The following transcript is from a panel discussion between several HR leaders in Oregon, Susy Dunn, Paige Jackson, and Tana Thomson, moderated by Suzi Alligood with an introduction by Brandon Laws. The podcast episode this transcript was taken from is entitled “Attracting and Retaining Talent in Organizations, an HR Leader Panel.”
Brandon: Hey everybody, I’m Brandon Laws and this is another episode of the HR for Small Business Podcast. Today we’re going to do something a little different. We had the pleasure of hosting a workshop on April 16, 2014 that featured a great presentation by our very own Suzi Alligood, our training and development director here at Xenium. During the second half of that event we had a panel of Oregon HR leaders which featured some ideas around the topic of attracting and retaining talent within an organization. So we’re actually going to cut over to the recording of the panel. The panelists are Susy Dunn, VP of People at Jama Software in Portland, Paige Jackson, VP of HR at Stimson Lumber Company, and Tana Thomson, VP of HR at Xenium HR.
We also had Suzi Alligood on a podcast several episodes back on the topic of performance management, which I’d encourage you to listen to as well.
Here’s some information about the panelists and the dynamic between them: Susy Dunn and Paige Jackson have an internal point of view while Tana Thomson, given that Xenium is an HR consulting agency, comes at it two different ways: first from a consultant’s point of view—what are the companies she’s working with doing to attract and retain talent—but she also talks about what Xenium does as well. So you get those two points of view which is fantastic.
I’m going to cut over to the Q&A portion of the panel now, so enjoy! Feel free to leave a comment and let us know what you think. We do events like this frequently and this is a format we could potentially use more often in addition to our typical Q&A style. Thank you so much!
Suzi: To kick off our panel discussion, let’s start with the first category: the importance of defining and integrating your culture and employer value proposition. I’ll let you all pipe in as you’re inspired to do so. How have you gone about defining your employer value proposition and how have you integrated this into your employee communication?
Paige: I have been with Stimpson for two years and coming into the company they had not defined what their value proposition was. It was a fantastic opportunity to go out and seek what do the executives think it is, what do our employees think it is? Because every company has a culture, it’s whether or not you have defined it and identified the levers in which you can strengthen it. It’s been a fun two years of going out and understanding what is important to our workforce. We have a very diverse workforce – we have manufacturing, we have foresters, and then corporate roles. It was trying to find what that secret sauce is and defining it and enabling that through communication. We have new quarterly newsletters that go out to the homes so that the families can read them. We now have an online equivalence so that there’s ongoing communication that reemphasizes what it is that they’ve said is important and what we are doing about it. It’s that closed-loop system that we are getting to, but definitely not there. I think culture is always moving, shaping and changing depending on your workforce. We are getting a handle on what the levers are to enable our managers to do a better job of retaining folks.
Tana: This is definitely something that we put a lot of focus to at Xenium in the last year and Suzi has headed a lot of that up by identifying our employee value proposition. Get your employees as well as Senior Leadership involved in providing input and then put that all together in a few simple words. I don’t think it needs to be anything too fancy, but really just uncovering what makes us special. Why do people love what they do, why do they want to stay at Xenium, why do they care about their coworkers, why do they care about the clients. What are those three or four things that we can all get behind and get really excited about? For us, it’s clearly about the people. How do we thread that through our marketing, both for the customers as well as when we go out and attract talent. We want to bring that into the interview process and on our webpage. Brandon has done a lot of work on bringing that out. I think everyone can get behind it, get excited about it and then we can weave that through in our marketing, interviewing process, and as we go about the work we do every day.
Susy: My situation is a little different at Jama. Jama is really at more of an early to mid-stage software startup and my role coming in is making sure that as the company grows and evolves that we don’t lose sight of the culture that they have so intentionally created. The culture has been so well defined yet we do need to continue to grow and expand so it’s a little different in terms of trying to come in and unpack what it is. They are really clear about what it is – the employees, the managers, the leadership team are very aligned and clear on what the culture is. I really try to make sure we are threading it through everything in terms of where we are sponsoring, where we are showing up for events, how we market and talk about ourselves on out career page and that it is really aligned to the company. In terms of all new employees coming in, they go through a really holistic onboarding. We really make sure people think about their pitch and we have them share that with the broader employees and continue to reinforce and see that alignment all the way through the culture. My task is a little bit different in terms of really trying to be intentional as we grow in size and scale and make sure it’s threaded through that entire lifecycle.
