Vision & Values - The Lesson Of Ikea

I've recently been reading The Ikea Edge, Anders Dahlvig's excellent account of his time at Ikea, rise to CEO, and what he learnt about management. I was inspired to read the book after listening to him on the BBC's Today programme with Simon Jack, as Dahlvig's outlook on corporate responsibility (CR) was in stark contrast to the stories of the day centred on Bob Diamond's resignation and the recent debates on CR vs shareholder value.

This has coincided with my PR clients looking to attract staff in what has become a very highly competitive market and ways to set themselves apart from the competition.

Dahlvig has some important points to make regarding attracting  the best talent, and they are fully interwoven with his vision of corporate responsibility, so I don't want to remove what he says from that context. However, his most insightful passages appear under 'The Structure of Company Culture'.

Dahlvig says that companies that create their own company culture have a competitive edge in the labour market by:

1. Creating belonging and fellowship - which in turn creates security, strength, efficiency and success

2. Brining employees together - this guides behaviour and responsibility

3. Inspires allegiance - work contributes to life, rather than simply pays for it.

In essence, "Most people want more from their lives than to just earn their keep.

...a larger meaning in work and life...is something many people look for". Organisations that achieve this will be more competitive in the labour market, so they can recruit, motivate and retain the best people. He points out that despite frequent offers of salary rises, staff tend to stay loyal to Ikea. This resonates with an example that was brought up recently at a symposium I attended on talent acquisition - that of Zappos Shoes.  Zappo's CEO (Tony Hsieh) focuses on 'delivering happiness'. Again, despite the potential to earn more money elsewhere, staff stay put and consistently score highly on satisfaction metrics. "You'd much rather support a company that inspires you than one that doesn't" says Hsieh.

Recruitment agencies are forever churning out salary surveys. Ostensibly to provide a benchmark, they clearly serve the recruiters' interests to try and increase salaries. But have these contributed to your PR agency’s hiring strategy? Let’s take a step back for a moment and consider this. How many of your staff could articulate the vision of your agency? Moreover, do you have a vision for the culture and values of your team, above and beyond generating profits? Maybe, rather than a salary survey, a culture audit would be more beneficial. 

Recruitment Strategies: The Rediscovery Of Talent

You'd have to have been living in a cave recently not to have noticed the boom in the 'Talent' market over the last 12 months. And by Talent, I'm referring to the business of talent acquisition and management.  Not a new idea by any means, but with the pressures of recession forcing businesses to try to achieve the seemingly contradictory goals of saving money on recruitment, and attracting and retaining the best candidates, the talent industry has had a renewed focus.

If you Google a definition of Talent, you will quickly see a huge array of definitions that date way back to the 1990s. In many minds, the idea of talent is closely linked to elitism. The best performing staff are given faster promotions and better salaries. Of course, nobody is arguing that high performers should not be rewarded. But rather than create a multi-stream, dog-eat-dog competitive work environment, businesses are looking at how talent can be used to nurture the greater good of the team - and bring everyone up with them.

Since 2004/05 it seems, the idea of talent has become more crystallised.  Essentially, talent is two things - capability and potential. Many people will think of Talent as their key performers - those people essential for the business to deliver its objectives. But the challenge is to define what makes them the beating heart of the organisation use that information to train others. The idea is that staff can be developed into high performers (i.e talent management). But looking more broadly, talent is also the assessment of the abilities of the team, how this fits with future objectives and if the two tally. Moving into new areas could mean taking on new talent, or developing existing talent in a new direction.  Moreover, companies have to ensure that the workforce feels utilised. New Talent can always be found and nurtured in the existing team - easily the most cost effective way of adding new capabilities into the organisation. And what really matters to the business is the time it takes to fill the capability gap - whether from new or existing staff. As Vineet Nayar, HCL's ex-CEO might say, "Employees first, customers second".

However, this in itself provides a new challenge. The easiest way to assess a recruitment strategy is to look at time and cost. But if you start looking at it from a 'quality of recruitment' perspective, the measurement becomes much harder. In 2011, in a now widely available study for Qualcomm [opens pdf], the Institute of Corporate Productivity revealed that while only 12% of companies said they had talent management metrics in place, 70% acknowledged that they should measure talent to such an extent. In their study, lower market performers were more likely to measure tactical recruiting metrics, whereas higher performers were more likely to measure quality.

In the same way that social media has forced PR to be more measurable, the fact that social media and digital tools are starting to make it easier to measure such things as staff satisfaction - with greater participation -   is another way they are changing the heart of business and it's bringing HR back into the strategic limelight. HR has always been a support function by definition, but talent acquisition and management is a strategy for success.