HIRING and RETAINING

At Brown & Brown Insurance, account services manager is an important, customer-facing position held by people knowledgeable about the industry and in charge of servicing clients on a daily basis.

The company has one person in that role who works from home. She starts her day early, sending around 50 emails before breakfast, then takes a break to get her daughter on the school bus and take care of other personal business. She gets back in front of her computer around 10 a.m. to answer any returned correspondence, working until her daughter gets home.

She then finishes her workday around 7 p.m., returning more messages and updating supervisors on any issues that have arisen with accounts during the day. Allowing her the freedom to work from home helped the company keep this employee in a role where retention is often difficult.

“That became the single most important benefit,” says James Clairmont, managing principal of employee benefits.

 “It’s not an insurance benefit. It’s strictly a benefit that is designed around being able to operationally provide that flexibility.”

Know your audience, stick with your culture

There are many ways to attract and retain employees, from flexible scheduling to providing a great culture. And there are ways to fill roles with temporary consultants to ensure companies can conduct productive searches for their permanent counterparts, according to a panel of experts. The group shared their thoughts during an August discussion at the Minneapolis Club hosted by Upsize and Club Entrepreneur’s Rick Brimacomb.

Clairmont says companies need to get beyond thinking about benefits as just health care, dental and 401K plans and focus more on designing programs that will differentiate the company and actually attract employees.

“Those are all great and you need them and we probably all have them,” he says of the traditional approach. “But we have found that by really understanding the demographics and needs and wants of the individuals you specifically want to attract, that you can design benefit programs that are more effective and that will help you to attract and retain the best and brightest.”

That’s become part of the culture at Brown & Brown, he says, adding that among the benefits offered by the company now include a Thursday afternoon happy hour and a tuition reimbursement program that was so popular that the original budget was exceeded well before all interested employees had signed up.

“All of those things are falling into the bucket of employee benefits and culture,” he says.

Darin Lynch, founder and CEO of Irish Titan One, told attendees that creating a rock-solid company culture and staying true to it are vital when hiring and retaining employees.

Irish Titan builds websites and works with clients on strategy, marketing, search engine optimization and content. The company is unique in its industry in that it doesn’t work with contractors, freelancers or off-shore resources. He’s also particular about who he hires, looking for people who meet five values, including passion, ownership, teamwork, impact and skills (POTIS).

He’s worked hard over the years to develop a culture that is people driven both in the sense that he needs his employees to, in their way, portray those values daily.

“We expect all of our titans to demonstrate those in their own authentic way every day,” he says. “Some of those are more external, client facing and some are more internal, but that’s what we expect of everybody.”

He also described the Irish Titan as a “no snowflake” kind of place. There is a culture of respect and acceptance, but people joke around with each other and Lynch, himself, acknowledged the occasional expletive flies out of his mouth.

“If someone is easily offended, we’re just not the place for them,” he says. “All of this is couched in respect. I’ve had to makes pretty snap decisions on peoples’ tenure at Irish Titan when they’ve acted in ways that are disrespectful. And I do that without much hesitation.”

To cement the culture, the company has a lot of traditions. All new hires have to perform their high school fight song or, if they don’t know it, another song. It’s turned into a big presentation and the performances are archived on social media.

“People rent costumes, we’ve had a ukulele,” he says. “It’s just a good way for people to become part of the family.”

But employees also are recognized for their hard work. At the one-year anniversary everybody gets an Irish Titan rugby shirt with their name and employee number on the back. The company recognizes a “Titan of the Quarter” and lets those with birthdays pick the food at the monthly meeting. It’s a passionate place with employees who are screened intensely before they are hired.

“Don’t be desperate,” he says. “Know who you are and state that. If you exclude sleeping hours, we’re at work more than we’re not. I want people who want to be at Irish Titan for who we are, not because I’m desperate and I need a butt in the seat.”