Suzi: You’re right in that there are clear differences in a startup and a more established company. When you’re more established you’re usually revitalizing and clarifying. With a startup, usually people are really clear. The excitement is brand new, you don’t have a huge massive workforce so you can really hone in on it. Different challenges for different businesses.
In terms of aligning your employment brand with your business brand, is that something that you have focused on matching up?
Susy: I would say definitely. I’ll speak not only to Jama but to my previous companies as well. Even thinking back to InFocus. We were so intentional about making sure that who we were as a product was really showing up in how we attract talent and how we try to engage employees as well. Tying it to the business brand I think is really important.
Otherwise it’s this dual personality and I think that that’s what employees want to see. They want to really understand who you are, what they are going to experience coming in.
Suzi: What strategies have you used to proactively identify gaps in your talent pipeline as it relates to your short and longer term business objectives?
Paige: Workforce planning has been pretty key for us over the past two years. Really identifying retirement cliffs and looking at attrition in a different way than we have in the past and understanding what that pipeline gap looks like over the next five to ten years by role. What are those skill competencies that we need to fill in order to have the skilled labor force we need to produce consistent work. In our manufacturing facility we have timber products. I can’t go and find a soft filer off the street. This is a whole new challenge for me in understanding what that means. Is it welding skills? We have to break it down into competencies that we can build from within and with partnerships. We have partnerships with Portland Community College and three other businesses to say this is what we need as an industry, can you help us build a curriculum that we can then use so that we know people coming out of this will have this level of competency. Trying to think outside of the box about how do we grow within since culture matters so much. That’s our strategy; growing from within and we have that workforce map to use as our playbook.
Tana: I think it’s important to identify which positions are most critical to your business, that will make or break your business. Pay attention to that fiercely and look forward with talent assessments. Looking at willing and able. It’s not just able, it’s willing. Getting the right fit, really getting those active conversations with folks about where they want to go and what that looks like and creating that path and plan are really important. I also think leveraging the internal career pathing is important. Often times you’ve got a lot of high potentials, bright stars right out of college that you can develop. Giving them that experience, path in place and continually giving them those opportunities to build and develop can be really successful. It’s a surer bet in some cases because they’ve been around the culture, they’ve been around the business, and they really understand what it takes. Spending a lot of time and investment with those folks that are high potentials can be really valuable.
Susy: Just touching on the partnerships, I think this is huge. I’ve come from larger companies where we’ve had very thoughtful 5 year workforce plans and I’ve always kept that with me. In terms of now being with a startup, we are really thinking two to three years out. We aren’t thinking 5 to 10 years out. But we are thinking ahead about the skills and talent we need and those partnerships are so important. Whether you are looking for those, in my world, software developers, really developing those partnerships with universities as well as there are so many different programs through the technology association where there are people who are coming into a second career where they really want to focus on maybe a new area. It’s tapping into those pipelines too. I think being innovative in where you are present, where you are showing up, again where your company is sponsoring themselves – if it’s at some sort of industry event, even the publications you’re in. We recently got published in an engineering publication because we knew that would attract some different types of the product crowd. I think it’s being really thoughtful in knowing where you are at and how you’re showing up in all those different ways. Other things that we do very creatively is we host a lot of meet ups onsite. So we are bringing talent in that we may not have a fit for today, but in a year or two we might. We keep a really close eye on who is coming onsite, who is attending. We try to make sure we continue those relationships and we stay in touch because you never know, in the next year we may have an opportunity for them. The partnerships are really important.
Suzi: To piggy back on that Susy, are you working closely with marketing on those events? How do you collaborate?
Susy: Absolutely. For example we were one of the sponsors of the TedEx event this Saturday in Portland. I didn’t have the budget to be able to be a major sponsor for that so I work closely with marketing. What we have been doing is sitting down and coming up with what’s our roadmap on where we do want to sponsor and what are the events that are going to be more broad from a marketing perspective that then I can have my team show up. Vice versa, where do I want to recruit that marketing may be able to partner with me on, so absolutely that marketing relationship is key.
Suzi: When competing for the same talent as some others in your market, what are some key things that you have done to differentiate yourself from larger competitors or competitors who may be paying more.
