Formula for retention.

You've recognized retentions importance, committed yourself and your team fully, and are sure you're bringing in the best people for your organization. Now how do go about actually keeping them? If employees today are, in effect, free agents, how do you get them to sign on with you each morning when they show up for work? Alas, there is no one proven formula for success, a model any company could slap onto its organization and ensure it will win the talent wars.

Yet there are attitudes and actions that both employees and executives say do make a difference. When you examine the companies that are the Michael Jordans of retention - those that consistently succeed well above the level of their peers - some constants do appear. What follows is a closer look at the most crucial factors, and some tips for ensuring your own two-point shots in each component.

MONEY

OK. Let's get this one out there, since it's the erroneous reason most executives believe employees stay put. It isn't that money isn't a key factor, it's just that money is merely the baseline, the foundation upon which the house of retention must be built. "Money is important," says Deloitte & Touche's national managing director of human resources, Jim Wall. "If a competitive salary isn't there, the house you build on top of it will cave in."

To Wall and others, competitive salaries mean just that: competitive. You can't base your pay on some sort of internal formula, giving fixed percentage raises each year. You need to look at what a player can get on the outside and be on par.

Money is the verb smart CEOs use when talking the language of retention. Companies that, for example, base at least part of all supervisors' compensation on the evaluations of those they oversee are communicating their belief that people matter. At Monsanto, fully half of a senior executive's bonus is based on people management skills, notes the McKinsey report. Yet this connection between pay and policy is overlooked at too many organizations, says Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeifer, author of The Human Equation. "I have seen compensation practices at firms that have virtually no positive effect on developing or reinforcing critical skills and behaviors," he writes.

Smart companies also know that stock options and bonuses for dedicated employees also say they are valued and appreciated. "People want to feel they are connected to the larger organization financially through some kind of sharing, options, or gainsharing," says author Stephen Covey. "The most enlightened companies work to tie as many people as possible - if not everyone - into the profits of the company."

"But money is merely table stakes," warns Deloitte & Touche's Wall. Money - along with a safe environment, basic benefits, and top-notch equipment - is what gets you into the game. It is not what keeps you there. "If you want great people, you can't get out your wallet and just keep throwing money on the table." he says. Once you've got the solid foundation, it's the other things - the company's culture, the nature of the job, how each employee is treated - that makes the house.

Ensuring that your compensation system is fair does not mean it has to be even, however. "Star" employees who are more critical to retain should be discreetly singled out for extra rewards, a process made easier thanks to today's more complex accounting software that can take such differentials in stride. As Rosenbluth International's Hal Rosenbluth puts it: "You love all your children and don't want one to feel more important than the others, but at the same time some kids come home with that great report card." This doesn't have to be a budget-breaker, however, since, as Covey notes, for those in middle management and above, a variable downside can also be included. "'A' players usually go along with the notion of sharing the risk if they feel they will also be sharing the reward," Covey says.

THE JOB

How much autonomy and decision-making ability do employees have? Are they given the opportunity to grow? Are people told only what they need to know to perform their particular task, or are they encouraged to see how their contribution fits into the whole?

People's desire to remain on the job, personnel experts say, comes down to whether they enjoy the work they do. As one employee at a top-perks firm put it, "If I did not have a challenging work environment, all the other great things the company does for me wouldn't matter." Indeed, Robert Levering, founder of the Great Places to Work Institute, tells of a company whose most extraordinary benefits include delicious pastries baked daily by an on-site French chef, but whose employees dislike working there - and frequently leave - because they are micromanaged and stifled creatively.

Employees have always focused on how satisfying their job is. But these days, they are tuned in to an even greater degree on how much they are growing and learning in their work because it represents a sort of safety net for them. The changing nature of the work world today means employers can no longer guarantee employment. What they can provide is employability, by ensuring that people continually have the opportunity to upgrade their skills and experience. "People must feel like you are invested in their continued capability, to deepen and expand their knowledge base even outside of the skills they currently need to do their job," says Covey. Ironically, by enhancing their resumes in this way and making them more marketable to others, you improve the odds that they will stay in your organization. "You actually get to keep more people by improving their employability because you satiate their appetite to learn and do different things," Wall says.

