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Attract! Attract! Why Attract is the New Retain

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The mantra of “attract and retain” has been around the HR community – and its general management constituency – even longer than the unfortunate rush to refer to people as “talent.”

It used to make sense. But it doesn’t anymore and the implications are significant.

Why Retention?

It’s been awhile since anyone dusted off the basic retention rationale, so let’s review the bidding. Here are some commonly stated reasons why companies should pursue employee retention:

  1. It costs more to hire than to retain people
  2. The more experienced the hire, the more it costs to retrain replacements
  3. Experienced employees know the ropes, the lingo, how things are done
  4. Experienced employees form deeper relationships with customers
  5. Retained employees are motivated, which helps customer relationships.

Of course, a few of these tenets were always subject to qualification – number 5, for example. Longevity can just as easily drive complacency and myopia as well as it can drive motivation.

But that’s not the Big Story. The Big Story lies in the assumptions underlying all five of those beliefs. Those assumptions are:

  1. the benefits of retention increase in direct proportion to longevity, and
  2. the pace at which new employees become productive is relatively fixed.

Both beliefs are looking a lot less true these days.

What’s Changed?

Two things have changed: work and people.

Work. Work has become outsourced, modular, plug-compatible, horizontal, contracted, bite-sized, for-hire, project-based. Employers shun fixed costs and value flexibility.

This is partly because they can: technology has made work-sourcing a global phenomenon, freed from space and time. It’s also partly because they have to: global sourcing means competitiveness is also global. The global economy has undergone a massive make/buy analysis and has come down heavily on the “buy” choice. If you’re not working with the world’s best/lowest cost doer of some key task, then you’re at a disadvantage.

The nature of work has shifted from a “job” focus to a “project” or “task” focus. Employers no longer need “someone who can do…” but rather “someone who has done, and will do…”  The new work model is not semi-permanent vertical employer silos of people; it is the model used by the film industry and by consultants, a constantly shifting nexus of tasks and resources.

Recruitment comes to resemble an ongoing speed-dating event.

People. I think we’re finally past decrying the lack of employee “loyalty;” it’s so last millennium.  People are “loyal” to their professions, their technologies, maybe their customers – but not to the constantly morphing corporate entities that sign their paychecks.

The skills of the new generation have evolved to fit the new workplace. The Facebook generation, adept at mass-scale peer relationships, doesn’t relate well to authority, no matter which side of the relationship they’re on. Geography? Twitter is everywhere and while not every 20-something can afford time in Europe, they all know someone who can and does, and can all Skype it and tweet it 24-7 in the meantime.

The oldsters may not like the verbal promiscuity of “friending,” but it fits perfectly with the new workplace. While society may pay a price in the dearth of deep, vertical relationships, the market place is demanding breadth.

Attraction and Retention Redux

Let’s put these trends together. What the economy needs, and what people are organizing to offer, is the ability to form relationships at the speed of transactions.

To companies, the attractive employees are not those with deep potential; they are those who can hit the ground running in a plug-compatible world, instantly connecting with thousands of like-minded peers within the company and without.

To people, the attractive employers are not those who offer long-term “commitments” (usually just relationship-disguised transactional offers anyway) but those who offer the ability to be instantly productive, while offering personal growth opportunities in the form of autonomy and new activities.

There is an obvious match here. What is no longer obvious is the relevance of “retention.”

Why would an employer want to retain people when the changing market requires ever-changing skills that can be bought quickly with precision rather than trained over time with generality?

Why would an employee want to be retained, when (s)he can find ever-changing opportunities to gain experience in a world thousands of times bigger than one employer alone could ever hope to offer?

Attract! Attract! Three New Strategies for Companies

The above are massive trends. The trend is your friend. The challenge is to ride the trend, not fight it. Here are three strategies for doing so:

1. Aim for zero cost onboarding and training. Zero works well as a stretch goal, but it’s not enough. How can you get people to pay you to join your company? (This is not as crazy as it sounds: how much do people pay to go to Harvard? So, become the “Harvard of YourNiche.”)

2. Reverse-hire search firms. Tell Russell Reynolds you want every employee to get one bonafide offer from an outside firm every year to keep them motivated. If they stay with you, they have re-upped, and become re-attracted. If they leave, you can choose either to recalibrate your attractions program, or wish the employee well and let them tell the market how employee-dedicated you are. (This is not as crazy as it sounds; Tony Hsieh already does a version of this at Zappos, paying people not to take a job offer).