Paige: We’ve been very successful in promoting our culture. It’s a key differentiator to actually attract talent. In our industry, many of our competitors are union shops and we are not. We have a very different philosophy from a compensation perspective of paying for performance. It’s really how do we come here and define what you want to be? Have a career with Stimpson and we will help you get there. Whether it’s through tuition reimbursement, job rotations – it’s really yours to own and drive. Amazingly enough, we have had some mills shut down in southern Oregon and gone down to recruit folks and they were absolutely fine taking pay cuts to come to a company that they felt like could grow. We’ve been very fortunate in that respect. The other thing just tangible that I’ve been amazed made a difference, is introducing relocation benefits. Who knew that would be so powerful, but really helping someone take the burden of moving their family so they can focus on doing the best work for you as a company – the response we’ve gotten – that has differentiated us from our competitors.
Suzi: How did you find out?
Paige: It was a gap when I assessed what we had at the company and I thought “Oh, we don’t have relocation benefits, let’s bring it back.” I’ve been amazed at the response and we’ve been able to leverage it.
Tana: I can speak to the consultant role in serving and sponsoring a lot of businesses locally that there is that secret sauce with a small business. It’s really getting behind something, contributing, making a difference, being able to bring about positive change. Sometimes in larger organizations it takes longer to get things moved through or to bring about innovation and change so some of the benefits of being nimble and small is that you can be a part of something great and create something exciting. Also what I think is important is autonomy. Working from home, giving flexibility – those types of things are important. Growth opportunities are important as well, as Suzi noted of the Fortune 100 Survey. Folks want growth opportunities. They want a career. They want to know how you are going to invest in them and help develop them professionally.  It helps keep things exciting for them and moving along that professional track.
Susy: In the past several years what I’ve found at my organization is that referrals are one of the best pipelines for candidates coming in. They are helping you sell and differentiate. While the culture is important, if you go to a company and you have a connection there, how valued that is. Even at Jama this past quarter alone, 70% of the new hires we had came from referrals. We don’t pay a big bonus. At Jive I had a big bonus program because we had a lot of that in the Bay Area, you are competing with big bonuses from Google, LinkedIn, ect. At Jama we’ve tried a different approach – you get a small bonus to maybe go out to a nice dinner or go out to the beach for a night, but it’s really about trying to attract people in that you want to work with. That’s one aspect is a referral.
The other piece that I think is key is getting to know your candidate. The reality is they might have multiple offers and that’s okay, don’t feel threatened by that. But, get to know the candidate – what’s important to them. Relocation is something that’s key. If you’re doing a national search and the candidate is looking to move to Portland, they probably want to come to Portland but what are some different elements around that relocation that might be special? For example, we just hired someone from Colorado who is moving here with a family. One of the concerns was how am I going to entertain my kids over the summer how are moving here. We found out what the kids were interested in and one of them likes to play soccer so we got a gift card to one of the soccer camps and the other likes the zoo so we got a family membership to the zoo. Those little differences, showing that we really invest in you as a whole person, are what rose us to the top and at a minimal cost. Probably $200 on our end for those two gift cards but it showed that family that we are really invested in them and want them to be successful.
 

“Those little differences, showing that we really invest in you
as a whole person, are what rose us to the top and at a minimal cost.” -Susy Dunn

 
Suzi: I think especially for some of your key positions, I mean engineers seem to be in such high demand and hard to find, I think you have to be aggressive.
Susy: One other piece to that that I found to be successful at Jama and at Jive is that we would be proactive about the career path. We would show them the career path document as they were in the interview saying look, here are all the ways that you could grow, here is what we look for, here is what we expect. Even though it’s primarily an internal document, show that to your candidates so they see how you make that investment in your career paths.
Suzi: In terms of identifying, assessing and developing people from rising stars to top performers, what practices have been effective in identifying those rising stars and growing talent? We talked about career pathing, but maybe a little more specific in terms of how you identify and then develop a plan and different kinds of activities associated with that plan.
Paige: Our annual performance review process that we go through, we actually do all of the reviews as the same time of year, so more of a focal based performance review. We actually introduced a 9 box which you would traditionally use for more of a high potential or succession plan to really help our manager peel apart where there was differentiation between the output or technical competence versus behaviors. How do you actually reward people for the behaviors and leadership that they show everyday, regardless of role and as a company if that is one of our goals and values then how do we reward it from a merit perspective as well. It has to be equal with the technical competencies or maybe even slightly ahead. It was a great opportunity, great tool to use to help managers peel that apart and really have a really solid review meeting with the employee on where they needed to grow and develop. We use it a little form a high potential perspective especially with those behavioral leaders to say what are you interested in? Kick up the career discussions between the manager and the employees to say where do you want to be? I think I know where you want to be, but maybe I don’t. So check in and actually get a good read on where it is they want to go now and help them find the path.
