RE COG NIT ION SNAPSHOT

Got Onboarding?Engaging employees in the early days of their

employment is an issue finding its way into boardroom strategy sessions. Why? Early turn-over can cripple service organizations and weigh heavily on any bottom line. Consider these stats:

Shining out among a group of admittedly bright stars can be tough.

“Schlumberger is a culture of overachievers,” says Floyd “Trey” Broussard, a business integration manager for Schlumberger Information Solutions (SIS) and recipient of the organization’s highest recognition, the WOW award. “We’re all challenged to come up with one game-changing innovation every quarter. On average only 4 percent of new products ever see the light of day—that makes our goal beyond ambitious. That’s why Schlumberger is known for picking the smart kids and establishing a culture that allows them to run quickly.” Schlumberger is the world’s leading supplier of technology, project management, and information solutions to the oil and gas industry. As an organization it counts on its talent to keep it ahead of competition. Establishing a culture that encourages the right people to stay is an important priority for every company, however for Schlumberger encouraging a culture of appreciation has become a point of differentiation. “We’ve done a lot of different things at Schlumberger to make it a place where people want to build careers, not resumés,” says Technology Center Manager,

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K U D SO.C . TA N NERVO LU M E 12 N U M B E R 3

JANICE HYSL IP, REWARDS OF EXCEL L ENCE

P ROGRAM MANAGER

Programming PerformanceHOW SCHLUMBERGER INFORMATION SOLUTIONS KEEPS AN ORGANIZATION OF TOP PERFORMERS ENGAGED

22%OF STAFF TURNOVER OCCURS IN THE FIRST FORTY-FIVE DAYS OF EMPLOYMENT.

THE WYNHURST GROUP, “SHRM PRESENTATION” APRIL 2007.

46%OF ROOKIES WASH OUT IN THEIR FIRST 18 MONTHS FOUND A STUDY OF 20,000 NEW HIRED EMPLOYEES.

FATAL MISTAKES WHEN STARTING A NEW JOB”, ANNE FISHER, FORTUNE, JUNE 2, 2006.

3x$THE COST OF LOSING AN EMPLOYEE IN THE FIRST YEAR IS ESTIMATED TO BE AT LEAST THREE TIMES SALARY.

THE WYNHURST GROUP, “SHRM PRESENTATION” APRIL 2007.

// continued inside

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Trevor Hicks. “We’ve remodeled our work spaces, implemented flex schedules, changed work processes. But I think a highly impactful and cost effective change we’ve made is establishing a regular practice of recognizing people for great work.” While Schlumberger has always recognized significant accomplishments in the organization, its move to make appreciation more frequent and accessible to every employee is a recent and important change. “We had a gap when it came to recognition,” explains Hicks. “Now we have three levels of awards that range from thank you for a job particularly well done, to more significant awards that honor really amazing accomplishments. The range helps us make recognition more frequent. More importantly, any employee can nominate any other employee for an award, which means that employees have influence and ownership in the program. And everyone notices when there is a regular pattern of appreciation in an organization. It’s unifying. It’s motivating. And

I’ve noticed a real improvement in people’s willingness to go above and beyond.” Hicks also reports that the change in culture has helped SIS’s voluntary turnover rates and employee motivation survey results as well. “Not only is there a huge improvement in our yearly employee motivation survey results, but voluntary attrition has also dropped dramatically,” says Hicks. “Considering that the job market is as hot for oil industry tech professionals as it ever was in the dot com bubble days, that drop is saying a lot.” Bryant Mueller thinks he knows why appreciation has made such an impact at SIS. As the organization’s vice president of sales and consulting, Mueller says recognition helps executives and supervisors better manage change in their groups by establishing greater trust and inspiring the confidence it takes to move the organization forward. “In the past it was rare to have individual acts praised,” says Mueller. “Now wherever we see actions that make an impact we can use recognition to acknowledge and praise the accomplishment. Presenting awards using the program gives us an opportunity to talk about corporate values, the code of ethics and really reinforce why we’re here. That tie to corporate values makes the praise more purposeful and less superficial and employees are responding to that by trusting their manager has not only the company’s, but the employees’ best interests in mind. We move people from being an opponent to an advocate of the organization.” An advocate is exactly what WOW award winner Broussard has become. “Everybody’s coin-fed to a certain extent,” admits Broussard. “But when I received my WOW award for working to bring a marketable innovation to the organization it was a surprisingly exceptional highpoint in my career.” As far as the tangible portion of Broussard’s recognition, he says he enjoyed selecting an award for his achievement far more than receiving cash for his accomplishment. “We’re talking about a social contract Schlumberger is making with me,” says Broussard. “The ability to select an award, one that I can choose and share with my family, personalizes it a bit. If I just get a check for $1,000 it’s great, but that type of recognition disappears into the folds very, very quickly. Awards and cash just tug on different strings in the brain and to be honest for most development engineers and others like me; it’s not about the money. It’s about someone noticing that my contribution is really good stuff. And when you make that recognition visible, it is a very powerful tool.” Creating a more powerful tool that would inspire managers to appreciate great work and inspire Schlumberger employees to bring a bit more to the table is exactly what program builder Janice Hyslip and other committee members were charged to improve. A dip in client satisfaction scores prompted the SIS president to create a committee to address several service-side goals. As

