The Idea in Brief
What separates great companies from merely good ones? Exceptional firms attract and retain the right people—employees who are excited by the company’s culture and values and who reward the organization with loyalty and stellar performance.
How to get the right people on board? Don’t try to be all things to all employees, Erickson and Gratton advise. Instead, communicate your company’s signature experience—the distinctive practice that best conveys what it’s really like to work at your company and what makes your firm unique.
Consider Whole Foods Market’s signature experience: team-based hiring. Employees in each department in every store vote on whether a new hire stays or goes after a four-week trial period. This experience sends a strong message about the company’s core values of collaboration and decentralization. It weeds out lone wolves—and attracts only people who share those values. Whole Foods’ reward? Highly engaged and productive workers in every team.
The Idea in Practice
To establish and leverage your company’s signature experience, Erickson and Gratton offer these guidelines:
Define Your Target Employees
Identify your target potential employees as methodically as you do customers. Example:
Unable to pay reservation agents standard industry salaries, JetBlue targeted people who prize flexible schedules. It created a signature experience reservation system: Agents work out of their homes and trade shifts using an online community board. Their job satisfaction has engendered a 30% boost in agent productivity and 38% jump in customer-service levels compared to industry averages.
Address Business Needs
Craft a signature experience that meets a specific business challenge. Example:
To help integrate five recently acquired oil companies, BP developed a signature experience called “peer assist”: unit heads assigned to peer groups exchange ideas about what is and isn’t working in their businesses. The experience has enabled BP to meet financial and safety targets while weeding out managers who can’t buy into its signature experience.
Share Your Stories
Encourage employees to relate legendary, signature experiences to potential hires. Example:
One legend any MBA student worldwide is likely to hear is that of Goldman Sachs’s signature recruitment experience. Successive cohorts of B-school students pass along the tale of the MBA student who went through 60 interviews before being hired. Job candidates who enjoy meeting partners in the myriad interview sessions are exactly those who will be capable of building the networks and collaborative relationships upon which the firm’s success depends.
Strive for Consistency
Buttress your signature experience with processes that send consistent messages to employees. Example:
Whole Foods backs up its team-based induction process with compensation practices, employee rewards and recognition, and promotion criteria that are also strongly team based. Bonus pay, for instance, is explicitly linked to group, not individual, performance. Result? Team members choose their trainees carefully: They want hard workers, not buddies.
Have the Courage of Your Convictions
Accept that you don’t need to be—nor should you try to be—all things to all people. No matter the content of your signature experience, you can use it to attract people who are suited to your organization’s culture—and who want to further its goals.
It’s 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, health care benefits, training programs, and other talent-management practices are in line with the rest of the industry’s. 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 organization and its mission.