Tana: I can think of a management consultant client that I’ve worked with and their talent is clearly in their people and they need to grow their people and keep their people. They’ve paid a lot of attention in this last year to developing quarterly meetings with the senior execs to say hey are we on the same page with talent? Somebody else may be seeing something different out of the client than another manager who has limited experience. Let’s get clear on what we are looking for and who that is and how are we going to develop those folks. They’ve also invested in a Director of Development who is really putting together formal structures. What does it mean to go to this level and then that next level and what are the competencies? Behaviorally, and technically, what are we looking for and how are we going to develop those folks both from an on the job social piece to actually training on a new skill, so really getting purposeful on that development plan and having proactive conversations about what are we doing to develop that talent.
Susy: The calibration – I’m a really big fan of that and I’ve been doing it for many years. If you’re not doing it I highly recommend it because especially having that seat at the table with the management team, helping them think through what are the top performers doing, what’s differentiating them. Sometimes the managers have an idea for what it looks like but they aren’t all aligned on it so that’s where I think sitting down after the reviews are over is helpful. If you use a rating, it’s a good chance to be able to really understand when you look at those outliers on the ratings, who is an outlier on both sides. I am currently not using a rating system and I’m seeing a lot of value in that, too. By taking the ratings off the table we are really able to focus on what are those goals, those accomplishments, those results and have found that it’s been pretty liberating. It’s made the process more meaningful and it’s taken a lot of the anxiety out of the process for the managers and the employees. I know that’s scary to some, but I’m really excited about the path that that’s heading because I think it actually allows you to look at it with a clearer point of view.
Suzi: When you do that, how do you base your merit increases on incentives if you’re focused on basing them on performance?
Susy: It’s really tied more to the goals and so we do intensive goal planning. It’s the achievement of those goals, so the people that over exceed – whether it’s based on a specific metrics for example if you’re in sales and you hit our sales target. We are being really clear on what are those other behavioral expectations. Even with our career paths – we have a technical career path in terms of here is what you need technically for the role but here are the soft skills that we expect and how we expect those to grow with your experience.
Suzi: How have you been able to get leadership – the supervisors and manager specifically – engaged in developing the people the manager? Maybe engaged and even skilled to be effective in those areas.
Paige: It helps. Our CEO has been very consistent for the last five years on the vision he has for the company and it is a people-centered vision that really is more about self-directed work teams and with that comes a very distinct shift in management practices. We have been doing a lot of work of skill building with our managers, and quite frankly, they are excited because it’s something new and they feel like they themselves have been empowered to do it differently and not do it the same way that they received it as they grew up in this industry. We’ve also introduced HR Business Partners. We have a very generous CEO that says do what you need to do! I have 775 employees and I have 3 dedicated HR Business Partners that are aligned to businesses so that they can spend time every week with that leadership team and really reflect on employee relations issues, what’s the message to the organization, how are we doing it. It will take us more time but we’ve found that our managers are better at absorbing the information or the adjustments to how they are showing up every day if it’s a face-to-face meeting.
Tana: I think it’s important to get senior level buy-in first on the importance of leadership and developing people. If there is that alignment, that’s a good start. I also think having accountability for those leaders around the development of the people, the retention of their talent, and making that an expectation for their role. HR can also partner and help show the way, too. It’s our job as a business partner with various business units to help model it. Maybe they haven’t seen it done before because they were a high potential that got promoted and we need to set them up for success and develop that leadership track with the soft skills as well as the technical skills to give them what they need to be successful. I think it’s important to have HR help partner to support them in their growth and show them why it’s important and putting those metrics in place to see the value in return in investing in leadership.
Susy: This can be the elephant in the room. Your managers are obviously the most important connection in that employees engagement, or one of the most important. What I’ve found working in companies that are either going through tremendous growth – when you’re in the upswing it’s very exciting, people are engaged and excited – but what about that long-term sustainment? In my opinion, if you’re not investing in developing your managers, they’re not going to invest in developing the employees. Really make sure you’re investing in the managers. I do monthly manager meetings that are really aligned to what the company strategy is, we are making them feel like they are empowered with information, and then you use that to throw out some really good training nuggets. At Jama, I’m using Jive and finding it’s really useful. We use it more as an intranet but also a great discussion forum for talking about some challenge you might be facing as a manager, here are tools, resources, so you just keep things really top of mind and you’re continuously trying to develop those managers. Also hold them accountable. When it comes to the goal planning and their review, make sure that management or their leadership is a component that they are being measured on. If you’re not, then they’re probably not going to dedicate a lot of time if all of their goals are tied to an accomplishment or a result, I guarantee that’s where they are going to spend their time.
