PALM SPRINGS, CALIF. - Departing employees who can lure clients away are a constant threat.
Prevention tactics range from legal covenants to simply treating employees better, speakers said at PRSA's Counselors Academy held here last week.
Employees play a key role in growth, especially as the industry becomes more splintered with home-based practitioners becoming commonplace.
Companies should allow flex hours and telecommuting to accommodate the evolving workforce, says Tom Miller, a senior VP with Roper Starch Worldwide of New York. "It's no longer when you work, but what you get done. You can't take a cookie-cutter approach to employees today."
Ideas from other firms include:
Patrice Tanaka & Co. Inc., a communications boutique in New York, allows casual dress every day and a meditation room; and
Edward Howard & Co., Cleveland, Ohio, offers employees stock ownership to retain its senior employees and mitigate the damage caused when upper-level execs leave.
In a more hard-nosed tactic, firms use contracts to prevent employees from working with clients for a specified time after leaving a company, says Michael Lasky, a partner at Davis & Gilbert, New York. Lasky says companies are finding "new ways to skin the restrictive covenant cat." He suggests:
A departing executive or his new employer can share revenues derived from the former employer's clients with the former employer. A contract should indicate that the exec is required to share profits after he leaves for an agreed-upon time;
A covenant can provide incentive to a former employee by guaranteeing continued salary payments during the non-compete or non-solicitation period; and
An employer may provide post-termination benefits in return for an agreement not to solicit or service former clients.
Sometimes PR businesses don't grow because they stay tethered to the tried and true, according to James J. Roop, president of The James J. Roop Co., Cleveland. When running a business, watch for these pitfalls:
- Institutionalizing perks: for example, paying for membership to a professional society for an employee who isn't active;
- Institutionalizing office practices: for example, sticking with the same office supplier and not researching something better; and
- Beware of the movement of what should be variable costs into fixed.
A luncheon keynote address with Regan Kenyon, president of the Secondary School Admissions Test Board, Princeton, N.J. was a miserable flop. Also, some of the conference's discussions bordered on the superficial and planners had to compete with pristine surroundings and a PGA-rated golf course at the exclusive La Quinta Resort.
58 percent of Amerians expect most pros will work some from their homes, says Tom Miller, a VP with Roper Starch Worldwide of New York. The market research firm polls about 16,000 Americans annually.
