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.

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