pick those preparing to leave in advance of their departure. Of course, there are employees who will have clandestine interviews and drop deceptive signals to disguise their intentions. But if people want to leave, let them go graciously; you don't want to manage your workforce like a police state.
The only exception to your retention efforts might be employees who are actively disengaged, meaning they are deliberately sabotaging the work of their team or relationships with customers. You want to identify them as fast and early as possible and get them out quickly.
For those who leave the company, insist on an exit interview, usually conducted by HR or an outside resource. Keep the data anonymous, but use it to improve your retention and recruiting efforts. Here are the top four questions Bluewolf's HR team uses during exit interviews:
- How well did the job match (or not match) your expectations?
- Did you feel that the work you performed aligned with your personal goals and interests?
- Did you have the tools and resources you needed to effectively do your job?
- Would you recommend this as a (good, fair, enjoyable—substitute your own appropriate adjective) place for a friend to work?
If they reply yes to the last question and you liked the departing employee, ask them to refer any friends if, indeed, you are hiring.
Your HR or legal departments may also have their own ideas, so be sure to check with them. Additionally, the web is full of examples of exit interview questions, so you should never find yourself stuck with nothing worthwhile to ask. And don't forget to actively record and use this data to improve your retention and recruiting efforts going forward.
Agile and Elastic
Agile companies need an elastic, flexible, and versatile workforce. Agile and elastic have almost passed into the buzzword stage and are on track toward becoming cliché. Nonetheless, many organizations continue to adopt elastic and agile concepts as they strive to become more competitive and better able to roll with a rapidly changing business environment.
Among all the things you could make agile or elastic, your workers still represent the most agile variable in the organizational equation. To put it another way, it is easier, faster, and cheaper to reorganize, redeploy, and retrain your people than it is to relocate facilities, retool plants, or change your customers.
One of the strategies agile companies employ is outsourcing (not to be confused with offshoring). At Bluewolf, we see outsourcing as a community of highly skilled freelancers that ebb and flow with the needs of the company. Rather than a passing fad or a last-ditch cost-cutting strategy of a financially stressed company, IT outsourcing has evolved into a strategic tool that reflects our rapidly changing business and technology landscape. While once used as a tourniquet to stem bleeding resources, it has matured and become a strategic tool for fast-moving businesses and industries.
In another drive to agility, companies need to explore partnerships. It is clear the business environment has grown so complex and competitive that no company can meet every customer need alone. Customer-focused companies need to be prepared to engage partners to deliver capabilities they can't deliver on their own (or risk losing the customer). Bluewolf partners with a small handful of companies, preferring to maintain and enhance our core capabilities in-house. However, there are some instances where Bluewolf customers may need specialized applications, and our partnerships with companies like Apttus and InsideSales help us deliver complete solutions.
Between a thorough effort to cultivate and hire the right talent for your organization, and successfully onboarding and retaining that talent, you have most of the recruitment bases covered. Take pains to avoid the “jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none” approach, which is both costly and ineffective. When you need to fill the inevitable talent gaps—often the result of emerging opportunities or changing customer expectations—you can fill them through part-time contractors, outsourcing, or selective partnerships. If you are committed to being a customer-focused organization, you now have a number of ways to find and deliver the capabilities and service your customers demand.
Work-Life Balance
In the not too distant past, work-life balance never came up as an issue in corporate life. The exception was when some critical star personally made it an issue. Management would grudgingly make the minimal accommodations to keep this employee on board, at least until the company felt safe enough to dispense with their particular talent altogether.
More recently, that thinking has changed. An increasingly large number of managers recognize that work-life balance is a key component of an organization's success. In the global war for talent, it isn't always easy to replace a productive worker. The worker, in fact, may not even be a star performer. In a well-managed organization, every employee has a role to play, and replacing any employee entails both expense and risk. The challenge becomes how best to set up a workforce so that everyone's personal situation (within reason) can be accommodated. Most managers now realize that it makes good policy to accommodate their employees' lifestyle needs.
In short, if your strategy requires that you have the best possible talent, you need to be prepared to make sacrifices required to attract and keep that talent. Often, in work-life balance situations the issue may not even be money. It more likely involves schedule flexibility or the need to accommodate a family care situation. It may require IT or HR or even top management to exhibit a level of flexibility to accommodate the particular need.
Some think this is a millennial worker thing, but it is not. Millennials certainly talk about work-life balance, but the issue was floating around before millennials started impacting the workforce. At Bluewolf, we implemented work-life balance policies at the start, long before millennials started arriving here in large numbers.
Complicating work-life balance is the demise of the 9-to-5 workday. In those days, workers showed up at 9 AM, left at 5 PM and the rest of the day was their own. Gone are those easily segmented days that separated work life and personal life. Today, workers feel they must always be available, at least in customer-focused organizations. Opportunities can pop up anytime, anywhere. Similarly, with expanded capabilities of mobile, cloud, and social applications, business expectations around worker availability are changing. Now it's up to you, the worker, to stake your work-life balance priorities and communicate that to management.