You also satisfy their universally human desire to feel good about what it is they spend 40 hours or more a week doing. The psychological need to keep growing, Covey says, is a basic human desire - and therefore a core element to retention.

At Sequent Computer Systems, a company with a tiny-for-high-tech turnover rate of just 18 percent, CEO Casey Powell credits this headroom as one of the cornerstones of his retention success. "We have empowered people who work here on behalf of the customer. We've had people ship multimillion-dollar machines overnight based on their authority alone." Do errors sometimes result? Of course. But that's also the case after some of the most carefully cleared and deliberated decisions.

One way to ensure that workers maintain decision-making authority is to create an intrapreneurial environment within the larger concern. Seattle software company WRQ, for example, a 700-employee shop that retains employees despite the preponderance of startups in the area, recently divided itself into three business units. One unit has just 100 employees, who no longer feel like they're a rowboat struggling in the wake of the company's steamship core products.

Whether the units are large or small, employees must be helped to see how their contribution fits into the whole. Information often defies gravity, flowing up the chain of command more easily than down. Savvy companies like Federal Express go out of their way to help each worker see how their task - even if it's as mundane as unloading the airplanes - enables the company to reach its goals.

So you want to give employees the right stuff to do their jobs creatively, autonomously, and with a sense of fulfillment? First you must be sure you understand just what it is they actually do. Many retention experts point to Herb Kelleher at Southwest Airlines as the Titan of Talent (turnover rate: 6 percent) not only because he knows how to pal around with employees but because he also respects the challenges they face in their work. Pfeffer lauds companies that have developed formalized programs requiring managers to spend time where the day-to-day transactions happen, singling out power producer AES Corp., where each senior executive heads out for a week's stint in a power plant, and Men's Warehouse, whose top brass regularly spend time in the stores.

Once you understand what they do, it helps to keep a continual pulse on how they feel about their job, an infinitely trickier proposition. Federal Express has solved that via its "Survey-Feedback-Action" program. Each employee anonymously scores the company on such topics as leadership, job conditions, and overall satisfaction. The results form a manager report card, which bosses must take to those who report to them to explore concerns and develop plans to rectify them.

Hal Rosenbluth relies on an even more esoteric approach to get at workers' perceptions. Every so often he sends crayons and blank white paper to 100 randomly selected employees, asking them to draw what the company means to them. Many color rainbows and pots of gold, but every so often a deep-seated problem comes through in the creations. One year an associate drew a shivering Christmas scene with no fire in the hearth and no gifts under the tree. Rosenbluth discovered that the woman's division was relocating and she feared she would soon be out of a job, even though plans called for retraining and retaining everyone in the department. To Rosenbluth, the picture spoke volumes about communication problems his organization was experiencing: "Look at the effect this lack of clear communication was having on our employee. You don't get that from surveys." Rosenbluth associates say they spend a great deal of time pondering their drawing when the crayons come, because they know it sends a message about their job that is clearly heard by the CEO.

THE BOSS

You can create the greatest company in the world, but if an employee ends up working for a terrible boss, he will be gone faster than you can say "leadership training." "People's direct relationship with their boss greatly affects their job. If the boss is awful, they will want to move," says Lee Lee James, president of Synovus Service Corp., an affiliate of Synovus Financial. Great Places' Levering agrees: "To most employees, the supervisor is the company. You can create the best policies in the executive suite, but if the front-line supervisors don't represent it, it won't make any difference to employees."

To increase the odds of having great representatives at its company, Synovus requires all of its supervisors - from bank branch head tellers to corporate senior vice presidents - to go through the company's Foundations for Leadership seminars. They must also adhere to the company's "Leadership Expectations Model," which demands that they excel in each of four areas: living the values; sharing the vision; making others successful; and managing the business. "Some people find it much easier to thrive in the last but not the other three," James says. "We help those people try to develop the other areas, but if they can't, ultimately they won't work out here."

A focus on conflict resolution in leadership training is imperative, those who study retention say, because one unresolved major blowup or a series of small ones with a supervisor is enough to start a person packing. "Living in conflict isn't pleasant," James says. "If we ignore these conflicts, people feel a loss of power or a sense that they aren't heard, and they will want to leave." Adds Lisa Moye, business development associate at the Center for Creative Leadership, which trains many leaders in these so-called "softer" issues, "If I have as my manager someone who is able to communicate clearly with me and understand what my needs are and respond to those needs, that will not only enhance my performance but also more likely improve my retention."

