All the Right Moves

By concentrating its resources, it would be protected from the effects of unexpected staff departures and technical problems while creating an environment more conducive to clear standard operating procedures. But for an organization so dependent on the knowledge and experience of its people, such a drastic move also raised some major issues. It fell to Scalpello and her team to convince as many of PR Newswire’s employees as possible to relocate, sometimes cross huge distances, and make sure that the whole transition ran smoothly. No easy task. But when HRM sat down with her, she was in a buoyant mood and very keen to talk about her experiences. Clearly, something had gone right.

HRM. Once you had settled on this consolidation and relocation plan, how did you go about accomplishing it?

AS. The business decision we made in October of 2006 was that we would start to close the smaller offices and offer our editors the opportunity to relocate to one of three offices. One would be Cleveland where we already had some existing staff. Another was our policy office in Washington DC. The final one was our western hub in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is the location that I was involved in helping choose.

From our perspective, it was important that all the senior executives really understood and appreciated that, although this was the right business decision, it had tremendous personal impact on the lives of our employees and the editors that we valued so much. So we made a conscious decision that we were going to be transparent in everything we did. We were going to be honest and our goal was complete credibility. There were a number of things that we did to ensure that. One was that, while different offices would start to close or relocate at different times, we made a general announcement so that no office had less than three months notice. Some even had as long as seven months.

We really believed that if we stumbled in the beginning, and at any point were seen as not being totally honest, that anything else we announced would have no credibility. We were willing to take the risk of such an early announcement because we wanted people to know what our plans were. It would have been totally dishonest and disingenuous to not keep certain branches informed and then suddenly say, “Oh, now we’ve decided to close your office.”

We wanted to show great respect to our employees so people didn’t just get an email or a memo. We individually met with every person who was going to be impacted by this change. Having these face to face conversations meant that there was an awful lot of traveling. From late October, senior management basically never got off the plane until around April of 2007 when most of this was wrapped up.

We gave every affected individual a letter and spoke to them about what we would do to help support them and what we would give them if they chose to relocate. We offered everyone what we called a “familiarization trip” to one of the new locations, to which they could bring a family member, friend or anybody else who could help them make that decision.

We ran very individualized trips to Cleveland and Albuquerque with no more than six or seven individuals at a time, employees plus their guests. We worked with the economic development people in Albuquerque and the mayor’s office in Cleveland. We didn’t just say, “Okay, here’s what the offer is going to look like.” We had meetings so our staff understood about the real estate market, the educational situation and so on. We paid for all of it because we really wanted them to know what living and working there would be like.

We did pre-trip questionnaires so we understood what people wanted to know and what was important to them before they went. We also did post-trip questionnaires. When we met with different relocation companies and spoke to them about what we were trying to do, they told us that if we got 10 percent of the people who were eligible to relocate, that would be a really good number. This was especially true since we were asking people to relocate over pretty big distances. It wasn’t like we were going from San Francisco to San Diego. In the end we got a final count of almost 27 percent.

As you can see by that figure, it worked out well. It also gave us extreme goodwill, even with those that didn’t choose to make the move. If you couldn’t relocate, no harm, no foul, we offered you a retention bonus to stay with us until it was time to close your office. We also offered full severance and outplacement assistance. People felt that although it might have not been the right decision for them to move, that we were treating them with respect and that we were taking care of them.

HRM. So were there particular difficulties you had in the logistics of making it work? What were the biggest challenges for you when you actually came to moving the offices?

AS. The biggest challenge was that you had to juggle a lot of different things. You had to balance the need to get the offices running as quickly as possible with the personal difficulties of our people.

The other major factor was that there was so much that was new. It wasn’t that people just moved from LA to Albuquerque. They had to find housing and so on. Some of our employees were moving from places where they had never needed to own a car. We had to help them familiarize themselves with a new location, a new worksite and also be able to hit the ground running. Luckily for us, every one of our supervisors in Albuquerque is a relocated editor, but there was also the issue of dealing with a large amount of new employees.