3. Up your knowledge management game. Tenure is such an expensive way to gain company knowledge. Figure out how to make it available to every employee, from day one.

And don’t assume that means AI and databases. Try the same thing that works in the outside world: massive horizontal networking. Invent intra-LinkedIn and Intra-Tweet. (This is not as crazy as it sounds; Clay Hebert is working on SpinDows)

Attract and retain? That sounds like a motto for a roach motel. The new mantra is Attract! Attract!

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Many Trusted Advisor programs now offer CPE credits.  Please call Tracey DelCamp for more information at 856-981-5268–or drop us a note @ [email protected].

Attract and Retain: People Strategy, or Roach Motel Ad?

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The phrase “attraction and retention” falls naturally off the lips of HR people. It’s also common with the customer relationships crowd.

Yet it’s also perfect ad copy for selling flypaper or roach motels; “they can check in—but they can’t check out.”

So which is it? High-minded strategy for people and customers? Or unfortunate parallel with the extermination business?

The phrase “attraction and retention” grew out of McKinsey’s 1990s “war for talent,” crystallized in the 1997 book of that name.

Excerpt:

…a company’s ability to attract, develop and retain talent will be a major competitive advantage far into the future. “The only thing that differentiates Enron from our competitors is our people, our talent,” said Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay recently.

Ouch…score a few points for the insect hypothesis.

Let’s have a look at how the phrase has evolved in ten years. Today:

It’s still about employee attraction and retention—in the HVAC contracting business.

For the 7-county Milwaukee area, Deloitte Consulting offers a 5-step process for attracting and retaining new business and industry residents.

It’s about website visitors

And it’s definitely about customers

But just how does one attract and retain?

Well, for customers, you could use one-to-one marketing:

Remember all of those advertising brochures you’ve found in your mailbox over the years from them? Those are the results of a one-to-one personalized marketing strategy. Most likely your relationship with Radio Shack began when you walked into one of their locations and purchased a stereo.

Yup, that’s probably where it started, all right. Though I haven’t been back in years…wonder why…

To attract and retain employees, you could create a retirement plan .

You could also “attract and retain more supporters, members, and donors, through a BrandXcellence consulting relationship.”

Here’s how Brunswick does it:

• Business and financial leadership development programs
• Products managed and engineered by local and regional talent
• Performance management process

You could do it through CRM.

You could read about the Five Key Elements of A&R.

But wait a minute—why is it that are we doing this? What purpose does attraction and retention serve? Ask that question, and we get some consistent answers:

the long-term sustainability of an organization’s business strategy and market differentiation hinge on effective recruitment, talent development, and retention.

Human capital continues to be the single-largest investment a company makes, and now management can quantify the return on investment of its human capital and connect it to business results…"

We use tools such as the Watson Wyatt Human Capital Index ® – which links the effectiveness of human capital practices to shareholder value creation

A primary challenge facing almost every organization today is quantifying human capital investments and their effect on shareholder value.

Ah, yes, that’s it—the reason we want to attract and retain employees and customers is so that we can raise shareholder value. People and customers are the means;  business success  is the end. Therefore the value of employees and customers can be measured by their contribution to financial value creation.

Does it not dawn on these people that they’ve gotten it backwards?  That financial performance is a result, an indicator, of success in serving employees and customers?  That companies should serve people—including shareholders—rather than the other way ‘round?  Causality flowing one way doesn’t mean it flows the other too; people who like things hang around for more, but just because people are hanging around doesn’t mean they like things (prisons, for example, have high retention rates).  

The sin of the roach motel approach is that it focuses on symptoms, not causes—and in so doing, perverts means and ends.

It all comes down to motives, and motives can be slippery. Even the same person, moments apart, can treat customers like ends—or like means.

One of the best—and most vacuous—recommendations is to engineer your entire company culture around doing things that attract people and encourage them to stay. Best, because it’s absolutely correct. Vacuous, because if you don’t start with a profits-exist-for-people mindset, you’re never going to get there by pursuing X-step processes in support of increased shareholder value.

You either live it or you don’t. People are attracted by genuine motives—not by some technician measuring their attraction levels. People stay most if they genuinely want to stay—not because of a program that locks them in in order to increase shareholder value.

The roach motel crowd is dominating the dialogue. In our pursuit of minute measurement of the effectiveness of flypaper, we’ve forgotten motives.

People come if we really, really like them and treat them well. Period. People stay if we really, really like them and treat them well. Period. Not for the sake of shareholder value. For their sake. Period.

Then—and only then—the shareholder value thing works best too.  As an outcome—not as a goal.