The Value of Being Valued

A paycheck alone is not sufficient. Not now, not before the
downturn, not ever. It’s tempting as an employer to assume that the
relationship between the company and its employees comes down to a simple
transactional quid pro quo: You work and we pay you, and then next week we do
it all over again.

Except that this picture leaves out the core things that
make us feel valued and want to give our best efforts: trust, respect, input,
recognition.

Companies that fail to address these areas run the
significant risk (and cost) of ongoing turnover, retraining and loss of
organizational knowledge-and these cultural aspects are even more important to
address in trying times when people are justifiably worried and in need of
greater support.

Here are a few areas my company focuses on that have had a
very significant positive impact for us:

RECOGNITION

Seven years ago, Allyis made a strategic gamble: take the
majority of our marketing budget and turn it toward employee care and
recognition. We put an executive in charge of acknowledging achievements such
as employment anniversaries and project successes, we asked employees and
clients to praise good work through a “kudos” e-mail alias and award program,
and we asked our employees to determine who gets yearly awards.

We also began acknowledging people’s life events outside of
work: engagements and marriages, births and adoptions, home purchases,
hardships, and educational achievements-the majority in the form of a card and
perhaps a small gift.

The result? Appreciative employees help recruit the best
talent they know, and when great work is coupled with positive attitudes, clients
keep coming back and, in turn, referring new clients. The response has been
universal across all generations and experience levels.

TRANSPARENCY

While it was a bit scary at first, we do our best to get it
all out there in terms of “inside” company information: We use a
SharePoint-based intranet, which allows everyone in senior management to post a
blog about what they’re currently thinking about or working on, and we publish
our company financials monthly, with our CFO and me jointly writing up a quarterly
report to let everyone know how we’re doing. We also open all management blogs
and posts on our financials to any and all employee comments.

When we had to reduce salaries last year, we told everybody,
“We know this isn’t great for anybody, but the board is going to take the
biggest reductions and we’re going to work through this and find creative ways
to save money and restore rates as quickly as possible”-which is what we’ve
done. We lost a couple of people due to the pay cut, but understood that this
was a financial necessity for them and wished them well. The vast majority of
our staff stuck with us.

EMPOWERMENT

Finally, to make sure that employees are consistently heard
and involved in our decision making, we hold twice-yearly “town hall” meetings
where people are free to ask anything and get an immediate answer; year round,
we also have an anonymous question-and-answer page on our intranet where
everything that gets asked is answered within 24 hours.

Also, we invite all employees to be actively involved in
social media, be it their own blogs (which we work hard to read and provide
responses to), Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, as these resources collectively
allow all of us to get to know one another better and, thus, be a more
connected community without further organizational effort or prompting.

Since implementing all these steps, our turnover rate has
dropped to about one-sixth of our industry average, and we get almost
one-quarter of all new employees via internal referral.

Richard Law is co-founder, CEO and chairman of Allyis, a
Kirkland-based personnel and technology firm. He’s also in charge of buying the
coffee to keep everyone productive after lunch.