HRM. Aside from the familiarization trips, what sort of assistance did you provide to your relocating employees to help them settle in their new environment?

AS. We worked with economic development people and we had dedicated real estate specialists who worked specifically with our employees. I’m also very proud of what our internal communications departments did. We created two pages on our internet site that had so much information about Cleveland and Albuquerque. Simple, valuable information like who to call if you need turn on your utilities, what the different neighborhoods are like and so on.

Employees who were already working and living in a location volunteered to be relocation buddies to people who were moving and would take them to different neighborhoods and speak to them about their experience living there. We paired people up with people who maybe had small children to talk about their experience within a particular neighborhood. It was something that worked really wonderfully, especially in Cleveland.

In Albuquerque, we didn’t yet have an office. But we were hiring a lot of local employees and they were so excited about being part of PR Newswire that they also offered to help the people who relocated to the area. We were using the local knowledge of our new hires to help our existing employees. It was really a smart move because then it didn’t create that ‘newbie versus existing staff’ situation. It was sort of reverse mentoring, the new employees were helping the more tenured employees, because in that part of their world they had more knowledge.

HRM. So did you find that doing that enabled you to get the office running that much quicker because people were helped to settle in that way and there was that exchange of information and ideas? Do you think that was beneficial for the office when it opened?

AS. Yes, definitely. And you know what? I visit those offices a lot and there’s such an energy and such a buzz because we’ve done a lot to build teamwork. That is critical, obviously, in an office where everybody’s got to help everybody else.

HRM. Are there any tips or pieces of advice you would offer to other companies undertaking a wholesale relocation such as this?

AS. I think there are a couple of things. I spoke to a lot of companies who had done this and took what I thought they didn’t do well and decided to do the opposite. For example, I know that one of the companies who had done similar did a very large familiarization trip with something like 30 people on a bus. I think my first tip would be that this is a very personal decision for people, so keep it personal. People would come to Cleveland with, let’s say, their wives and their small babies. Sometimes I’d follow up to see how the wife liked it because I realized it wasn’t just the male employee. She was going to be a key decision maker. Is this a place that she wanted to move?

Maybe even more important than that is the need for as much transparency as possible. When we announced our plans some people were suspicious that it was simply going to be a cost saving move. When they saw what those offices looked like, state-of-the-art technology, beautiful furniture, flat screen TVs they quickly changed their minds. Also in Albuquerque we now have supervisors who moved there from San Francisco, LA, Chicago and New York. Unlike some other companies have done, we did not ask anyone to take a salary cut to bring them in line with the Albuquerque salary market.

What that meant was that their salary was going to go a lot further in that market. Our reasoning was, you know what? If they’re worth this to us a week ago, they’re still worth it to us today, maybe even more so because of what that institutional knowledge and client experience brings to the transition of these offices.

The other tip I would give is that you should try to retain the leaders and get them engaged early on. As soon as we started talking about people relocating to larger hubs in Cleveland and Albuquerque, we got the commitment of the individuals who would be running those two hubs. They were both people who relocated. We had them involved and they were giving us advice on what the relocation packages should be for the people that were trying to get to move to those offices. It was a really important for the company that these two important people themselves had chosen to relocate to those offices.

The final piece of advice I would give is this. There’s an expression that says, “It’s not over ‘til the fat lady sings.” I’m going change that and say, “It’s never over.”

I’ve just come back the past couple of months doing focus groups in our new offices. I’ve been going back to employees and saying, “Okay, what did we do right? What’s working? What do we need to pay attention to?” As far as I’m concerned, if you want to build an engaged workforce, the conversation never stops.

PR Newswire: key figures

• Founded in 1954
• More than 1000 employees
• Offices in 14 countries send news to clients in 135 countries in 40 languages
• Distributes information to 85,000 journalists, 600 television stations and more than 4000 websites