Suzi: What about if you have a situation where you are really focused and well-intended around career development, but there aren’t a lot of options for advancement. Maybe you’re a smaller organization and there’s just not a lot of room for people to go. How do you keep people growing and engaged?
Paige: I’ve been very impressed with our manufacturing managers and their intuitiveness of how to grow and develop. Because we are a non-union shop we can do a lot of cross training. From day one, we find out where the interests lie with employees and really starting them off cross training. They may have been hired to be a machine operator but we are going to cross train them in forklifts. We are growing the capabilities of the organization and we are keeping them challenged. Especially with the younger workforce, we are finding that they get bored much quicker than we’ve seen in the past, so how do we actually give them opportunities to learn something new and if there’s a business need, how do we make it a blended role? Get creative. Don’t just stay within your job families. We’ve been blending roles and increasing pay where it makes sense to identify the work they are doing on a day-to-day basis. Leverage tuition reimbursement if you’ve got it. How do you continually move them forward so they are growing and being challenged every day? That’s basically what we have been doing.
Tana:  Having conversations with employees about where their interests are and where there is flexibility. Whether it’s a task force or a special project, or an area they want to research, or maybe taking on two direct reports. Whatever it might be, just getting creative as far as what their interests and passions are and where you can stretch and give them those opportunities. I think that being creative, partnering with other departments, really getting an understanding of where they want to go and creating those opportunities for those people.
Susy: This is a problem that I’m currently facing. We are a small company and we have a lot of young talent coming in, literally young, fresh out of college, and they want to grow very quickly. I find it fascinating that they may be with a company three to six months and think I’m ready for the next step. That reminder of you really need to be in a role for a good year to really understand all the facets of the role and the business – that’s a reality. I really think that what it comes down to is getting to know your employees and understanding what’s important to them and then providing them with the autonomy for them to learn. Whether they are interested in growing and developing themselves personally, try to make that investment. You may not have a big training budget but there are really creative things you can do. The other thing is, you also conversely have people who don’t want to feel the pressure of change. There are some people that are going to be very happy moving into a role and staying there for several years. We have to balance the need for growth with the individual and what’s most important to them. I do think that there are important conversations around “not yet” with people—we may not have a position that you are interested in today if they want to grow, but that doesn’t mean it’s never going to exist. It’s always a fine line, it’s the no versus not yet. It’s the getting to know the individual and having that continuous learning opportunities.
 

“What it comes down to is getting to know your employees and understanding what’s important to them and then providing them with the autonomy for them to learn.” -Susy Dunn

 
Suzi: Shifting gears into recognition and reward programs, what tools or systems have you implemented or currently using to understand what motivates and engages your people?
Paige: Three things we’ve implemented over the past couple years. One thing we realized is that our managers weren’t regularly having meetings with their employees. Let’s start there! Get to know them as a human being and understand what motivates them, how they want to receive rewards and recognition, so really basic foundational – make sure your managers are meeting with employees. Then rather than doing org health surveys, we decided to do focus groups with employees at each location so it was more of a face-to-face meeting where we could ask follow up questions and understand what’s important to employees and how would they assess how we are showing up and performing as a company so we have a real clear gap analysis at the end to say where do we want to invest our dollars and how do we float it back to them to thank them for the information and say this is what we are doing about it. It’s never a good thing not to close that loop. The third that we’ve implemented is we have probationary reviews at the end of 90 days. At that point we are also asking employees to do a sit down meeting with their HR Business Partner for a stay interview – walk us through your experience of recruitment, onboarding, integration into your job and team, feedback on your manager, did you actually get the information you needed at the time and the right cadence to be the most successful. Do we need to adjust anything? Those have been wonderful feedback mechanisms – more real-time to managers in adjusting, to the recruiting team, so it’s been a great feedback loop.
