Take rewards, for example. Everyone knows a more motivated worker is a more productive worker. But as companies struggled during the throws of the downturn, they were forced to consider alternatives to motivating employees with the standard one-size-fits-all cash reward. Instead, many introduced more personally meaningful, but often less expensive, non-cash rewards. Fairmont Hotels, for example, now offers high performing employees a wide choice of individualized awards; cafeteria cook Florica Radu wanted a new kitchen floor, whereas laundry attendant Lisandra Miravete hoped to take her mother to London.
Research from our new book Workforce of One: Revolutionizing Talent Management through Customization (Harvard Business Press, 2010) suggests that such customized rewards pay off; 73 percent of the 557 employees we surveyed felt that their performance would improve if rewards were tailored to what motivates them best, and 83 percent felt that they would be more likely to be attracted to and remain at an organization with highly personalized rewards.
New approaches to customizing learning have also taken off during the downturn. Instead of having a centralized training department create and roll out a costly but generic course, many organizations have turned to a less expensive alternative: enabling employees themselves to create learning content and dynamically pull and push it to one another on an as-needed, highly customized, and collaborative basis. Microsoft, for example, gives many of its employees the tools to create, capture, and share their own learning content with one another using blogs, wikis, online bulletin boards, SharePoint, and YouTube- and Facebook-like applications. Such peer-to-peer learning has tremendous advantages: since it is created closer to the frontline needs of the workforce, it is both more relevant and timely; employees are no longer force-fed information they already know; and information can easily be custom-condensed or expanded to the level of detail a peer may need.
Even the furloughs that all too many workers experienced during the downturn have
succeeded in breaking the long-standing paradigm of the one-size-fits-all work relationship. Furloughs taught employees to seek multiple work options, stitching together a portfolio of activities that may reflect their life interests and goals even better than the one standard job they previously held. One corporate communications expert we interviewed, for example, used the time off from her company to pick up some contract work in graphic design from another company, thereby broadening her skill base and enabling her to tap into her burgeoning interest and strength in the visual arts. Many employees who have returned to work full-time are now demanding that their organizations continue this practice internally, enabling them to custom configure their work experiences by picking and choosing assignments and projects best suited to them.
Offering employees such options is just good business. At Best Buy, for example, helping people play to their strengths by enabling them to customize their jobs has been found to double the rate of increase of employee engagement. This makes a dramatic difference in Best Buy’s financials, since a 0.10 increase in engagement (on a 5-point scale) is worth an estimated $100,000 in incremental profit per store, per year.
As the economy recovers, many companies will find that to attract and retain top talent, they will need to continue to offer such opportunities to employees. Forced up against the wall to creatively experiment with new ways of managing talent during the recession, many organizations have finally realized that such customization opportunities can be beneficial to the bottom line, and even at times an economic necessity both in terms of cost and in terms of productivity gains that can ensue when workers have jobs, rewards, learning, and more that are customized uniquely for them.
Susan Cantrell is a fellow at the Accenture Institute for High Performance. David Smith is the managing director of the Accenture Talent & Organization Performance practice. They are both authors of Workforce of One: Revolutionizing Talent Management through Customization