Those supervisors who can't respect and properly interact with their direct reports must be dealt with surely and swiftly if morale - and employees - are to be retained. It's an approach D & T has taken with positive results. "This firm has chosen to not pay managers because they consumed people rather than led them. Some have been removed from their positions," says HR chief Jim Wall. "That sends a very powerful message."

THE CULTURE

Now we come to the "warm and fuzzies." People can make tons of money, love their job, adore their immediate boss - and still want out of the organization. The extent to which people feel proud of the place they work, see their own core values of honesty and trust reflected back, enjoy the atmosphere around them, and feel like they can survive and thrive there is no less important than their take-home pay or their daily tasks.

But because culture is not derived from a single icon, an individual program, or a generous employee benefit, even identifying your company's culture can be a massive challenge, let alone taking steps to alter it in ways that aid retention.

That's exactly the undertaking Deloitte & Touche set about in the early 1990s, when it found that, despite having hired women in equal numbers to men for nearly a decade, the percentage of women being put up for partner was actually declining. "For me, the compelling case for why we had to change this situation was that we were diluting the quality of the partnership," says Jim Copeland, the CEO of the firm and its global organization, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. Taking an extreme example, Copeland says, some 20 years earlier, 100 men would have been hired by the firm, and 10 years later, the best 10 would be named partner. But when 50 men and 50 women are hired and the best 10 men were being named partner, "you were getting the best 10 out of 50 rather than the best 10 out of 100." Since in a professional services firm, the one with the most best people wins, top management was eager to correct the discrepancy.

At first, they assumed that women were leaving to stay home with their children, but a round of early research of 200 female ex-employees documented that the vast majority of women who had left - even if they had become mothers - were working full-time elsewhere. So Deloitte & Touche decided it had to ask itself the hard question, "What is it about our culture that makes this not a good place for women to be?"

Numerous candid discussions with groups of women at the firm proved a major eye-opener, especially when a well-respected female partner candidly shared her perspective that it was indeed a terrible place for women - a shocking revelation to the men who had worked their whole careers to build what they considered to be a wonderful organization.

"In many cases, senior management doesn't know what it doesn't know," Copeland explains. And in Deloitte & Touche's case the top brass hadn't a clue that male biases were impeding women at every step of their careers: Men were being given the most plum assignments on the unspoken assumption that women wouldn't want to travel; male partners were walking past female managers' offices to ask male managers to lunch - a result of a subconscious bias that attracts like to like; guys were bonding on golf-course outings that the women weren't invited to; and the women who did want to step back temporarily after giving birth to a child faced an "up or out" career track that demanded all or nothing.

Through its widely touted "Initiative for the Retention and Advancement of Women," the firm set about to radically transform its male-oriented culture. "It was not easy, but most of the things we identified did have solutions," says Global Chairman Ed Kangas. For example, all assignment opportunities had to be reviewed by a woman partner charged with ensuring gender balance, especially for the more high-profile jobs. Flexible work arrangements and part-time opportunities were touted - with a guarantee that the careers of those who took advantage would be closely monitored for backlash. That was critical, notes Wall, because some of those exact policies had been on the books since the mid-1980s, but nobody was biting. "People felt comfortable using them only when the firm assured them it didn't see a reduction in hours as a reduction in commitment." Today, 800 employees are on flexible work arrangements, the vast majority of whom, when surveyed, said they would otherwise have taken their talents elsewhere.

One thing Deloitte & Touche - and other firms that have made equally bold moves to examine and alter their cultures - discovered is that such change cannot be limited or controlled. "When you give smart people permission to talk about things you're not supposed to talk about at work, they don't limit their topics. We set in motion a cultural revolution here that we did not fully anticipate when we started," Wall admits. "We basically took a can opener to the organization and said everything was fair game." Suddenly the men were grumbling, too, about the aspects of the firm that they were unhappy about. As a result, the culture today embraces such notions as new dads taking time off to be with their families, and older fathers popping out occasionally to take in a child's afternoon ballgame, without mumbling about heading out for a meeting.

