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employee engagement

Every company needs to offer a unique employee experience that sets it apart from the others
Tamara J Erickson and Lynda Gratton

It is the HR equivalent of keeping up with the Joneses. In their quest to find and retain top talent, businesses often try to match competitors' offers, ensuring that their compensation schemes, training programmes, health care benefits, and other talent-management practices are in line with the rest of the industry. While this strategy may be useful for bringing job candidates to the door, it's not necessarily the most effective way to usher the right people across the threshold – great employees who will be enthusiastic about their work and fiercely loyal to the organisation and its mission.

Certainly, reasonable pay and a breadth of health care options matter to prospective hires, as do the tasks they will have to perform. But people also choose jobs and become engaged with their work on the basis of how well their preferences and aspirations mesh with those of the organisation.

Imagine yours is one of the three job offers a talented candidate is mulling over. She hears a little about the orientation programme at each firm. At your company, the first three months are probationary. As a new hire, the candidate would work closely with an assigned team, and when 90 days are up, the team members would vote on whether she stays or goes. Management won't have the final say. At the second company, the candidate would work on a series of fast-paced, creative proj-ects during her first three months, under the close scrutiny of senior management. At the end of that period, she would be expected to find a project that matched her skills. In the third company, the new hire would undergo intensive training during the first three months, learning the organisation's well-defined ways of doing business. After that, she would apprentice for an extended period with one of the firm's strongest performers.

None of these orientation experiences is inherently better than the others; the prospect will pick the company whose entry programme most closely reflects her own values and prefe-rences. If she loves risk and can put up with ambiguity, she might relish the challenges and the pace of the second company but would probably be miserable with the constraints of the third. If she enjoys collaborative work, she might gravitate towards your company.

These show the importance of employee preferences in the war for talent. Unfor-tunately, they are often overlooked. What truly makes good companies great is their ability to attract and retain the right people – employees who are excited by what they are doing and the environment they are operating in. Such people are more likely to be deeply engaged in their work and less likely to chase after slightly better salaries or benefits. They will find ways to satisfy their own preferences and aspirations while meeting the organisation's needs. Their commitment is contagious, infecting customers as well as prospective employees. Engaged employees are the antithesis of hired guns rotating in and out of critical roles – they are productive for the long term.

However, you won't find and keep such individuals simply by aping other companies' best practices or talent-management moves. You need to be able to tell new and prospective hires what it is like to work at your company, to articulate the values and attributes that make working at your firm unique. You need to prov-ide a signature experience that tells the right story about your company. In the process, you'll empower the people who share your values and enthusiasm for work to self-select into your firm, thereby creating the foundation for highly productive employee-employer relationships.

Bringing distinctiveness to life
A signature experience is a visible, distinctive element of an organisation's overall employee experience. In and of itself, it creates value for the firm, but it also serves as a powerful and constant symbol of the organisation's culture and values. The experience is created by a bundle of everyday routines, or signature processes, which are tricky for competitors to imitate precisely because they have evolved in-house and reflect the company's heritage and the leadership team's ethos.

A signature experience is a critical element of the companies' ability to achieve high levels of employee engagement. These organisations excel at expressing what makes them unique. They know what they are, and it is not all things to all people. They understand their current and future employees as clearly as most companies understand their current and future customers. They recognise that individuals work for diffe-rent reasons and accomplish tasks in different ways. And they demonstrate what they are vividly, with stories of actual practices and events, not through slogans on the wall or laminated values cards on every desk. As a result, these companies hire people who easily and enthusiastically fit in, and thereby cultivate a more committed workforce.

Finding your signature
Companies that successfully create and communicate signature experiences understand that different types of people will excel at different companies, and that not all workers want the same things. In a series of studies conducted jointly with researchers Ken Dychtwald and Bob Morison, Tamara Erickson categorised workers into six segments on the basis of why and how they like to work. Some care deeply about the social connections and friendships formed in the workplace, for instance. Others just want to make as much money with as much flexibility and as little commitment as possible. Some have an appetite for risk. Others crave the steadiness of a well-structured, long-term climb up the career ladder.

The firms we have studied that have engendered highly productive, engaged workforces acknowledge and address these differences more effectively than their competitors. Specifically, they follow some general principles for creating, supporting, and preserving their unique employee experiences:

Target a segment of potential employees. Most executives can tell you which consumers will buy their products or services. Few have the same insight into which job candidates will buy into the organisation's culture and adapt to its workflow. Companies that target potential employees as methodically as they do potential customers can gain a sustainable market advantage.

