Push employees toward an outside life
OK, this next part might hurt a little. If you are really trying to
push your people to do something your competitors haven’t
thought of, Ruscheinski says you might want to send them home
for a while.
“We encourage people to be curious about and active participants in the world outside of their cube, the world outside our
offices,” Ruscheinski says. “So we like people to be active in the
arts and the community and politics, to really sort of stoke those
interests. We try to give people the ability to pursue those interests
outside the office, and that is directly related to motivating staff
and creating a creative culture.”
When Ruscheinski says the company encourages participation
outside of the office, she really means employees are given a good
shove in the direction of having a life. She recently helped create a
program called Edelman Escapes, which gives employees an extra
week of vacation and $1,000 — with the only caveat being that they
must first fill out and have approved a form detailing why they will
use this time for a vested personal interest.
“We’ve given out dozens of these over the last few years,” she
says. “We’ve sent people to cooking school, we’ve given people the
opportunity to finish a novel, to visit an exotic location, to record
a CD, and in a lot of cases, it’s to support a cause. So it’s highly
motivating, and that’s gone a long way toward keeping people
refreshed and energized and motivated.”
Before you think Ruscheinski and Edelman are being a bit too
kind, remember that they wouldn’t keep doing these things if they
didn’t find some value in it. Every leader has had a good employee
quit or retire early to pursue a personal passion, but when you can
find affordable outlets to let them tackle a passion and keep their
job, you create a bond with your company.
“We’ve reaped the rewards,” she says. “It’s a great retention strategy, so again there’s self-interest here, too. It’s an incredibly nice thing
to do for employees, but it keeps people feeling very good about the
company.”
How great of a retention strategy has it been? Edelman tracked
its most recent turnover rate at about 15 percent. The industry
average is 24 percent.
So that brings us to the sabbaticals, the most outrageous contrast
to the old axiom that the best employee is eternally at his or her desk
working quietly. If you want the outline for how a plan works, here it
is: Employees at Edelman are eligible for a sabbatical for the first
time after they’ve been with the agency 10 years. At that point, they
get three weeks. Every five years thereafter, they are eligible again
and get another week added on — and, yes, this is on top of vacation
time. The limit is six weeks, and the time must be taken all at once.
First, Ruscheinski wants you to know this formula wasn’t just
pulled out of midair. If you want to give employees extra time off,
start with accountability. Making 10 years the minimum amount of
time before someone can take a sabbatical ensures that the person is
probably a pretty valued employee who can balance his or her work
with this break. And, even with 3,000 employees, she says you’d be
surprised by how little overlap there is with the time rules.
“Obviously, I will say we did all the metrics before,” Ruscheinski
says. “We figured out the cost associated with it and the metrics and
how many people hit the 10-year mark every year and how many
people in the same group would be out at the same time, but it is
extremely manageable if you do your homework in advance — it
ends up actually being kind of naturally staggered.”
Beyond keeping turnover numbers low, the break tends to give
experienced employees a new lease on their career.
“It’s incredibly hard to quantify, but anecdotally, I’ve seen it, I’ve
heard it, you can talk to any of the people that have come back
from sabbatical, and it’s like they come back as refreshed and energized as a new employee, and they’re just going, ‘Bring it on,’” she
says.
And perhaps there is one way to quantify it: Edelman has continued
to grow through its creative ideas. In fact, the company did more than
$400 million in fees in 2007, roughly doubling its size in the last four
years.
Not every leader is going to be able to succumb to the idea of
sending people away for weeks at a time or paying for them to take
cooking classes, but the thing that Ruscheinski has seen and
helped create at Edelman is that fresh, energized employees motivate a company’s innovation and growth. She knows that if you
can create even one or two programs to do that, your competition
will have a hard time keeping up.
“I’ve been told this by several employees who have come here
from public companies, it’s much easier to invent things here, try
new things and scrap things when they don’t go well,” she says.
HOW TO REACH: Edelman U.S., www.edelman.com