D & T's new culture now fully embraces the lives and concerns of people of both genders. Through a mosaic of attitudes, programs, oversight, and directives, the firm has become one of the most sought after workplaces by men as well as women. It reached No. 8 on this year's Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work for in America. A growing number of women now make partner each year - with 212 women partners in 1998, up from 88 in 1993, some admitted to the firm's partnership while on a reduced work plan. The overall turnover rate has dropped to 16 percent, versus a profession average of 25 percent. And new clients increasingly say they are choosing D & T in part because of how it treats its people. "Our culture has become a competitive advantage," Copeland says.

Why is a firm's culture so integrally related to retention? The answer, experts say, is as simple and complex as the fundamental need people have to fit well into their environment. "People have a strong desire to feel good about the place they work," Stephen Covey says. "Optimism, trust, and caring are very viable needs. When those needs aren't met, people start to look elsewhere," he says - or, if they do remain, they begin to focus more on money and become mercenaries rather than visionaries for your organization.

Caring is such a crucial part of Rosenbluth International's strong culture that the company even has an open meeting policy. All meetings in the company are posted publicly, and any staffer who wants to attend is welcome. Not only does this assist people in learning things that will aid them in their job as well as assist them in choosing their future career path, it eliminates the secrecy - and rumors - that often result from closed-door sessions. And it shows employees that the company cares enough about them to not want them to feel excluded.

A strong culture also dominates Synovus Financial, so much so that the company has given it a name: "The culture of the heart." It is a culture that at its base communicates in every way possible that employees matter, whether that's by assisting each individual in setting and attaining personal goals or by carving each of the company's 3,000 employees' names into the bricks at its newest facility. When the company went on a massive acquisition binge several years ago, it worked hard to ensure that its culture didn't get lost in the shuffle. A specific unit, the "People Development Exponent" - also dubbed "Personally Developing Everyone" - was formally created to formalize the programs and policies that keep the heart beating.

That Synovus has succeeded in retaining that unique culture despite the acquisitions makes it a poster child of sorts. "Mergers and acquisitions often have a dramatic impact on a company's culture. It's difficult even for a terrific culture to emerge intact," Robert Levering says. In too many mergers, Levering and others note, evaluating the culture is considered an afterthought, something to be done by HR after the deal has closed. The typical result: massive retention woes, because people know the culture they either loved or at least understood will likely be altered. (At least one company, Spencer Stuart U.S., the country's third-largest search firm, believes it is so important to understand a potential target's personnel and culture that it has launched a unique service of providing such intelligence to potential acquisitors.) "The smartest companies evaluate the culture of all the companies involved and look to retain the best of each of them," Levering counsels.

What kind of culture have you created for your organization, and is it a place employees relish being a part of? As Deloitte & Touche's Jim Wall so aptly puts it, employees should be viewed in the same vein as volunteers, who put in their time only because they believe in the organization's purpose and feel their presence makes a difference. "Our assets walk out the door each night and come back only if they feel like it. If the mission changes or the culture stops feeling good to them, they'll stop 'volunteering,'" he says.

BENEFITS AND PERKS 

Once called "fringe" and thought of in the same fluffy, ornamental way, benefits are now considered a core part of a smart company's retention strategy and the elements that often best reflect the company's culture. It isn't that employees break out the benefits book and reconcile what they have with what they can get elsewhere; it's that they use the sum-total of those benefits to assess the firm's culture. "People want to be part of an organization that behaves a certain way," Wall observes.

For example, when his firm instituted a policy reimbursing couples $5,000 towards a child's adoption, only a handful of employees actually took advantage. But the positive feedback from all employees was tremendous - a huge bonus for a program that cost the company less than $100,000 last year. Similarly, when Sequent sends employees' spouses theater tickets or gift certificates as a thank-you for allowing their partners to work extended hours, the cost is minimal, but the message - that families matter - resonates loud and clear.

Of course, many benefit programs are mightily expensive. The SAS Institute, a Cary, NC-based software development firm, pays $250 per month each for on-site children's care. Credit card issuer MBNA contributes $2,500 for education to every employee who gives birth or adopts a child. And the generous health and pension benefits many high retainers dole out might make number crunchers pause.

