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."