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Bill Bohn, Associated Financial Group; Mary Curtin, 4Iimprint; and Linda Evans, Douglas Dynamics participate in an Employee Retention Roundtable, co-sponsored by Associated Financial Group and The Business Journal

Staff Milwaukee Business Journal
(Page 23 of 23)

We're a very non-hierarchal type of organization. If we as a company win a trip, everyone's eligible for it. We do a drawing. We're into sharing. We're constantly reading up on, OK, what's new, realizing that it's got to be small. We're 500 people. We're not 5,000. Know what fits your company and culture because not everything is going to.

MR. BOHN: A lot of that stuff is brilliant, and I don't know if you intentionally employ one of the more recent types of science or not, but it's called behavioral economics. There's a book called “Predictably Rational.” Basically, it gets to the heart of a lot of these strategies when you're talking about retention, value and understanding what's going on. It's changing the work environment from an economic transaction. I come to you, I negotiate a price, I do X, and I'm gone. There's no loyalty there. You're changing that to a social interaction. For example, if you go to your friend's house for dinner and have a beautiful dinner, nice wine, at the end you get up and say, “Best dinner I ever had, how much do I owe you?”, you probably won't be friends with that person very long. That is a social transaction. If you go to a restaurant and you try to thank them and bring them a candle and say, what a great meal that was, you'd probably be arrested. That's an economic transaction. So the exact same scenario, you got food and it was really good. It's all about how you position it.

A lot of these strategies about making people feel more at home, more valued, making their life easier like a friend or a family member would, those are the things that turn it from an economic transaction to a social transaction. Many times they're very inexpensive. Whatever you spend, you're going to get back multifold in terms of employee satisfaction and retention. The other thing I would say is don't ever underestimate the importance of people understanding their benefits, not just that you have good benefits, but that they actually understand them. Ten, 15, 20 years ago you just called everybody into the lunchroom, said, “Here's your little booklet, do you want the HMO, go home, you're on your own.” Today we have to understand that dependents, spouses, etc, are major consumers. We continue to change plan design, high deductibles, consumers, and all of these things. If the people who sat in the employee meeting probably didn't get it, and I guarantee they are explaining it to their spouse. So you use tools to get that information out. We have some Web tools and other things we've developed to facilitate educating your employees. Use total compensation statements to make sure that they understand what they have and its overall value. So a two-pronged approach, have a social versus economic transaction and good communication. A Met Life study says that people who are satisfied with their benefits are nearly three times as likely to express a strong sense of loyalty to their employers than those who do not understand their benefits.

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