Those who provide such programs, however, say the payback is enormous. Not only does it generate the goodwill that leads to higher productivity and worker involvement, it also leads to a reduction in costly turnover. At SAS Institute, where elaborate benefits include fully paid health insurance, a company fitness center (that even launders employees' dirty workout clothes), and mandatory evacuation by 6 P.M., all proposed benefits must pass three hurdles before it is put on the books: Is it consistent with the company's culture, does it serve a significant number of employees, and is its perceived value at least as high as its cost?

Probably the benefits most highly sought by employees today are those that allow for work/life balance. A study at IBM, for example, found that the ability to balance work and life was a key driver for the top performers the company was most eager to retain. Smart companies, not surprisingly, are therefore finding a way to not only offer them, but - even trickier - to make them work.

As Deloitte & Touche discovered, just offering these benefits - which include everything from elder- and child-care assistance to extended parental leave and flexible work arrangements - is only half the package. Companies must truly weave the notion that employees are entitled to an outside life into their very fiber, a notion easier said than done. Even at employee-friendly Hewlett-Packard, for example, sales team members recently complained of feeling the strain of the long hours and intense pressures required from the job. As the New York Times reported, the result too often was broken marriages, unhealthy employees, and an attrition rate rising to 20 percent. The company is in the midst of an experimental program to reduce and redesign workloads; among other things, workers are now setting goals for leisure along with productivity.

One firm that has taken the notion of balance to extremes but nonetheless seems to be doing it right is Great Plains Software - headquartered in Fargo, ND, but with employees scattered anyplace they please. Its 850 workers turn over at a rate of just 7 percent because the company adheres to the formula of hiring the best people it can find - and then letting them get their work done in whatever way and whatever location and time they choose, trusting that they will do their fair share. So far it is working; the firm's revenue rose some 50 percent last year.

Some work/life programs are notoriously expensive, of course - but at least one consultant believes that if companies are smart about how they go about it, they needn't break the bank. For one thing, says Marc Michaelson, president of Tandem Performance International, a performance-management consulting and training company based in San Francisco, companies need to view these programs as business objectives, not benefits. "The best programs offer goals that are mutual: Employees get a better life, while businesses get a better employee," he says. His company doesn't even like to speak in terms of "work/life" balance, preferring instead to tag these programs as ways employees can be "100 percent present" at their job. Allowing employees to reach the point of burnout, for example, serves no one, Michaelson says, because workers can't be creative - or even minimally productive - when they are over the edge. "Employees who can't manage their lives give up and leave. Or they get so burned out that you encourage them to go, even though they were a good player who just ran out of steam," Michaelson says. By reframing their personal needs as your company's professional needs, Michaelson says, a company can see the benefits that flow from the dollars spent.

That was the philosophy behind Kraft Foods' recent push to get employees to use more of the work/life benefits the firm provides. Its 24,000 employees nationwide received a 24-piece puzzle in a burlap bag labeled: "Open with Care: Vital Pieces of My Life." Inside, each piece was labeled with a particular life issue, such as well-being, personal pursuits, and community involvement, while the back of the piece suggested a Kraft work/life benefit for helping attain a goal in that area. just a short time after the puzzles were distributed, usage of the company's benefits rose 30 percent - a number lauded by President and CEO Robert A. Eckert. As he told the Chicago Tribune, "It's crucial that our employees get the support they need to focus on their own work and feel free to be innovative and passionate about their contribution to the company."

In addition, Michaelson says, the way a large number of work/life programs are structured and communicated to workers encourages them to use them when they are in crisis mode, not in the years before when prevention and careful planning can have a major impact. From childbirth to the incapacitation of an elderly parent and even to divorce, Michaelson notes, most life events are at least somewhat predictable. If employees would explore options for dealing with their widowed mother years before she breaks her hip and must be rushed to a nursing home, for example, he says, "the usage of the benefit wouldn't be frenetic, reactive, and most costly."

