Talent Management - July 2008 - (Page 56)

INSIGHT continued from page 47 APPLICATION continued from page 49 Employee feedback indicated the redemption process was very easy to use. The process also is seamless internationally. Currency denominations default to the employee’s local currency, but employees can use drop-down menus to select other currencies or gift certiﬁcates for other countries. Spotlight Impact The Spotlight recognition program incorporates many features employees previously indicated they wanted. However, even Intuit’s Spotlight team was surprised by the program’s rapid adoption. Awards in the last year of the previous program had reached about 5,500. In the ﬁrst year of Spotlight, 20,000 awards were given, rising to about 26,000 the following year. Within two years, between 90 and 95 percent of eligible employees had received at least one award. But adoption still was inconsistent across the organization. Grenier said one manager from a company Intuit acquired refused to use the program or to allow those in organizations reporting to him to use it. Eventually, managers on his staff got around this by calling colleagues from departments that did not report to this manager and asking them to recognize people for them. On the other hand, Intuit had successful adoption in its contact centers and its salaried workforce outside of engineering functions. It also had great success among supervisors and managers. Part of the issue with the engineers’ reluctance to adopt the recognition program stemmed from their long projects and the team nature of the work. As a result, awards in engineering became geared toward teams and milestones. When a team meets a milestone, the entire team is recognized. Some Intuit engineering leaders also give “ship trips” to their teams. When a new product is shipped, or a new software version released, the leader takes the team that developed the product to an event. “The Spotlight program nicely brings into focus two related issues: Is recognition valued when it is scarce, or does it work better when it is frequent? And [does] recognition [work] best when it is a surprise or when it is expected by employees?” said Hayagreeva Rao, Atholl McBean professor of organizational behavior and human resources at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. In 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008, Fortune listed Intuit as the most admired software company in the United States. In a 2007 survey that included eight categories, Intuit ranked No. 1 in people management, use of corporate assets, social responsibility, quality of management and quality of products and services. Fortune also regularly includes Intuit in its list of the best places to work, and its employee recognition program is one reason for this acknowledgement. Eric Mosley is the co-founder and chief executive ofﬁcer of Globoforce. He can be reached at editor@talentmgt.com. TM: McCord: It’s math and science heavy and very logically laid out. That’s right, and everything is via schedules. We’re a very analytic company. I don’t do written MBOs [management by objectives] and performance-based goals. The entire company runs off of what’s known in engineering terms as a Gantt chart. When everybody is very, very clear about what their deliverables are, there’s no reason for them to write them down and submit them to me. They’re more effectively managed at the department level. We get all kinds of data about what’s working and what’s not working with our customers through our interactions with our customers everyday. That deeply drives the culture of the company. We always think about measuring everything. There’s a lot of activity that’s coordinated simultaneously and that drives deliverables. I break performance management into a couple of categories. One is the delivery of objectives: what people in your department have to achieve to move the business forward. Those are usually measurable goals with deliverables and due dates. Then there are deliverables around leadership: put together a great team, inspire them to do amazing work, deliver it on time with innovation. We have high-level goals around growth, around ﬁnancial objectives. We’re very clear internally about what those are. But because our business itself is innovative, it allows me as an HR professional — it allows the people in leadership — to be more creative. Succession planning is mostly done around performance management. The company scales quite a bit, so someone who might be very successful at any early stage may not be successful later. Out of the 400 salaried employees, 100 are VPs and directors, and probably half of those are promoted from within. It’s not a formal, written occurrence. It’s more a regular review of our talent by the management team. We review talent progression at the executive level twice a year. TM: McCord: How do you handle succession planning? TM: McCord: What’s next for Netﬂix in terms of talent management? As we move into the digital delivery space, that’s going to be another area of enormous invention. Our next interesting challenge will be maintaining a very impactful organization that is scaling very rapidly. We have some 10 and a half million members right now and growing, but on the digital space, not so many. It’s injecting a new type of talent into the company that not only doesn’t exist in our company now — it doesn’t really exist anywhere. 56 July 2008 talent management magazine www.talentmgt.com http://www.talentmgt.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Talent Management - July 2008

Talent Management - July 2008 Editor’s Letter Human Performance Leading Edge Learning Connections Guest Editorial Passive Candidate Recruiting: Evolving with a Changing Workforce How Do They Feel? Sec Regulations and Executive Compensation Performance Management: A Retail Perspective Train the Non-Trainer Management-Go-Round: Developing Future Leaders Netflix Creates Its Own Script for Talent Management Intuit Spotlights Strategic Importance of Global Employee Recognition Make HR a Profit Center: Automate Technology to Gather Tax Credit Data Offshoring and the Impact on Talent Management Advertisers’ Index Editorial Resources Full Potential

Talent Management - July 2008

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