TalentTuning

Executive summary: Because everyone has different abilities, work styles and preferences, as well as different motivations for working, companies like Best Buy, Procter & Gamble, Google, The Container Store and W. L. Gore & Associates know that no single way of treating all employees is ever likely to be the best way. As the economy begins to recover, they are achieving improved workforce performance and productivity, higher levels of engagement and lower turnover while recruiting top performers who produce outstanding results, writes David Smith and Susan M. Cantrell in Accenture Outlook.

Market leaders like Best Buy, Procter & Gamble, Google, The Container Store and W. L. Gore & Associates are getting maximum performance from their employees by taking an individualized approach to talent management, treating each employee as a "workforce of one."

Because everyone has different abilities, work styles and preferences, as well as different motivations for working, these companies know that no single way of treating all employees is ever likely to be the best way. As the economy begins to recover, they are achieving improved workforce performance and productivity, higher levels of engagement and lower turnover while recruiting top performers who produce outstanding results.

By using one or more of four workforce-of-one customization approaches, these organizations are achieving customization in a highly structured, coordinated and scalable way, thereby retaining control of the management of their organizations. The hard work organizations have done standardizing people practices remains valid and relevant; it serves as the foundation enabling companies to take the next evolutionary step toward customization.

Controllable and manageable
"After a comprehensive study of more than 100 organizations, we have identified four distinct ways that an organization can customize in a structured, rules-based manner (see chart, below). These four workforce-of-one approaches to customization are built on standards that allow flexibility rather than encourage sameness, which is precisely what makes the approaches controllable and manageable," writes David Smith and Susan M. Cantrell.

1. Segment the workforce.
Just as marketers have been deftly dissecting consumer populations for decades—they have us pegged as suburban moms, clothes-conscious teens, techno-geeks and the like—companies can segment a workforce into discrete groups that share similar characteristics.

Employees may be grouped by any relevant criteria, such as value to the company, role or workforce, and age or generation. Advances in business intelligence and analytics have spurred a revolution in how companies are segmenting their workforces; companies are now creatively grouping their employees on such varying dimensions as learning styles, values, personality, wellness profiles, mobility, behavioral patterns, and even networking and communication styles.

Even the extended workforce can be segmented. Many companies today are finding highly talented workers all over the globe by tapping Web-based talent profiles of pre-screened people available for work, using test scores, experience, ratings and referrals from other users—think of Amazon.com and Facebook—to help them make a strong match for a particular need.

Because executives specify standard practices at a detailed level for each given segment, control is maintained.

2. Offer modular choices.
Just as Dell customizes computers by offering customers a menu of mix-and-match options, companies can offer a predetermined list of organizationally defined options that enable employees to customize their work experience.

At Capital One and Microsoft, for example, employees choose from a variety of mix-and-match work environment options based on their individual needs and changing work tasks.

Other organizations have unbundled standard job descriptions and broken them down into smaller tasks that can then be reconfigured in numerous ways by the individual, based on interest and skill. And at Skyline Construction, a San Francisco–based builder, eligible employees can pick their own salaries (within a certain range), choosing between lower salaries and a shot at a larger bonus, and higher salaries and the possibility of a smaller bonus.

By limiting employees' options to a list of organizationally defined and sanctioned standard alternatives, offering choices becomes manageable, affordable and controllable.

3. Define broad and simple rules.
Alternatively, an organization can create standard organizational rules so broad and simple that they can be interpreted in many different ways by workers or managers.

Just as contestants on the reality TV show The Amazing Race can take different routes to the same destination, so, too, can companies simply define the end, letting individuals and their managers customize the means based on the employee’s unique strengths, preferences and needs. The organization maintains control because the rules always have clear boundaries; as long as employees stay within them, they can act in a way that suits them best. Boundaries may be constrained by strategy, values, time, money, results or organizational scope, among others.

Consider how broad and simple rules can be used to customize jobs. At W. L. Gore, the Delaware-based maker of Gor-Tex and other fluoropolymer products, boundaries are constrained by organizational scope; employees determine their roles and tasks on each project, working within the loose limits of general functional or broad work areas only.

Time may also be used as a constraining boundary. At Google, for example, engineers need spend only 80 percent of their time on core duties; the remaining 20 percent may be customized by working on projects that have the greatest potential to create value for their organizations.

Best Buy, on the other hand, customizes jobs by using the broad and simple rule of obtaining results. Take Moira Hardek, a member of Best Buy's Geek Squad. After discovering that customers responded positively to her personal style, Hardek developed a passion for getting more females interested in technology careers, including jobs on the Geek Squad. Because Best Buy broadly defined Hardek's job as delivering superior customer service, she was able to match her job to her strengths by creating a technology summer camp with unique hands-on experiences designed to demystify technology for a younger generation—specifically young women.

Data analysis done jointly by Best Buy and Gallup reveals that helping people play to their strengths effectively doubles the rate of increase of employee engagement. This makes a dramatic difference in Best Buy's financials, since each 0.10 increase in engagement (on a five-point scale) is worth an estimated $100,000 in incremental profit per store, per year.

4. Foster employee-defined personalization.
In the same way that today's consumers can define and create their own content using the video-sharing site YouTube or the volunteer-written reference site Wikipedia, employees can now define and create their own people practices without any centrally defined limits, choices or policies designed to serve particular employee segments.

Individuals can create customized learning experiences, for example, by participating in wikis, blogs, YouTube- or Facebook-like applications, or virtual, simulated job experiences. They can also set their own schedules, as they do at Tesco and JetBlue Airways, by brokering schedule changes with fellow employees through shift-trading markets.

Compensation can be employee-defined too. In the US Navy, sailors—not HR—set compensation levels in hard-to-fill jobs through an online job auction website. This market-based system differs from a modular-choice approach to talent (like the Skyline Construction example cited above). Rather than having a few predefined schedule or compensation options determined by HR to choose from, this system gives people a practically unlimited ability to define their own schedules or salaries based on what the internal employee market can bear.

Even competencies, job descriptions and career paths can be defined not from on high but rather in a bottom-up fashion by employees themselves. By scanning résumés, email and other electronic communications, human capital analytics software can organically tell the organization what skills, experience and knowledge each employee has to create common, dynamic and ever-evolving worker-generated profiles.

Companies can use analytic technology, like that developed by talent management software company Taleo, to analyze promotion and transfer histories to identify common customized career paths taken by their employees. They can then use social networking technology to help those employees identify and network with people who have taken paths similar to the ones they want to take. This process will help provide some degree of structure and guidance for employees who work in complex organizations but have no clear career paths.

It's true that the employee-defined personalization approach grants the organization the least amount of control. But the organization still decides which employee-defined personalization practices it will support and how through incentives, technology and cultural change—enabling it to maintain some degree of control, consistency and alignment with business needs.

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