Tana: It’s really important that we look at engagement and motivation individually, so again that falls on the manager and making sure HR is giving them the tools and support to be equipped to have those conversations. I’ve seen as simple as a questionnaire, so rating these top 15 things as far as purpose, money, accomplishment, those types of things – rating them from 1 to 15 and really understanding that it could change at times but it’s an active process. Being able to recognize and individualize feedback and that whole reward loop and being engaged as a manager. I think the challenge with the surveys is you’re going to get a general sense across the company but how you really pinpoint that there are high potentials struggling in this area, or they really need x. I think it goes back to engagement with the manager and having that open communication. That could be the monthly one-on-one, that could be an impromptu meeting but just having that foundation of trust and communication where they can say hey here’s what I need right now from my job or here’s where I want to go, or here’s what would really be helpful from the team or company. Communication is key there.
Susy: I agree with you both. In a lot of companies we don’t have the benefit of being able to have an in-house comp expert because we just don’t have the budget to support it if you’re a smaller organization. I highly recommend you continue every year or two to bring in a comp expert to help share what those trends are, what we are seeing in the marketplace. One of the things we encountered about two years ago and looking at the Webtrends group, salesforce came to town and all of a sudden the salaries for our support team went up by about 10k and we started seeing support engineers deciding they wanted to leave downtown Portland and go work in Hillsboro and make more money. We were caught off guard by that. All of a sudden we were put in a position at our local companies to decide are we going to try to match this compensation or what are we going to do to get in front of it? As we continue to see more investment here in Portland, it’s wonderful to see Portland as this vibrant hub in technology, and healthcare and services but we are also going to see a lot of changes in the competition landscape. I encourage you to continue to leverage those expert resources when you can. The other thing to reinforce is to get to know your employees and what’s important to them. One of the things that you do have is a variety of tools within any company. You have their salary, you could look at discretionary bonuses, think of things again that incorporate the family. Some of the best opportunities we’ve had to really drive engagement is if somebody delivers really well on a project, give them a weekend getaway for their family. Cover the airfare, the hotel, it may cost you $1,000 or $2,000 but that goes a long way and their family also will really appreciate that. Look at ways to incentivize in ways that are really meaningful to them.
Suzi: What role does wellness play in terms of your value proposition and benefit programs?
Susy: I’ve been at Jama since the fall, and it was fascinating coming into a company where wellness was just embedded in. Previous organizations I’ve been at, we’ve been asked to or recommended we need to embed wellness in. It’s been a really interesting experiment just to see a workforce that just in their DNA are avid bikers, hikers, skiers, etc. One of the things I’ve been trying to do is not come in and have this be any sort of HR program but really just make sure we are empowering and advocating and fostering and continuing people to know that wellness is so important. Looking at things that are important to them – we host onsite yoga, there were several people interested in juicing so we called Green Leaf Juicing and asked if they would do a workshop. It’s been really interesting to see it as part of the DNA. Going back to thinking of previous organizations where we tried to implement it and did, it does go a long way but I think a lot of times it’s really trying to figure out what matters most to your employees and don’t make it just a solid program. Really look at it as investing in each person individually and leverage it from there.
Suzi: It’s almost like shifting the mindset of wellness as a benefit-related program to more of a part of the culture.
Tana: I think wellness can be a notion of work/life integration. Not so much work/life balance but supporting folks in what they need to do personally which could be for the day to give that flexibility.  A lot of people have competing things going on with children, elder care and other things so giving that flexibility to take care of that and then know that they’ll get the work done and giving them that autonomy can be really valuable for employees.
Paige: We do have an outcomes based wellness program. It’s been in place for about five years so there are monetary rewards for different levels from rebates to their premiums. What we started to do was aggregate the biometric data by location and share it to say hey guys, as a site, this is where you have opportunities to get better and let them choose what’s the one thing they want to improve upon this year. Then give them a budget. We’ve got 30 guys after their shift going snowshoeing in Idaho because they want to be together and that’s fun for them. We have brought in nutritionists to the Clatsakine mill that brought in catered healthy food to say here it is, this is what it looks like, because nutrition was one of their goals. It’s really empowering the people so it means something to them and they feel like they have ownership.
Suzi:  How much does work environment influence your ability to attract and retain talent?
Paige: Significantly. We are a saw mill so the perception is that we are a dead or dying industry. There is a ton to overcome to get that new fresh blood looking at this as not the industry of their fathers. It’s very technologically savvy. We have optimizers, there are software engineers who work in the mill now. It is advanced as an industry but there is a perception out there that it is gritty, grimy and a lot of hard work so we have to overcome that.