So it just may be in a company's best interest not only to put these programs on the books but to ensure that they are frequently used. Sometimes, especially for CEOs who grew up in a different environment, it can be difficult to adjust to this new work/family reality. DTT's Ed Kangas, for example, has toiled to convince employees that sometimes it is best for people to tilt the work-family balance to the family side, although he never made such choices in his own career. Had his firm had the policy then that it does now, giving new fathers two weeks of paternity leave, he admits, "I wouldn't have taken it, because I would have felt it wasn't manly." Savvy CEOs must recognize that today, thanks to two-career couples and less community support, employees who take advantage of work/family programs are being smart.

Finally, there remains one additional perk employers should be conscious of providing as a way of reducing turnover, and it just may prove to be one of the most important: a cake. A big, moist, decorated cake. With the words, "Thanks for the work you've done. Come back anytime," inscribed in icing.

Retention experts say that making employees who leave a company feel valued and appreciated sends a powerful message to those who remain. What's more, it just may help the employee who left to find greener pastures elsewhere recognize just how chartreuse it was back at your organization. If properly nurtured, boomerang employees can make up a substantial percentage of a company's workers, and they are some of the most fiercely loyal. As Synovus's James observes, "We love to have people who have left us come back. We've invested in them, trained them. They never take us for granted again."

Quitting Time

Percentage of workers planning to look for a new job within the year:

All Employees 21% Those who aren't regularly mentored 35% Those who are regularly mentored 16% Those dissatisfied with their company training 41% Those satisfied with their company training 12%

Source: Interim Services and Louis Harris and Assoc.

Real Life

TIM GARZA vice president of vehicle and accessory sales JM Family Enterprises, Deerfield Beach, FL

No bad hair days

Massages. Manicures. Workouts. How about real work? There's a point to these perks.

Head for JM Family Enterprises at 5 A.M. on a weekday morning, and you'll likely catch Tim Garza on the campus. Not working, exactly, but working out - at the complimentary company gym. Other times he might be getting his hair cut at the company-run hair salon, lying on a massage table having a rubdown (one of the only services employees have to pay for, albeit at a subsidized rate), or flying to the Bahamas for a day cruise aboard one of the firm's luxury yachts. If he's feeling ill, there's an on-staff doctor to check out his troubles. If he's scheduled a meeting in Chicago or Dallas or L.A., he might hop on the company jet to get there.

For Garza, who has been with the privately held, $6.2 billion Toyota distributor, finance, and warranty company since his first day out of college in 1977, the reason for a company to provide such elaborate perks is a no-brainer. "For one thing, if you provide these benefits, people don't have to spend three hours going to a doctor, two hours at an off-site hairdresser, or eight hours getting to a one-hour meeting," he says, adding that helping employees reduce stress can't help but affect productivity. For another, he notes, "it says that management cares about the associate: about his health, happiness, and longevity with the company."

To CEO Pat Moran (father Jim is chairman), the firm's corporate culture - which includes an atmosphere of appreciation and open communication - works in tandem with company benefits to keep "associates" motivated and satisfied. It has helped clamp voluntary turnover at 15 percent - a figure that would be lower, Moran says, if headhunters didn't target JM Family's top-notch employees like elephants in a hunter's crosshairs. What's more, she believes, providing such lavish giveaways makes smart economic sense. "We have healthy, hard-working people largely because of our benefits. This ability to attract and retain some of the best people in the industry translates into sales and customer satisfaction records in virtually every area of our business. I can't think of a better payback."

For Garza, top management's commitment to providing an elaborate benefits package reflects its overall quest to do right by its people. "This is a company that keeps its word," he says. "Whatever promises have been made to me by management have been fulfilled." For example, he notes, during his first year with the company, he was told he could become a district sales manager if he did his part by acquiring the needed skills. "Even without my having the experience, the company kept its word and, at age 24, made me the youngest district sales manager they ever had," Garza says.

Numerous promotions have followed - another reason he stays at JM Family Enterprises, since, as he notes, no one wants to do the same job for 22 years. "I consider it another main perk of the company that the founding family is always focused on what it can do for your career."

Real Life

CHRISTY HORNE team member Synovus Financial, Columbus, GA

Team work

Looking beyond what companies give employees to what employees give each other.