Businesses that run in the cloud are more suited to flexible schedules. They can be accessed anywhere, and a chair in an office at a specific location is not required to contribute. Life happens—be aware of it, accept it, own it, and then implement a system that allows you to accommodate a diverse workforce.
Technical Skills
Everybody needs some level of technical skill just to effectively navigate mobile, social, and cloud systems every day. But that's not my concern. My concerns are that every modern business needs outstanding technical talent to support growth in our organizations and the talent war is driving salaries through the roof. If you're not a Fortune 500 company, how can your growing business compete?
The answer: you need to redefine talent. Start by recognizing that you probably don't need graduates from MIT to create a tech powerhouse in your organization. What you need are people who are technically literate, meaning they are sufficiently familiar with technology to get a substantial benefit from it. They don't have to invent it, troubleshoot it, or build it from scratch. Some of the best employees may be those who don't have the best technical skills but can communicate clearly and facilitate communication between others. These soft skills—active listening, communication, thinking, and critical observation—may be more valuable than star technical skills. People with soft skills contribute to higher levels of employee engagement and can truly inspire great ideas in your organization.
To find them, focus on sourcing candidates who demonstrate these types of qualities and soft skills to support the growth of a strong team. Not all will have the most impressive technical background. Widen your search pool by determining which skills you absolutely need on day one and which can be taught on the job. Don't fight for the shiniest résumé—there are plenty of companies who can and will outbid you. Look instead for individuals who want to work for how much they can give and not how much they can get. That may seem overly idealistic, but my experience suggests it's not.
Start by grooming promising people you already have. Yeah, I know the complaint: if we train them, they will just leave for a higher-paying job. My response: pay people a competitive wage—not necessarily the highest in your market, but a competitive one. People will appreciate that you invested in them and pay you back by being more productive and adding to your skills inventory. Besides, grooming people to succeed is the right thing to do, not just for the company but for them.
At Bluewolf, we actually tap our own employees to teach their skills to other employees in the areas of project management, technical competencies (mobile, Application Lifecycle Management [ALM], analytics), Salesforce certifications, and soft skills (conflict resolution, conducting productive meetings, and so on). Employees who teach skills win points in our gamification program to qualify for some big prizes. We also support continuing education with tuition reimbursement. If you can't underwrite tuition, other options include arranging online talks, setting up seminars and lectures, or anything else that will provide opportunities to expose your people to skills that will build the company. None of this has to be expensive. You can always find local college instructors who will teach for what amounts to a modest honorarium.
So where do you find the talent you need, especially if you aren't going to cultivate it internally or pay big dollars to recruiters? I'm tempted to say wherever you can, but I can do better than that. Here are some recruiting options:
- On-campus recruiting; don't forget community colleges
- Trade schools
- Partnerships with career shift training programs like General Assembly
- Coop programs, which will lead you back to colleges
- Programs that help working moms reenter the workforce. They have tons of experience but often encounter little opportunity when trying to get a job after a few years off. Be prepared to be flexible; moms returning to the workforce most likely will have a child or a few who still need periodic attention. In addition to their experience from their premom life, however, they probably have a lot of social and collaborative skills honed from serving on endless committees at the PTA, their church, or myriad community groups. And they probably have patience, which you may also need, at least at first.
- Military veterans—they bring a wide array of skills, experience, discipline, and a desire to work.
Conclusion: Drastically Competitive Job Market
The big competition is for whatever talent you need. It's not about some particular job you are looking to fill. Anyway, jobs are not what they used to be and candidates are expecting more and more from the companies they come to work for. It's not necessarily about high salaries, big benefits, or nifty perks—ping-pong tables, beer in the fridge, pizza Fridays. It's really about personal and professional fulfillment and satisfaction. As you work on defining and improving your company culture, benefits, and employee focus, don't just focus on attracting new talent, although that is critical. Also focus on keeping the employees you already have by providing them with a better experience, too. In the end, a rich company culture can go far in compensating for a less competitive salary. Understand how to define your culture and then market your brand to potential employees to find the best fit, for both of you. Focus on your culture, creative hiring practices, flexibility, partnerships, and professional development to solve your resource problems and attract and retain the talent that will be essential for helping you serve your customers and achieve success.
Let's give Jim Clifton, the Gallup CEO and author of The Coming Job Wars, the last word on jobs and hiring: “The biggest problem facing the world is an inadequate supply of good jobs.…Job creation is the new currency of all world leaders. The new most important social value in the world no longer relates to human rights, the environment, abortion, religion, gay marriage, women's issues, or equality. The number one social value in the world is the next position you are trying to fill.”5 We take it seriously at Bluewolf; hopefully you take it seriously, too.