It’s a New World and Everyone Is Paying Attention

An Industry Insight feature with Boost Rewards

Maintaining and attracting the right workforce is evermore critical in a globally competitive economy. Two forces are hard at work in this arena and it’s important to pay attention to both. The first is the changing nature of the knowledge worker and the second is the subsequent changes needed in the workplace to deal with new attitudes and behaviors about work and life.

“We've turned the corner with a new corporate culture. It's not shifting - it's shifted”
-Evan Scott, Chief Marketing Officer of Boost Rewards

Several books in particular speak volumes toward understanding these changes – Richard Florida’s book The Rise of the Creative Class defines a new generation of workers and delves into what drives their decisions. This book and Florida’s subsequent work, while focusing on regional economic development, go a long way toward helping us understand the recruiting and retention issues we face on a recurring basis.

The Workplace Revolution , by Matthew Gilbert, also does a great job helping understand some fundamental shifts in employee expectations and how management can tackle the issues needed to retain and grow top talent.

Finally, Barbara Brannen’s Office Peace, a groundbreaking fable about principles for behavior-driven management, offers a refreshing new look at common sense ideas for creating and sustaining a vibrant culture based around key behaviors.

We’ve turned the corner with a new corporate culture. It’s not shifting – it’s shifted. Access to information and knowledge has made a tremendous impact on society and individuals. It’s changed how business is conducted, how people view education, and, in general, who we believe should be in charge.

Seizing the opportunity to engage employees in ways that embrace these changes has the potential to positively transform corporate culture.

The new world of work

So, the world of work has gone through some fundamental shifts, particularly in the area of employer-employee relations. For many reasons – the rise of the knowledge economy, the changing nature of loyalty, and information technology to name a few – workers expect more from their employers than ever before.

Employees are asking new questions from a generation ago. What sort of work culture do you have? What is your relationship with your community? Is your workforce diverse?

These questions are very different from the previous generation’s questions related to salary and stability. It is Generation X prominently leading this new focus. They want a life in addition to a career, and they want a say in making it happen.

The newer world of connectivity and community

Access to information has paved the way to a whole other level of connectivity. For the first decade or more, the internet was about access to information – and companies learned what it meant to put more and more information online. More recently, with the advent of Web 2.0 applications, we know that access to information has become exponentially more involved with millions of people taking an active role in pushing their own content onto the web.

These aspects have created two interesting dynamics. For businesses, the shift has meant, as integrated marketing leader Gordon Hochhalter (managing partner, Mobium.com) writes, “Business products are bought, not sold.” This is a much bigger deal than that may sound. The shift has to do with who’s in charge. In this new paradigm, customers are in charge of what information they get, how they access it, and when they engage their prospective suppliers.

The second dynamic is how this sense of ownership and self-reliance has moved into the world of employees. They, too, have their own ideas about what information they want and when they want it; they also want choices. The Internet revolution is providing them with these by way of a growing number of social networks, evermore accessible blogging software (free, by the way!) and a host of other tools such as Google’s suite of products.

Everything matters

In the workplace, this means everything matters now; how you educate and train your employees, what access they have to the vision of the company, how well you engage them in meaningful work, and most importantly, how you reward them for a job well done. A generation ago, providing the security of lifelong employment and a pension was integral to the American Dream. Today, the American Dream has shifted. It includes doing good to do well, being recognized beyond years of service for contributing to the team’s success and feeling like one’s ideas and opinions matter to the organization.

These new workers, and the companies savvy enough to keep them, are turning their world into reality. Creative companies such as Starbucks, Google, SAS Institute, and others have a host of ways they build and grow their cultures to reward their employees.

At Shumsky, we’ve built our own rewards and recognition program around five principles developed by Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz – 1) Make it your own, 2) Everything matters, 3) Surprise and delight, 4) Embrace resistance and 5) Leave your mark.

Show me the money

The story of Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire is, in fact, not about the money but about redemption from being greedy and empty. In today’s workplace, this ideal of ‘being inspired’ is real. And let’s be clear – with the assumption that an employer is providing industry standard compensation for a given position, the rest of what that employer offers is critical to building and maintaining a vibrant culture. Such a culture has the ability to retain its best performers and attract like-minded workers to join in.

Recognition and rewards programs have been around since S&H Green Stamps (who remembers those?) and before. What has become exciting in the last couple of years has been the development of platforms that incorporate these shifts in the workplace and in the psyche of the worker. They leverage existing behaviors to encourage new ones – such as integration with email and being able to select your own rewards from the points you earn.

In Barbara Brannen’s Office Peace, the author presents a fable of what an inspired work environment would be like. On the protagonists first day he enters the parking lot where every spot is labeled Employee of the Year. What we come to learn is that this imaginary company considers every employee ‘Of the Year’. What we learn throughout the book are 10 principles for creating a culture that honors what many workers want today – office peace. A place where they can justify spending the number of hours they devote to their employer because the employer devotes time to them.

Getting to the new world

Michael Rennie, Principal with McKinsey and Company said, “The opportunities and challenges of the last 20 years in business have been driven by the application of information technology; the next 20 years will be driven by the application of consciousness.” Companies are learning to leverage technology to drive more than corporate efficiency. They are using technology to drive corporate responsibility and culture.

Three resources you can explore to help embrace the new world of work in your organization are the Incentive Marketing Association (www.incentivemarketing.org) website to learn more about the latest thinking in employee-focused program; the Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement (www.performanceforum.org) – a Northwestern University think tank with research and services to help organizations leverage their organizations’ greatest assets; and Barbara Brannen’s website, (www.letsplaymore.com) to learn about her philosophy, services and books. Brannen has turned a stellar career in human resources into her consulting group, The Top Banana Institute.

Evan Scott has more than 20 years of experience in integrated marketing communications. He has led the product development team for Boost Rewards, an online incentive platform designed to allow companies the ability to consolidate corporate incentive programs and offer new choices for how employees participate in and benefit from those programs. More information is online at www.boostrewards.com. Or contact Scott at evan.scott@shumsky.com.