Having worked at Synovus Financial, a bank-holding and credit-card-processing company, since she graduated college in 1992, Christy Horne recently got the proverbial seven-year itch. She was growing weary of her job at a company bank in Phoenix City, AL, and longed to focus on corporate communications - in which she got her degree - rather than juggling the numerous posts the tiny branch required. But rather than throw her resume into the ring at other corporations, Horne worked her contacts at Synovus in order to be shifted internally. It's a testament to the true teamwork mentality that permeates the $900 million company that her boss happily let her move on as she desired, since his division's loss was another division's gain.

"People here want to keep all team members in the family rather than have them go outside, so they really help you get where you want to be," Horne says. She ended up this year in the company's training group, dubbed Synovus University. But she knows that when she's eventually ready to move on again, another unit will embrace her. "The diversity of the company [which includes 39 banks plus mortgage, insurance, credit-card, and other units] allows each person to have many careers within Synovus. I hope to spend my entire working life here," she says.

Being able to stay within the company would be meaningless if employees didn't also have a strong desire to do so. That's where Synovus's "culture of the heart" comes in - a philosophy that says that employees matter, and that each individual must be noticed and nurtured. "You cannot think of retention as a broad sweeping deal," says Lee Lee James, president of the company's affiliate Synovus Service Corp., which handles HR for the entire organization. "It has to come down to a level of the individual, where Christy Horne - and each employee - knows that someone cares about her and is worried about her health, her future, her fulfillment."

Of course, the company's excellent pay and benefits package - including 150 shares of stock options for all and an unusual 20 hours of annual leave for parents to attend activities at their children's schools - certainly help. But the reason Synovus landed atop the 1999 Fortune list of 100 Best Companies to Work for in America and hardly has a retention problem is because it goes beyond what the company gives employees to focus on what employees give each other.

"It's everyone's job to assist each member of your team, not just to assume your supervisor will do it," Horne says. When Horne was recently, and frantically, stuffing 60 notebooks for a training presentation she was about to facilitate, several coworkers dropped everything to help her finish the job without anyone having asked. "Everyone wants to see you succeed," Horne says, a notion reinforced in the company's detailed leadership training programs. Teams are so much the focus at Synovus that Horne prefers that her formal title, vice president of training and development, be subservient to her role as a group player.

Real Life

SUE HARTFORD lead product marketing manager WRQ, Seattle, WA

Get smart

Supporting its employees' education goals gets this firm high marks.

Sue Hartford held an acceptance letter in her hand from the M.B.A. program at the Kellogg School at Northwestern University. The then manager of public relations knew that getting an advanced degree was part of her long-term goals, but she also knew that she enjoyed her work at software maker WRQ.

For its part, WRQ knew that it had an ambitious and talented employee in Hartford - and that if she headed out to Chicago, there were no assurances she'd return. So the $140 million, 18-year-old company, which has long supported employee training and development, decided to pay in full for Hartford to attend the executive M.B.A. program at the University of Washington. (WRQ has since formalized this program for other employees.) "Since we don't have huge manufacturing facilities, real estate, or a lot of inventory, our assets truly are the employees, and we'd better pump money into them to make sure they are state of the art," explains Candy Marshall, vice president of legal and human resources.

Last June, Hartford completed the two-year degree, which required her to take two days off each month and divert at least some of her high energy to her studies. "This company encourages people to take initiative in setting their own career goals, and then it tries to support that in whatever ways it can," Hartford says. In the middle of the M.B.A. program, for example, Hartford decided she wanted to switch to product marketing and was encouraged to do so. "People rarely leave a company for compensation reasons," Marshall explains. "Mostly they go because they are stuck in a job with no career opportunities." Such a focus on helping employees reach their stated goals is one reason WRQ had a 12 percent turnover rate last year, compared to the software-industry average of some 30 percent.

In a flattened firm like WRQ, those opportunities are often horizontal, as was Hartford's initial move into marketing. Once she'd gotten her M.B.A., however - and returned from a subsequent maternity leave (and baby Sydney was placed in childcare with assistance from the work/life management firm, Working Solutions, another WRQ benefit) - she was offered a promotion. "You often hear executives worry that if they pay their people to get an M.B.A. they'll leave soon after," Marshall says. "But that mostly happens when you try to keep the person in the same job. Obviously she went through the effort to get the degree because she wants more responsibility."

