Agency: Starting a Creative Firm in the Age of Digital Marketing (Advertising Age) by Rick Webb

Author:Rick Webb [Webb, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781137501189
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2015-01-05T14:00:00+00:00

17

* * *

EMPLOYEE RETENTION

In terms of human resource matters, we can broadly break things down into two categories: employee retention and employee departures.

HR VERSUS RECRUITING

In tech, HR is often equated with “recruiting.” I have seen many tech companies hire people in HR whose only job is to recruit. This is a mistake.

Depending on your specific discipline, recruiting may be a breeze or a pain. The odds are, in the early days you will do most of it yourself. Hiring a recruiting firm or a dedicated internal recruiter probably won’t make sense until you’re around 100 employees or more. Leverage your personal network, your clients, and your employees in the early days. Set up an incentive system, rewarding the employees for referrals that lead to a hire.

But above all, don’t confuse your recruiting efforts with your HR efforts. As your company grows, a real, dedicated HR capacity will become vital. The tipping point is between 20 and 30 people. Once you have some employees, especially if they are performing well, it’s easy to “set and forget” them. That is, it’s easy to focus on the problems in your company and not pay as much attention to the things that are going well. When the thing that is going well is a machine or a process, this can work. When the thing that is going well is a human, however, over time, “set and forget” can lead to problems.

It took us a long time to figure this out. We were good about giving raises and praise. But beyond that, in many ways, I see now, we took our good employees for granted. What I eventually came to learn is that if we are trying to make employees feel invested in the future of the company, we need to invest in our employees.

BE THE GROWN-UP IN THE COMPANY

You own a company now. This means that you are far, far more incentivized than you ever were at a previous job. You know this. This is what drives you. This is why you own your own company. While your company may be great, the incentives you feel are far, far more weighty than those of people around you. They are, almost by definition, not as vested in the fortunes of the company as you are. It may hurt to hear this, but to some of your employees, even some of your best employees, this is just a job.

Secondly, you are now privy to the thoughts, lives, activities, ailments, and foibles of every person in the company. Unless you’re starting your company and you have a background in HR, this was probably not the case at your previous company. Some people have real problems. I had one employee—a great employee—whose child was born with an incredibly rare condition that was severely life threatening. Of course we made ample exception of the rules for her. Sometimes life’s problems pile up. Sometimes an employee had a hangover, yes, but then the next week their mother died. The two may or may not have been related.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.