Rewarding and motivating top performers: Lessons from PR Agency Management Summit
Ask any good agency leader what their biggest challenge is and recruiting/retaining top talent is always either at or near the top of their list. After a challenging 2009, there’s a greater need to engage and mobilize top performers.
At last week’s 2010 Bulldog Reporter Agency Management Summit I facilitated a roundtable for the Council of PR Firms on this topic. Participants included:
- Michael Lasky, Davis & Gilbert
- Brian Brodrick, Jackson Spalding
- Jennifer Haskins, Hawkins International Public Relations
- Jeff Lambert, Lambert, Edwards & Associates
- Laura Tomasetti, 360 Public Relations
- Craog TerBlanche, Volume PR
The challenges faced by participants varied. How to identify and bring a senior level talent into equity position? How to retain a fast-tracking senior account executive? What do you do when a senior executive wants to work part-time but retain the same level of responsibility and prestige within the firm?
Ideas from the roundtable participants were plentiful.
On identifying top talent. One agency has two executive meetings each year where they review all of the agency staff and identify the top talent and discuss what they need to make sure those people are retained. Even in downtimes, these top performers are rewarded with salary increases, bonuses, etc.
On long-term retention. Annual bonuses are fine for rewarding performance, but if you want to keep an employee, consider a longer-term bonus period with vesting. Perhaps a three-year bonus vested over the time period.
On new business incentives. There was discussion on whether the incentive should go to the person who brought in the lead or the team members who won the business. The incentive amount ranged generally from 5-10%. Most agreed that if the incentive is split among a team, there is a disincentive to have all the right people in the meeting.
Professional development. Rewards and salary are critical, but so is the work and career opportunities. Providing additional training opportunities for top performers serves both the agency and the employee. And, offering junior and mid-level staff an opportunity to lead agency initiatives is another way to provide leadership opportunities and enable agency management to evaluate how an employee performs in leadership roles.
Work-life balance. Offering reduced or flexible work schedules is seen as a good way to retain women with children. Providing the flexibility to do some work remotely is also becoming more commonplace. Agencies are helping to pay for services that promote work-life balance. One agency found an efficient way to offer a corporate gym membership where the employee’s cost is very low. Another agency offers a fitness credit.
Rewards. Agencies use various ways to reward staff. There are internal recognition or spot-bonus programs like “Do the Unexpected,” “Hi-5,” or “Step Ahead” awards. And, nothing replaces a well-timed “thank-you” from an agency principal.
Summer Fridays. Many larger, major-market agencies have closed at noon on Friday for years. Smaller, regional shops are implementing variations of this as well without sacrificing client service. At one agency, the staff is divided in half and employees get every other Friday off. At another, every employee signs up to work two summer Friday’s to cover for employees who are off.
Travel. There were different variations on how to use travel to reward staff. One agency offers a work-exchange program through a global independent agency network that it is a member of. Each year an employee works in the office of a network agency in another country for 3-4 weeks. This provides a singular learning opportunity as well as a reward. Another large agency provides this exchange program through their network of offices.
Senior level talent. All agreed one of the biggest challenges is incentivizing senior talent. Options include multi-year bonus plans, equity, stock options, phantom stock, bonus plans tied to group or agency performance. For example, owners might consider setting aside a certain percentage of dollars if profit before taxes (or EBITDA) is over a certain target. This bonus pool could be used for the executive team.
One uncommon approach to rewarding long-term contributors is a four-week sabbatical made available to employees after ten years. This is both a retention and rejuvenation tool.
No matter what the incentive or reward, all panelists agreed there’s no substitute for being clear about where the agency is headed and each employee’s career path.
Comments
It's not just agencies that worry about retaining top talent, CEO's cite that has a top concern across all industries. I think as people are used to personalized marketing and more customization in their life, they will come to expect this in their worklife as well.
HBR just had an interesting idea cast on how to make HR relevant and it talked about personalizing benefits more to retain talent. The idea being not all of your employees are in the same life stages or even have the same needs and to be able to offer more benefit choices to fit those needs.
blogs.hbr.org
Oh my, can we please do the work exchange with agencies in other countries? That sounds HEAVENLY!
I like your article.It is great and useful for me
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