Operating under the premise that no two workers are alike, companies that are practicing one-to-one management are figuring out what makes each of their employees tick. And that, the employees say, makes all the difference.
Collecting information about individuals and transforming it into tailored offerings is the stuff of one-to-one marketing. Now companies are taking that concept and focusing it on their own employees.
Linda Connor is a high-school-yearbook editor at heart. The vice-president of corporate culture at Technology Professionals Corp. (TPC), a $6.6-million technology staffing and services company in Grand Rapids, Mich., is constantly amassing and recording lively tidbits about the organization's almost 90 employees. She then takes that information, runs it through her imagination, and pulls out ingenious -- occasionally audacious -- ideas for customized rewards.
"I sit down at employees' 30-day reviews and ask specific questions about hobbies and interests for each member of their families," says Connor, who has, among other things, arranged for a staffer to fly on an F17 bomber. "I ask about the spouse, children, and even pets, so that if an event occurs that I know has been a drain on the family, I can do something special just for the spouse or kids." Connor updates her profiles over time with information and insights gleaned from routine interaction, "so we are prepared to do things that are very timely for their current interests or needs," she explains. "Every time I meet an employee or I hear about a meeting someone else has had, I take mental notes."
Collecting information about individuals and transforming it into tailored offerings is the stuff of one-to-one marketing, a seed planted in 1993 by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers that has since grown into the mighty oak of customer-relationship management (CRM). But in a new twist, TPC and companies like it are taking that concept and focusing it on their own employees. If describing such practices as "one-to-one management" constitutes buzz-phrase hijacking, at least the term's coiners consider the application compatible. "Organizations are limited in their one-to-one efforts to the degree that they don't model them internally," says Rogers, cofounder of the Peppers and Rogers Group, in Norwalk, Conn., and coauthor of The One to One Future. "Employees are hard-pressed to treat customers uniquely when they don't feel that's how they're treated by the company."
"Every time I meet an employee or I hear about a meeting someone else has had, I take mental notes."
In its 2001 survey, the Society for Human Resource Management includes a seemingly exhaustive list of 160 benefits ranging from prepaid funerals to ice-cream socials. One-to-one-management companies, in responding to individuals' acknowledged desires rather than to the masses' perceived demands, routinely devise perks of which the survey builders never even dreamed. Creative examples encountered at several small companies include
- hours as flexible as a Romanian gymnast,
- funding for staff engineers and scientists to deliver their non-work-related research at far-flung professional conferences,
- the services of an ergonomics consultant,
- textbook money for interns,
- the opportunity for employees to audition new chairs and desks in their offices in order to select the most comfortable.
Employee-tailored services can be as inexpensive as changing cleaning products to ease the airways of an asthmatic, or special-ordering vegan and kosher meals at company functions. They can also be cost-effective, delivering the same bull's-eye impact as target marketing. "Target marketing aims to provide the appropriate products and services to people with specific needs," explains one software company's CEO, who didn't want his organization's accommodating nature publicized. "Similarly, if you target the right benefits to the individual, you eliminate a lot of waste and inefficiency associated with providing blanket benefits to people who didn't want or need them."
Even in a fitful economy companies should consider moving beyond cafeteria-style benefits to something approaching valet-style benefits, suggests John Izzo, coauthor of Values Shift: The New Work Ethic and What It Means for Business. "The available pool of really good people is eventually going to turn into a puddle," he says. "And when it does, we're going to have to start treating employees the way we treat customers. The grapevine about which companies are good to work for is much stronger than it used to be."
One-to-one-management companies are run -- in a timely inversion of John Adams's ideal -- as organizations of men (and women), not of laws. Nonetheless, a few laws, or at least cultural traits, appear to govern many such organizations. Together those traits create an environment where employees' needs are known, sometimes anticipated, and served, just as customers' needs are known, sometimes anticipated, and served in CRM-focused organizations. What follows is a look at the rules by which one-to-one-management companies operate.
WANT A BETTER POD? GET TO KNOW THE PEAS
One-to-one marketing relies on the accretion of data on thousands -- sometimes millions -- of people by powerful computers. Patrick J. McGovern's brain does sort of the same thing. Each December the founder and chairman of International Data Group (IDG), a $3.1-billion technology-media and research company based in Framingham, personally delivers hand-signed cards to 3,300 employees across the United States, along with glowing words about their individual achievements during the previous 12 months. McGovern began the practice in IDG's birth year, 1964. "I found the experience an excellent way to express one-to-one my recognition of employees' role in our business progress and ask their personal opinions on what we could do to improve," he says.
Back then, of course, McGovern's holiday cheer had to stretch only as far as 16 employees. Recalling the names of more than 3,000 people and what they've been up to requires serious homework. The night before McGovern visits a business unit, he reads and memorizes managers' reports about their employees' accomplishments. "It takes me about three and a half weeks to deliver the cards and the personal plaudits," says McGovern. "But I learn so much about people's attitudes, ideas, and suggestions that it's very valuable to me.
