Want to Reduce Turnover? Turn your Employees into Brand Talent!

It is increasingly difficult to separate the act of finding great talent from the act of keeping great talent. In many ways it is a math problem: there aren’t enough people out there to replace the people you are losing. Reducing voluntary turnover is turning out to not only be the most cost-effective recruiting program you have, but maybe the only option left to you.

As recruiting managers come to this “ah-ha!” moment, they inevitably turn to the option of employee loyalty programs. The idea is simple: if you give the right rewards and say the right things then employees will stay around. It’s just like selling detergent: make it cheaper and sexier and people will overlook that your clothes don’t get clean. Fortunately people value their work experience more than they value their cleaning products, so the average consumer marketing cons aren’t going to work.

Loyalty programs will have decreasing effectiveness because the days of blind commitment to a company are done. In the past a company was an embodiment of a principle: security. Employment was rewarded independent of the value someone contributed, so you could be loyal to a company because they would be loyal to you. No longer. Too many employers view talent as a cog in the economic wheel: less valuable than the money and machinery, more valuable than the lobby décor. Many employees see an employer as an abstraction consisting of institutional shareholders wagging the dog that is management. Whether these perceptions are warranted or not is besides the point: it is the reality of our world. The days of executives taking a hit from Wall Street because they want to keep their employees around is a rare event indeed.

Employee loyalty programs have been a small but key contribution to this tsunami of cynicism. Management credibility is paid in the coin of authenticity, and nothing feels more contrived than an “attaboy!” followed by increased work hours, lousy bosses and decreased wages. Piecemeal changes to the relationship with employees won’t turn this situation around. It really does take a radical new approach.

It will come as no surprise that I think the solution to voluntary turnover is found in “open markets.” Put simply, talk is cheap (for both employers and employees), so don’t ask and don’t tell. Offer choices and watch what people do. Specifically, it is time to create a market for your employees and see who they chose.

Stated as a value equation, if you want to receive the value of committed employees and no surprises (“But you can’t leave, the project is at the most critical phase!”) then you need to provide the value of helping your employees be free agents. That’s right: you can’t have confidence in your employee’s commitment until you know they have a choice, and you can’t know they have a choice unless you set them up as “Brand Talent.”

Yes, this is a plea for every employer to start looking at investing in “Brand Talent.” Dave Lefkow and I have been working for the last six months on this concept, and the more time I spend with it the more passionately committed I become to the idea.

People who are Brand Talent have the following characteristics:

• They are networked (there is some identifiable way that they track the people in their network).
• Their network works for them, and they work for it (they add value to it and it in turn is ready to provide value to them).Their skills are in demand by multiple employers (there is competition for their services).
• Their network can verify that they can perform those skills, and is willing to take the time to prove it.
• Their network is trusted and verifiable (the hiring authorities are willing to use the network to reduce the time it takes to figure out whether the brand talent is any good).
• They have developed some brand identity within the community that hires or contracts roles with those skills (people have heard of them before).
• They don’t look at job boards or job postings, and they are inherently skeptical of any recruiter / hiring authority who calls them and doesn’t know their brand and offer them work that is consistent with it.

HR leaders and Chief Talent Officers must start to look at these factors as a critical advantage for the company, rather than a threat. Brand Talent employees are likely to be better producers, clearer about their job options and interests and to have an extended network of allies and resources that make them more efficient at their jobs. Since Dave and I maintain that everyone (yes, everyone) can be Brand Talent, the real question is when are companies going to start investing in making their own employees Brand Talent?

Think this is a crazy idea? None other than staid old McKinsey said it best when they pointed out in their article “Competitive Advantage from Better Interactions” :

• Companies are looking for ways to improve the effectiveness of their top talent: workers who interact with others and draw on experience and judgment to solve the deepest business problems.
• What makes these workers valuable is their ability to work collaboratively, to leverage "relationship capital," and to improvise and improve new solutions within an environment that fosters trust and constant learning.

While McKinsey’s analysis is focused on intercompany relationships, the open source and crowd sourcing models show clearly that intracompany networks built on the credibility of the individual participants are the wave of innovation in the future. This means that helping employees become Brand Talent is a key competitive advantage for any employer involved in creative and knowledge work. Or, to quote McKinsey again (from the article “The 21st Century Organization”):

• Professional employees, who create value through intangible assets such as brands and networks, now constitute up to 25 percent or more of the workforce in financial services, health care, high tech, pharmaceuticals, and media and entertainment.
• Making professionals productive enables big corporations to be competitive, yet most of them do little to improve the productivity of these employees.

Or, as I recently wrote to a fellow HR enthusiast:

I feel that when I am "out there" I am creating a larger community of learning and practice than just the people I am lucky enough to work with at EA. In biology this is known as cross-pollenization, and it is critical to any organism's survival. All entities need to expose themselves to new concepts and ideas and grow in response to those new inputs, or else they naturally die. Being out there, building your brand, is one of the best ways to return value to your company as you expose it to all to the things you learn and people you meet.

When employees build their own personal brand it is good for the individual, good for the company and good for the country. So have loyalty to those principles and the people who help you live them, and loyalty to the company will naturally flow from it. This is the one moon that can change the tide of dissatisfaction and the turnover that accompanies it. And that makes it a moon worth shooting for.

 

Comments

[Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com]

What an awesome idea, but I fear that few organizations will have enough confidence in themselves to implement it. I am always amazed at how high a percentage of recruiters and hr managers that I meet at conferences are afraid of allowing their key employees to blog for fear that those employees might write something inappropriate (if they can't trust key employees to write appropriate entries, then how can they trust them to make appropriate business decisions?) or that those blogs will attract headhunters like flies to honey. If an hr professional won't allow their key employees to blog for fear that those employees might become recognized as a star (heaven forbid -- our clients might take notice!), then how will that hr professional feel about turning their employees into brand talent? Hopefully Darwin was right and organizations that refuse to hire, develop, or promote star employees will go the way of the dodo bird.

[Dave Lefkow]

The real business case for allowing your employees to become brand talent was laid out best in Good to Great by Jim Collins. One of the most important characteristics of a company that made the leap from good to great was that there were leaders that were willing to step aside - level 5 leaders as Collins refers to them - and let their people really shine. Yes, some of these star employees left for greener pastures and became CEO's at other companies, as he demonstrated with his compelling examples from Wells Fargo. But the company was all the better for having them there in the first place, and they had a larger stream of people who wanted to achieve similar results joining the company as a result.

The age of endless loyalty to one employer is over. If someone is after your people - you're doing something right!

[James]

Excellent article on a very interesting topic. I am based in China where staff retention is an even bigger issue than it is in the west. I feel your ideas here can be applied in almost any context, in almost any country in the world. Excellent.