“ The ability to select an award, one that I can choose and share with my family, personalizes it a bit. If I just get a check for $1,000 it’s great, but that type of recognition disappears into the folds very, very quickly.”

— FLOYD “TREY” BROUSSARD, BUS INESS INTEGRATION MANAGER, WOW RECIP IENT

continued from cover //

WOW

a member of the committee, Hyslip and others were challenged to create initiatives that centered on achieving three specific goals: improving service quality, improving client satisfaction and improving motivation of the SIS team. “After evaluating several different levers, we came to the conclusion that creating a better means to recognize great work is really where we needed to start to affect service, satisfaction and motivation,” says Hyslip. “The real change came when we came to the conclusion that the program needed to be peer-to-peer. There were some concerns about how well that concept would take off, but after the first year we had a near 40 percent employee participation rate across 65 countries and we knew we were on to something.” Rolling the program out to a largely international workforce was another challenge Hyslip and her team faced head on. “Our employees work in 27 regional organizations around the world. Each of those regions has a manager and we sought their input and feedback throughout the creation of the program,” says Hyslip. “That approach meant that when it came time to roll out the program not only were our international managers aware of it, but highly supportive as well.” With manager support and an eye to communicating in ways every culture could understand including popular video vignettes showing several wrong ways to recognize people, Hyslip and her team made sure the message of sincere appreciation for highly-valued work was clear through a heavy communication campaign. Generating senior leadership support was also critical to shifting the focus of the Schlumberger culture from highly competitive to highly congratulatory. “We had several debates as to whether showing appreciation for smaller achievements would diminish the value of the really big awards in the organization,” says Hyslip. “In the end we came down to the realization that if our goal was to really affect the service levels and motivation of our people and reinforce certain behaviors, it’s not about the amount of the recognition—it’s about taking time to hold up the behavior as exemplary. We made a conscious decision to invoke a culture of appreciation and senior leadership has been nothing but supportive ever since.” When Hyslip says supportive she means personal recognition from the company president to WOW award winners and surprise calls to the program’s 1,000th and 2,000th award recipients. “Our 1,000th recipient happened to be a young lady in Egypt who was very surprised to hear from the president,” says Hyslip. “But it’s little moments like that, little stories that spread like fire through the organization and everyone gets motivated by that type of support.” WOW award recipient Jessica Jennings of the SIS Rapid Response team says she’s never seen an organization where recognition carries so much cache. “I’ve won some top awards in the advertising industry—a Cleo among others,” says Jennings. “And what’s interesting to me is that I’m known more as a two-time WOW award winner than anything else. People are putting the awards on their resumes when they interview for different jobs in the organization. This program has not just taken off; it’s truly part of our culture.” Improved employee motivation scores, higher employee satisfaction for recognition and rewards and drops in voluntary attrition rates show evidence of the program’s impact. The multi-faceted approach to keeping, motivating and retaining the best and the brightest is an investment that’s paying off big.

“From my perspective it’s an extremely cost-effective means of providing rewards and motivation,” says Hicks. “For the last couple of years the cost of the awards I’ve given out has probably totaled up to roughly the equivalent of one or two really nice team dinners. And I’ve gotten a lot more motivation benefits across the board than I would from something else like taking a team out to eat. And that’s simply because rewards are more durable, culturally valued and important to the recipients.”

SCHLUMBERGER INFORMATION

SOLUTIONS HEADQUARTERS

IN HOUSTON, TEXAS

JESS ICA JENNINGS , WOW RECIP IENT,

DES IGNER OF REWARDS OF EXCELLENCE

MARKETING CAMPAIGN

“Not only is there a huge improvement in our yearly employee motivation survey results, but voluntary attrition has also dropped dramatically.”

— TREVOR H ICKS , TECHNOLOGY CENTER MANAGER

AWARD SPOTL IGHT

ku•dos

1. honor; glory; acclaim.

2. a statement of praise or

approval; accolade; compliment.

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