Benefits of temporary consultants

While a creative approach to benefits and a supportive culture might help lure employees in and keep them around a while, participants say it’s important that companies still take a reasonable amount of time doing due diligence on potential hires to make sure they find the right match.

One solution in the interim, says Susan Haugen, partner and director of recruiting with Scouts, is bringing in a temporary hire. Scouts places high-level financial consultants into roles on an interim or project basis.

“If you bring in a consultant, they can be there quickly to overlap with the outgoing employee and they can get up to speed in days rather than weeks or months,” she says. “Also, importantly, having that consultant in there doing the work allows the hiring manger to really do a good and patient search.”

Having someone like that in place eliminates offloading duties on other co-workers, who might already be feeling overburdened. Temporary consultants might also make sense when a company has a specific short-term need, such as a specific software implementation or an updating and documentation of company processes.

And temporary hires in upper-level roles are becoming more common. As consolidation pushes long-tenured employees out of jobs, it’s increased the population of available consultants. And it’s being seen by more employers as an acceptable career path.

“It’s not just a temp job that you have to do between perm jobs,” Haugen says. “More employers are aware of consultants and the benefits they can bring. There are more consulting opportunities, so consultants have wider choice of the types of roles they take.”

Legal pitfalls

While there are many ways of attracting and keeping workers, there also are hiring standards companies must follow. Mark Pihart, attorney and shareholder with Winthrop & Weinstine, says most involved in hiring know discrimination against anyone via gender, age or disability is not allowed. But there are other protected classes that are not widely known, such as marital or parental status.

“We’re seeing a significant uptick in failure to hire claims by applicants based on some of these protected classifications,” he says. “There may be this assumption that while this person is married or this person has young children at home, he or she is not going to be as dedicated to the job, and therefore the decision is made to hire somebody else.”

Additionally, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is cracking down via wage audits on companies that hire someone at a raise but well below their own company salary guidelines, he says.

“You have to make sure those individuals know the rules,” Pihart says.

Right along with that, he adds, is maintaining a fair and impartial hiring process. For instance, if one manager doesn’t hire someone because of a drug conviction, but the manager in another department down the hall does so, that lack of consistency within the process, “makes it ripe for somebody to bring a claim.”

“It’s easy for somebody to take a swing and say ‘I think the real reason I wasn’t hired is because of this,’ he says. “So, those are the two biggest things I would say that create legal exposure from employers in the hiring process.”

There also are some red flags the Department of Labor and Internal Revenue Service look for with respect to using a contingent workforce. Probably the biggest, he says, is when a temporary employee is hired to fill a role as a contractor when several others within the organization are W2 employees. It’s not necessarily wrong to use temporary employees, but misclassification of workers is a big focus of the government at present.

At other times, when the relationship sours, claims can be filed against both the temp service and the business the person was placed with because of a lack of clarity over who legally is the employer. Pihart recommends getting the deal on paper.

“If you have one or more go-to temp agencies you are working with, you should have a contract with those temp agencies that clearly spells out who is on first and who is on second,” he says.

But he concurs with the panelists on the importance of company culture. Opportunities for development and advancement and support from all organizational levels are keeping employees around.

“How am I going to be trained?” he says. “Is this an environment of swim or sink mentality or is my employer going to invest in me and provide me with the training and resources so that I feel like this could be a career as opposed to just another job I might jump from two years from now? All that plays in.”

CONTACT THE EXPERTS

JAMES CLAIRMONT, managing principal of employee benefits, Brown & Brown Insurance: 952.698.1132; jc********@****ls.com; www.bbmpls.com.

SUSAN HAUGEN, partner and director of recruiting with Scouts: 952.484.6947; in**@**********nt.com; www.scoutstalent.com.

DARIN LYNCH, founder and CEO Irish Titan: 612.910.1414; darin.lynch@Irish Titan.com; www.Irish Titan.com.

MARK PIHART, attorney and shareholder with Winthrop & Weinstine: 612.604.6623; MP*****@******op.com; www.winthrop.com.