The Culture Connection

Finding And Keeping Great Employees

A popular TV commercial opens with a manager for a large office products company reviewing a huge manual of the latest product price reductions. As he hands the telephone-sized book to a frontline clerk and instructs the clerk to retag all the listed items before leaving the store, the clerk pauses only briefly before exuberantly shouting “All Right!“ and beginning a dance of joy around the store. The manager smiles and walks away, saying, “That kid was a find!“

What inspires the clerk to want to stay late and retag hundreds of store items? What makes him shout for joy rather than jam the pricing gun down the manager's throat? How has the firm found and retained such an apparently enthusiastic employee? Either by luck or design, the manager has bridged with this employee the missing link in today's staffing and retention challenge.

The Missing Link

The evidence is clear, and experts agree:

• James Collins and Jerry Porras, in their best-selling book, Built to Last, state that an essential ingredient of all excellent organizations is their “core ideology.“
• In their landmark book, Corporate Cultures, Terrence Deal and Allan Kennedy conclude that a strong culture “enables people to feel better about what they do.“
• According to the Fuqua Report, the top two reasons people join a company are the opportunity for personal growth and the culture; core culture being the key driver of individual growth.
• Noted human resource and retention expert Jack Fitz-Enz has found that the two reasons why most people leave a company are the supervisor and the culture; it is the culture that drives the ultimate relationship with the supervisor.
• Norm Snell, director of global compensation and benefits for Cisco Systems, fervently believes that a company “can only tinker with compensations and benefits systems so much; it's culture, culture, culture“ that must drive staffing and retention systems.
• John Kotter and James Heskett conclude that corporate culture “may even be greater than all those factors that have been discussed most often in the organizational and business literature—strategy, organizational structure, management systems, financial analysis tools, leadership, etc.“

The relationship we have with our people and the culture of our company is our most sustainable competitive advantage,“ says Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks.

The missing link in today's search to find and keep great employees is to align staffing and retention activities to the company's core culture. Aligned companies break out of the cycle of disconnection and find and keep top-notch employees through a laser-like focus on their core culture. They recognize that they need to build a strong, stable, and lasting consciousness of connection for both prospective and current employees. Aligning their staffing and retention processes to core culture is their preferred method of driving long-term organization success.

The Four Core Cultures

Aligned companies base their staffing and retention processes upon one of four forms of core culture.

Customer Service. The underlying purpose of a customer-service culture is to create customer solutions. Competitive advantage is gained through getting close to the customer. These companies strive to think as their customers do, anticipate their needs, and create value for them. Customer-service cultures often empower the frontline service worker, and create strong customer-employee partnership links that build high levels of repeat business.

Innovation. A second core culture is that of innovation. The underlying purpose of an innovation culture is to create the future. Competitive advantage comes from unleashing the power of technology to create new products, new markets, and new niches within existing markets. Their voracious appetite for brainpower is matched only by an innovation culture's appetite for staying on the cutting edge.

Operational Excellence. The third core culture is operational excellence. The underlying purpose of an operationally excellent culture is to create a process that minimizes costs while maximizing productivity and efficiency. Competitive advantage is in attaining process excellence from product or service creation and delivery. The foundation of an operationally excellent culture is to constantly improve systems, procedures, and product or service quality.

Spirit. The fastest-growing core culture is spirit. The underlying purpose of a culture of spirit is to create an environment that inspires employee excellence. Competitive advantage is gained through unleashing people's limitless energy, creativity, and enthusiasm. Spirit-driven cultures often embrace a higher-order purpose, a corporate goal that stretches toward a greater common good. They capitalize on the collective energy and spirit of their people to propel them to excellence.

Separate But Equal

The four core cultures are separate but equal. No one core culture is superior to another. None is more likely to guarantee outstanding financial performance than another. All are equally powerful in driving long-term organizational success.

In most companies, elements of all four cultures exist simultaneously. Without question, customer service, innovation, operational excellence and employee spirit are all important. But to find and keep great employees, key questions must be asked and answered:

• Which one core culture is most important to your company?
• Which single core culture sustains the pure essence of your success?
• Which core culture affords the best route to your company's competitive advantage?

The key to finding and keeping excellent employees is to align your staffing and retention to the one core culture that best propels your company's success.

The Benefits of Alignment

You enjoy numerous benefits when you align staffing and retention processes to core culture. For instance, alignment simplifies the staffing and retention process. Since staffing and retention are based upon core culture, decisions reached within aligned companies also strengthen the core culture. Alignment builds strong job connections, too. Aligned companies connect every job to its context and how the job strengthens the core culture. Applicants and current employees therefore feel linked to all of the company's job by way of participation in the core culture. Thus, individual job staffing and retention decisions are based on more than generic personality characteristics; they focus on which characteristics best sustain the core culture. Non-aligned companies rely too heavily upon job skills, ignoring the cultural context of the job and its pervasive impact on the employee's success on the job.

Further the focus on core culture helps aligned companies satisfy employees' deeper need to make a difference on connection to personal values. It is also easier at aligned companies to show how candidates and employees can make a difference in promoting the core culture, which is a more satisfying personal connection than any signing or retention bonus could ever deliver. Employees within aligned companies think twice about leaving, for fear of losing the special personal connection. Non-aligned companies continue to fight the selfish side of what's-in-it-for-me (among both candidates and current employees). Without building new connections, non-aligned companies rely far too heavily on money-driven practices in their attempts to find and keep valuable employees. Such employees are harder to retain because they often feel compelled to search for new opportunities and stronger personal connections to their work and their employer.

The ultimate benefit is a unique competitive advantage: the ability to consistently find and keep top talent. With staffing and retention processes based upon core culture, an aligned company attracts and retains far more superior employees who fit well with its core culture than a non-aligned company does. High productivity can be directly attributed to a focused, concerted plan to align staffing and retention practices to the core culture. With no clear focus for their staffing and retention, non-aligned companies suffer greater disconnections throughout their organizations. Staffing and retention becomes a burden rather than a competitive advantage.

The Process of Alignment

There are three steps to the process of alignment:

1. The organization must clearly understand how each core culture uniquely contributed to employee connectedness.
2. The organization must embrace one core culture as its operational driver.
3. Management must then align all staffing and retention strategies to the core culture.

Does the focus on one core culture totally eliminate all your staffing and retention problems? Does it automatically attract thousands of superior employee applicants or transform all the average performers into great employees? No, of course not. No one formula can ever produce such results. We are not prescribing a magic pill that forever eliminates your staffing and retention to their core culture. What we are advocating is a method in use at leading companies that keeps them one step ahead of their competition.

Jim Harris, Ph.D., is president of the James Harris Group. Joan Brannick, Ph.D., is president of Brannick Human Resource Connections. This article is excerpted from “Finding and Keeping Great Employees“ by Jim Harris, Ph.D., and Joan Brannick, Ph.D. Copyright 1999, Jim Harris and Joan Brannick. Published by AMACOM, a division of American Management Association.