Tana: I think as you all know, applicants are more savvy and they want more from their work environment now so they are going to take their time in doing their due diligence to make sure that they’ve got the right fit. We spend a lot of time at work and it’s important that they are asking us questions about work environment. I think it’s crucial in the ability to attract and retain talent. They want to know who they are going to be sitting beside, who they are going to be spending a large portion of their day with every day. It’s really important for candidates and they are interviewing us as well. Many times they have other offers on the table so it’s really our opportunity to shine and get them well integrated and a good feel of what it’s going to be like. If you have a positive culture that’s supportive, I think it really shines through in that interview process and can be a competitive advantage.
 

“As you all know, applicants are more savvy and they want more from their work environment now, so they are going to take their time in doing their due diligence to make sure that they’ve got the right fit.” -Tana Thomson

 
Susy: This is on my mind a lot right now because we are moving into a new space in December. We are in the midst of the design and we’ve just gathered feedback from employees. It’s a software company so we offer all the perks – we have the food onsite, the kegs of beer, all different types of collaboration areas embedded throughout. At the end of the day when we talked to employees, what was most important is that we don’t lose the essence of the culture. This space is really important, and yes people have opinions, people wanted a rock climbing wall and all these unrealistic thoughts about what we should put into place. But, when you really peel it back, what they wanted was a place they had pride in, that they felt like they wanted to be able to show off to their families. It didn’t have to be the fanciest, it just had to really show off who we are as a culture and truly emulate that. One of the things we talked about was furniture budget. You could have the fancy walnut desk and we’ll end up spending twice the amount of money as something that may be a little nicer than they IKEA furniture you sit on today, but it’s not going to be the fanciest furniture in the building, and they were okay with that. We were really open and honest about it. The space is important but I also think sometimes we overestimate. You can have the fanciest space and still have a culture that is really unhealthy.
Suzi: Shifting to metrics and benchmarks and then we will open it up for questions. What metrics have you used to evaluate the effectiveness of your recruitment and or retention practices?
Paige: We’ve been looking pretty hard at our voluntary and involuntary first year turnover as an indicator of quality of hire, so leaning away from a traditional recruitment metric. We look at it on a monthly basis down to the role so is there a trend in the job type, location, really getting down to an actionable metric. Monitoring those termination reasons – is there any sort of trend that we can do something about? Then the stay interviews have been huge wealth of knowledge to feedback into the overall loop to say we can do a better job of recruitment and assessing the talent.
Tana: Looking at the trends and peeling back the onion to look at what worked well, what didn’t, was it internal career pathing, did they have direct experience, did they get the right training, the right support system. I think as you look at patterns and trends you can re-shift your focus on retention. So maybe not a hard and fast calculation so to speak, but looking over time of a one year or two year period – what worked well, what hasn’t and what can we do differently moving forward to set people up for success and keep those high potentials on the team.
Susy: I’m a very big fan of metrics and also being able to tell the story and the themes behind those metrics. I look very closely from a recruiting perspective about what the time to hire is. That’s from the time we post the job to the time the offer is accepted. I really use that as a key metric and I look at that by department and by role and try to understand if we are seeing some trends that it takes longer than expected to hire what is that and then how can we more proactively hunt and source and try to bring more of that talent in. I look at the time to hire, I also look at the demographics of the pipeline. I want to know what the employee referral percentage is, how many we are directly sourcing, how many hits are coming in through our career site. If you don’t have an Applicant Tracking System that gives you some good analytics, that is something you can use to your advantage. Also LinkedIn – if you aren’t paying for any of the various LinkedIn packages there are some incredible analytics that you can get about the people who are looking at your company, how much time they are spending looking through the jobs. I look at that too, it gives me the health of the recruiting. For the turnover I look at the exact same perspectives. I really look at the one to two year turnover because I want to make sure we are retaining people for at least two years. If I see turnover that’s higher than expected in that one to two year category then I really try to understand and assess what that is. Those are the keys on the front and back end. Throughout the marks we look at how can we measure engagement from surveys after we have all employee meetings from the benefit surveys, etc. We use all of those to track engagement. I have a dashboard that I show the board of directors and they love it because it just shows them here are some of these quick metrics but I’m also able to describe the themes behind it and that really tells a good story.
Suzi: Thank you all so much! You all have such great experience and knowledge and are so articulate. I’m really grateful to have connections and partnerships with each of you. You all were fabulous, thank you!