Gary Shamis isn’t an inventor, but the managing director of SS&G Financial
Services Inc. doesn’t have to be
for his firm to be successful.
“We are very good at copying
others,” Shamis says. “What I
try to do is learn from others
who have done things successfully. Once in awhile, we’ll take
credit for an original idea. But
for the most part, it’s keeping
our eyes and ears open and trying to understand what other
people are doing successfully in
our industry and in other industries and trying to understand
the applications and how it can
help our business.”
As an example, Shamis
noticed that a consulting company was having great success
working for cities, communities
and companies to make them
culturally appealing to young
people. He saw the potential
benefits of employing such a
strategy and immediately hired
the company.
As a result, the 450-employee
firm has improved retention
while posting 2007 revenue of
more than $50 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Shamis about how to stop
young employees from leaving
and why it’s worth it to splurge
on Starbucks.
Listen to what your employees want. Our people felt that we weren’t
giving them the degree of positive recognition we needed to.
That was important to them, but
we didn’t even understand it
was an issue.
Once we understand that [as a
result of employee surveys], it’s
trying to get our senior-level
people to understand the importance of that and then begin
doing more of that.
There are other things, too,
like looking at quality of life
issues, which are very important
to young people.
We have a very sophisticated
wellness program. We work
with nutritionists and have
physical activities the firm sponsors and pays for. With the wellness program, if we have people
who are healthier, certainly
we’re going to have lower
health care costs, but that is a
long-term project. That’s not
something you put in, and in
one day, you lower your health
care costs.
Also, having the best technology, the best computers, things
like that are going to appeal to
younger people. … Even the little things are important.
Like the coffee they drink
is important to them, so we
switched over to Starbucks. We
have Starbucks in all the offices,
and it costs us $10,000 extra a
year to have Starbucks, but it’s
just one little piece of the puzzle.
Convince your employees the
grass isn’t greener elsewhere. The
focus is on the retention, our
ability to keep these young people. I think young people
become preprogrammed when
they leave college to have many
life experiences.
That makes it really challenging when you’re trying to train
them and get them working on a consistent basis on a client,
and then they’re thinking, ‘I
need to spend two years at
SS&G, then go elsewhere.’
So the challenge is to convince
them that elsewhere is not as
attractive as they may think.
Along those lines, we’ve started offering something we call
the Boomerang Award. We give
that to people who have left our
firm and come back.
We’ve had around 30 employees who left the firm at one
point, returned and are currently employed by the firm today.
