How to Build and Keep the Team You Want

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How to Build and Keep the Team You Want

• June 21, 2003

Charles Sterling, Ph.D. San Francisco
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Life is Easy, Right?

• High unemployment means you have your pick of the
  very best employees available
• Employees are gratefulthrilled even!to come to
  work everyday
• All worries about losing your best employees
  evaporated when the labor market turned
• Any concerns you had about paying your employees
  appropriately have gone awaytheyre happy just
  to have a job!

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No?

• Youre not alone!
• Good leaders and successful business owners
  realize the truth behind the statement Our
  employees are our most important asset!
• How do you translate that statement into a
  reality for your business? Lets begin our
  journey.

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Begin with a Vision
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The Importance of Vision

• Why stay with a company if you dont know what
  its purpose is? Why get out of bed in the
  morning if you dont know the importance of what
  youre doing?
• Dont think that vision, or mission statements,
  are trite just because so many companies do them
  poorly
• According to Ken Blanchard, Having a vision
  means being so clear about your purpose, so
  committed to it, and so sure about your ability
  to accomplish it, that you move ahead decisively
  despite any obstacles.

For additional information on this subject, see
Ken Blanchard and Jesse Stoner (2003), Full
Steam Ahead!
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Essential Elements to the Vision

• Significant Purpose
• Answers the Why question gives employees an
  understanding of what the company is here for
• Clear Values
• Answers the How question provides guidance
  around the question What do I want to live by?
• Picture of the Future
• The picture must be that of the end result,
  something you can actually see. It focuses on
  what you want to create and envisions the end
  result.

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Rewards
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A Framework for Understanding How Rewards Work
(Valence)
Effort
Performance
Outcome
Expectancy
Instrumentality
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Rewards Need to be Right

• Many elements of rewards that need to Be Right
• Mix of pay (base, short-term incentives, and
  long-term incentives)
• Benefits
• The work experience

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Pay is Complex

• Pay has many different components that affect
  how people perceiveand relate totheir work
• Starting salaries
• Base pay levels
• Merit increases
• Promotional increases
• Short-term incentive targets (including
  commissions) and payouts

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How do you Address this Complexity?

• Know thyself
• Start with a philosophy of pay thats aligned
  with your mission statement and how you value
  your workforce
• Address issues such as
• Pay levels relative to the external labor market
• Balance of base pay relative to incentives
• Fiscal responsibility of your pay program
• Legal defensibility

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How do you Address this Complexity?

• Know thy neighbor
• An enormous amount of data is available from
  commercially available surveys
• Find out what salary surveys your competition
  participates in, and participate in them
  yourself!
• Consider an industry-specialized survey for
  highly unique jobs

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How do you Address this Complexity?

• Seek out guidance and support
• Developing pay programs sometimes requires
  specialized experience generally not found within
  a typical human resources department
• Assistance canand should behighly customized
  the result should be simple to understand and
  easily administered

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Go Fishing!Bringing fun, passion, focus, and
commitment to work
For more information, see Fish! Tales, by
Lundin, Christensen and Paul (2002)
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A Compelling Fish Story

• What was going on here? Was there a larger story
  for workplace success?
• The workplace experts spent time getting to know
  the operationfilming the engaging environment,
  talking to the customers and the workersand
  found a compelling and fascinating story based
  upon four basic principles they call the FISH!
  Philosophy.

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Principle 1 Play!

• Work made fun gets done, especially when we
  choose to do serious tasks in a lighthearted,
  spontaneous way.
• Play is not just an activity its a state of
  mind that brings new energy to the tasks at hand
  and sparks creative solutions.

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Principle 2 Make Their Day

• When you make someones day (or moment) through
  a small kindness or unforgettable engagement,
  you can turn even routine encounters into special
  memories.

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Principle 3 Be There

• The glue in our humanity is in being fully
  present for one another.
• Being there also is a great way to practice
  wholeheartedness and fight burnout, for it is
  those halfhearted tasks you perform while
  juggling other things that wear you out.

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Principle 4 Choose Your Attitude

• When you look for the worst you will find it
  everywhere.
• When you learn you have the power to choose your
  response to what life brings, you can look for
  the best and find opportunities you never
  imagined possible.
• If you find yourself with an attitude that is not
  what you want it to be, you can choose a new one.

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Conclusion

• Like all important choices in life, the choice of
  which company to work forand the significant
  effort put forward to excelis highly complex.
• Understand that monetary rewards play a
  significantbut not overly significantrole in
  the decision to join, succeed, and leave an
  organization
• Dont compete on the basis of pay alone pay
  attention to the humanity of your workers

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Thank you!
Charles Sterling, Ph.D. Mercer Human Resource
Consulting Three Embarcadero Center, Suite
1500 San Francisco, CA 94111 (415)
743-8960 charles.sterling_at_mercer.com
Presentation available on the NASPD website