Address specific business needs. Some companies' signature experiences stem from critical business needs.

Identify and preserve your history. The seed of a signature experience already exists in many companies. Their challenge is to find it, extend or shape it to the needs of today's business, and protect it.

Share your stories. One of the legends any MBA student is likely to hear is that of Goldman Sachs's recruitment experience. Successive cohorts of B-school students pass along the tale of the MBA student who went through 60 interviews before being hired. That story isn't an urban myth. The selection process is truly an endurance test, requiring enormous resources. In a given year, about 5,000 applicants speak to ten members of the firm, and the top 2,500 speak to more than 30. Each year, Goldman Sachs invests more than 100,000 man-hours in conversations with prospective employees.

The seemingly endless interviews are not designed to ferret out candidates' intellectual prowess or previous work experiences – that's what the GMAT scores and application forms are for. The process is a reflection of the company's commitment to internal collaboration and networking and serves as a preview of life in the firm. At Goldman Sachs, there is no room for individual stars. Prospective candidates who hear the stories and enjoy meeting partners in the myriad interview sessions are exactly those, the firm believes, who will be capable of building networks and strong collaborative relationships.

Employees at Starbucks have their own tales to pass on. When recruiting baristas, it looks for people with outgoing personalities and strong social skills. To convey these attributes and prompt customer-savvy individuals to self-select into the firm, Starbucks tells all prospective hires about its mandatory in-store immersion process. Every new Starbucks employee – even at the corporate level – goes through a 24-hour paid training module called First Impressions. The standardised curriculum focuses on learning about coffee and creating a positive customer experience. This is followed by in-store training – employees spend time making beverages, talking to customers, and learning the business on the floor. Employees at all levels say this hands-on experience is essential preparation for any role within the company. And they swap stories about candidates who ditched the process early on, just because they didn't want to spend weeks working in the stores. Indeed, the satisfied lot who stuck with it and poured lattes for a while tell these tales with great pride.

Strive for consistency. A signature experience must be buttressed by processes that send consistent messages to employees. Our research shows that one of the most common causes of low engagement in organisations is employees' perception that some elements of the work experience aren't exactly as they were advertised. How many times have we all heard people, six months into a job, say, "It's just not what I expected or wanted."

Several years ago, a large industrial company asked us to help redesign its orientation process, which executives at the firm felt was turning people off and driving them away. When we took a close look, we concluded that the orientation process wasn't the problem; it accurately reflected the highly structured and tightly managed nature of the organisation. The problem was occurring much earlier, during recruitment, when the company promised prospective employees a flexible work environment full of excitement and innovation. This company was not a bad place to work, but it was doing a poor job of targeting and attrac-ting people who would thrive there. It needed to change either the pitch it used with job candidates or the experience of working at the firm.

Have the courage of your convictions. Companies – even very large ones – don't need to be all things to all people. In fact, they should not try to be. No matter the content of your signature experience, you can attract people who are suited to your organisation's culture and interested in furthering its goals. Conversely, you must be willing to accept that your employment proposition won't appeal to everyone. Exxon Mobil, for instance, readily acknowledges that its highly structured environment isn't for everyone, and a number of employees choose to leave early in their tenures. The company's demands are exacting; emplo-yees are expected to follow clear communication protocols and strict security regulations – as you might expect in an industry in which safety is a high priority. Interestingly, however, attrition among employees who make it past the five year mark is almost nil, and the level of enga-gement among them is very high.

The company's executives calmly recognise their plight. "The suit was too tight," they say, as they describe those who departed early on. Management understands that the company's signature experience won't necessarily map to every stage of the employee life cycle. And management carefully and sensitively protects the processes that contribute to this secure, structured experience. For example, the company recently considered switching from a defined benefits plan to a defined contribution plan, which the majority of companies today favour for their employees. In the end, it conclu-ded that the security the defined benefits plan provides is more in sync with the values of the employees the company hopes to retain.

People will become long-term, deeply engaged employees of your company if their work experience is what they expect it to be and if your firm's values and attributes match theirs. The best strategy for coming out ahead in the war for talent is not to scoop up everyone in sight, unless you want to deal with the fallout: high turnover, high recruitment and training costs, and disengaged, unproductive employees. Instead, you need to convince the right people – those who are intrigued and excited by the work environment you can reali-stically offer and who will reward you with their loyalty – to choose you.