Keeping the Keepers

Holding onto high performers is a top-of-mind concern at the nation's largest companies as the economy rebounds. By Maura C. Ciccarelli It's been the topic of the year: What happens to top talent when the recovery gets into full swing? Despite the on-again, off-again economic recovery, it's a certainty that high-potential employees have a market value now and in the future. So it's instructive to learn how the nation's largest companies, listed in Human Resource Executive 's , are coping with these current and future challenges. The fear that high performers will flee is a real one, even for highly engaged employees, given the results of an Aon Hewitt Engagement 2.0 Survey in August. A random sampling of U.S. employees finds that

24 percent of highly engaged employees would be open to other job offers and/or will actively look when the economy improves. So what will keep top performers happy? It's not about the money. In a Kelton Research/Cornerstone OnDemand survey last year, more than half (53 percent) of 584 working Americans surveyed said that, aside from compensation and benefits, being appreciated would motivate them to stay in their current position -- even more than an opportunity to advance their careers (46 percent). Eighty-two percent of surveyed employees hadn't established any career goals in collaboration with their manager, 68 percent hadn't received any kind of useful feedback from their supervisors in the last six months and 53 percent said they didn't feel like they had any understanding of how their role contributed to broader business objectives, says Charles Coy, director of product marketing for Cornerstone, a talent-management-solutions provider based in Santa Monica, Calif. These findings dovetail with what we've been hearing, confirming that, on a touchy-feely level, employees don't feel appreciated. That tracks with findings from surveys done by the Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement, a Naperville, Ill.-based research center within Northwestern University's Medill Integrated Marketing Communications graduate program, says Jennifer Rosenzweig, the Forum's director of research. Organizations think too much of themselves as an aggregate and not enough of employees as individuals, she says. If, however, you can flip that focus, you can get engagement and retention of top performers, even in a recovery. Experts agree, and add that job customization can also engage top performers. HR leaders from the nation's largest companies concur that keeping hi-pos depends on making jobs meaningful, as the following stories demonstrate. It's also about developing a strong culture built on listening to and communicating with employees on a regular basis; empowering effective management, mentoring and training; being flexible in job descriptions and work arrangements; and even, dare we say it, having a little bit of fun. Like many companies on the Top 100 list, Hilton Worldwide (No. 51) has recently been structuring its talent-management strategies to support a culture for the entire workforce -- top performers, in particular -- that enables employees to create their own paths toward greater engagement. Like most companies, the loss of good talent is always a cause for concern and, as the economy grows stronger, there may be some who feel more confident to pursue work elsewhere, says Matthew W. Schuyler, Hilton's executive vice president and chief human resource officer. It is our belief, however, that retention of top talent is impacted most by the ability to provide meaningful work and a culture where people are passionate about what they do, rather than the economy. Top Hilton performers are identified and recognized through supervisor and colleague nomination programs, including the global CEO Light and Warmth Award that highlights workers who embody the values and champion the vision of Hilton Worldwide either through a specific event or through their daily interactions. The values, which spell out HILTON, are: Hospitality, Integrity, Leadership, Teamwork, Ownership and Now (e.g., operating with a sense of urgency and discipline). Also, Hilton's career-pathing program gives employees online access to detailed information on all roles within different departments and the ability to explore a wide range of training to develop the necessary skills; in the end, this encourages long tenures within the organization. Hilton also adds getting into the trenches to its list of engagement programs. From May to December 2010, 70 Hilton executives left their offices for a required three- to four-day business-immersion program that gives them hands-on experience in a variety of jobs at a Hilton property. Each night on the employee web portal, the executives reported through blogs and photos about their experiences and the employees they met. A huge side benefit of the program, Schuyler says, is that visited employees appreciated when the executives publicly acknowledged them for their work and, better yet, understood what they did. Our CEO [Christopher J. Nassetta] had a vision relative to this, a hunch that would be a meaningful experience for our executives, and he was right, Schuyler says. It can only enhance your ability to design a work approach that engages and ultimately retains the workforce. People look for broader meaning in their jobs and, to the extent that our executives both show that they get it and in fact do get it, it can only help with the engagement of our workforce. This immersion experience, to use a familiar phrase, 'keeps it real,' Schuyler adds. Recognition and saying 'thank you' is the most-talked-about and least-delivered-upon area of management. Being able to understand everyone's role by actually helping with their job was the best way to understand how to say 'thank you.' That was a nice byproduct of this effort. Hilton has been communicating to its employees through other means as well, such as surveys, quarterly town-hall meetings, quarterly newsletters and videos on employee portals to create a culture of engagement for all employees -- especially top performers. If an employer is going to listen to me during a downturn, why would I want to leave during an upturn as long as I feel like I'm fairly paid, feel like I have opportunities to learn and grow and develop, and as long as I'm having fun in my career and like who I work with and who I work for? he says. Schuyler, who only joined the hospitality industry a year and a half ago after a 20-year HR career in the finance, technology and professional-services industries, got his firsthand experience through the immersion program at the San Diego Hilton. There, he not only learned how to book guests at the front desk, but also helped plate 5,000 chicken dinners and worked in the physically demanding laundry facility where massive amounts of sheets, towels and linens are washed, dried and folded every day. It was like watching a symphony come together, he says. When you see something of that scale come together, when you see how people who are done with their part of the job pitch in to help everyone else, that was really inspiring to me. Bring Back the Pizza During the downturn, Ernst Young (No. 41) was very strategic about what was kept and what was cut, especially when it came to engaging high performers. We decided we were not going to cut back on things like variable pay and high-performance bonuses, says Kevin Kelly, the Americas director of people for the financial services firm based in New York. By keeping these things fully funded, we wanted to encourage high-performance behaviors throughout the year, not just at the end of the year. Nonessential expenses were cut -- many suggested by th