Agency Reinvents Itself with Partnership-focused Employee Retention
If you were an animal what would you be? CEO Roger Fischer of Fischer & Partners (F&P) in Marina del Ray, Calif., is an elephant whose core value is trust.
This seemingly corny question has proved to be an exciting employee ice-breaker for the agency, which over the last five years has reinvented itself from a generalist firm to an exclusive healthcare agency. Though healthcare is a lucrative practice area for agency specialization, competition to attract and retain top employee talent is fierce.
F&P has chosen employee retention strategies that focus on promoting varying levels of partnerships that often rely on fun and witty exercises. A key example is the animal question that is used to dig beyond an employee's surface to arrive at what makes an employee tick. The animal designations are used for plaques that are posted outside employees' offices, which also include employee core values and employee "primetimes" or the time of day when an employee is most productive.
These efforts are delivering more than simple "feel-good" results, they are helping to support the agency's "magnet" goals to attract and retain great staff and clients.
In the last 18 months, when many of the partnership strategies have been test-driven, employee retention has been at an all-time high, says agency Fischer. Within the last year, F&P has only lost two of its 20-plus employees - one who got married and relocated and another who decided to go back to academia.
Most importantly, no one has jumped ship to go to another agency or left because they were dissatisfied, says Fischer. That achievement alone is worth the $150,000 the agency annually spends on professional development because employees are encouraged to stay and grow with the agency. By the end of 1998, Fischer increased its staff to 25 from 15 in 1996 and boosted its revenue to $3.6 million from $2.1 million within the same timeframe.
Setting the Ground Rules
To help the agency survive its growing pains, F&P, in 1996, retained Coaching for Results, a professional training and consulting firm in Beverly Hills, Calif., that used a combination of one-on-one consultations and group meetings to establish partnership goals. For the first year, Hutt Bush, CFR's president, met with Fischer's senior management where he encouraged candor and brutal honesty about what it would take to develop cohesive employee and client relationships. These meetings led to Partnership 2000 - the guiding principles that form the backdrop for the agency's professional development initiatives. Partnership 2000 relies on 10 rules of partnership that encourage mutual respect, challenge employees to be 100% accountable for establishing strong internal and external relationships and focus on embracing change and flexibility.
Earlier this year, F&P rolled out the Partnership 2000 initiatives throughout the agency with monthly off-site training sessions that promote professional growth-from team-building strategies and presentation skills to giving and receiving constructive criticism.
In July, the session focused on leadership and encouraged employees to rethink the agency's organizational structure. This input led to Fischer adopting an inverted pyramid approach to client relations in which customers, employees and the media occupied the top layers and executive management and the CEO occupied the bottom layers. Although it has been somewhat humbling for Fischer to see his role at the bottom of the agency's organizational chart, it reinforces how much he trusts employees to make strategic decisions.
Beyond Feel-Good Results
Admittedly, some of Fisher's 10 rules of partnership seem warm and fuzzy on the surface. For instance its No. 1 rule states "Remember that results are about design, design, design" and its No. 3 rule reminds employees to display genuine good feelings like trust, affection, love and respect with no deceptive behavior. While Bush concedes that they aren't rocket-science concepts, they provide affirmations about the agency's core values and empower employees to adopt daily partnership goals.
Employees also are rewarded for partnering effectively with co-workers and clients and attracting new employees and clients to the agency through performance-based incentive programs and other perks. Employees are given handsome finders fees for landing new clients (5% of revenues for the life of the account) and recruiting a new employee ($3,000). Soon the agency will offer new stock equity programs.
Although these efforts are helping to position F&P as a major healthcare communications player on the West Coast committed to employee satisfaction, the agency's motives are not altogether altruistic. "What we spend on professional development is really a mutual investment where employees are given an opportunity to affect and take part in the company's growth," says Fischer.
(F&P, Roger Fischer, 310/577-7870; Coaching for Results, Hutt Bush, 310/205-7900, www.coachingforresults.com)