For Hartford, WRQ's focus on helping employees constantly gain new skills - be they in the classroom or on the job - is what will keep her there long-term, despite the lure of all those Seattle startups with their potential for minting millionaires. "Where you go here is totally up to you," she says.

But be it paying for education or providing an environment where every employee feels he or she can make a difference, WRQ supports its employees because CEO Doug Walker and all of top management believe it makes good business sense. "We aren't nice just to be nice," Marshall explains. "We are nice because we believe that when you create an environment where people are valued and respected, they will provide the company with the creativity we need to move forward."

Real Life

J. MICHAEL CUERIA project engineer Federal Express, Memphis, TN

Purple ways

For 14 years. FedEx has been watching out for Hike Cueria. And he's returned the favor.

J. Michael Cueria wanted a part-time job to work his way through the University of Memphis 14 years ago when he stumbled on Federal Express's "handler" position, where he toiled from 11 P.M. to 4 A.M. unloading packages from planes. Cueria expected the job to be grinding and exhausting, which it was, but he was surprised to also find it enjoyable and satisfying. "Management went out of its way to make us feel appreciated, to show us how our little tasks were adding up to the company's goals," Cueria says. By the time he graduated with an electrical engineering degree three years later - his final semester paid for by FedEx, no strings attached, after his grant money ran out - he had decided that any company that treated its grunt workers so well would be a wonderful place to launch his professional career.

Cueria has since become one of the legion of "purple-blooded" employees at the $13 billion company, who now wouldn't think of going elsewhere. FedEx is an example of how even a behemoth with 145,000 employees can keep them from feeling like little more than one overnight letter on a massive conveyer belt, especially important in Cueria's case now that he works on its intranet site and is regularly wooed by outsiders.

How does the company keep its full-timer turnover rate to a minuscule 3 percent, especially given all the manual laborers it employs? Cueria points to Federal Express's famous employee-focused philosophies, including its no-layoff orientation and its "People-Service-Profit" objective, which focuses on satisfying employees so they'll provide the good service that helps the company prosper. The firm's ability to listen to employees also plays a major role. A "Guaranteed Fair Treatment" policy, for example, offers employees an appeals process for grievances, all the way to the "Supreme Court of FedEx," staffed by senior executives - and often Chairman Fred Smith.

Formal recognition programs are also a way of life at FedEx. Cueria has received 20 "Bravo Zulu" awards - for effort beyond one's job description - which includes both management appreciation and gift certificates or theater tickets. He's also gotten two "Five Star Awards" worth hundreds of dollars each for his major accomplishment in creating the company's intranet.

Smith recognizes that employees provide FedEx with an invaluable business advantage. "I firmly believe employee dedication mirrors the extent to which an organization demonstrates its commitment to its people," Smith reconfirmed in the company's 25th anniversary book last year.

That's certainly true in Cueria's case. Of course, the salary, job responsibility, and perks - such as his being able to hop on a FedEx plane from his office in Memphis to watch the Chicago Cubs play a home game - are crucial. But feeling the company is watching out for him cannot be overstated. When management helped Cueria train for a highly coveted Internet certification a few years ago, his dedication - and those violet veins - thickened. "Knowing the company is willing to make that kind of investment in me, even as it makes me more employable elsewhere, makes me want to be all the more loyal back to it," he says.

THE LIST FACTOR

Once, it may have seemed like a clever gimmick to drive magazine sales. Now, making "the list" drives recruitment retention, and corporate policy making.

What do Fortune, Business Week, and Working Mother have in common? All rank companies as being the best places for people to work - and, as a result, have upped the level of success needed to appear on them.

When Working Mother pioneered the notion of a magazine list of best places to work in 1985, it could barely cobble together enough companies to warrant a ranking. Over the years, however, those on the list began to see the benefits of being there, and the scramble among companies to be crowned a morn-nurturing site began. Last year, the magazine upped its standards, reporting not only the family-friendly policies a company has but how many employees take advantage of them - a better indicator of a company's culture.

Business Week has since twice weighed in with its own lineup - a report card that rates not only a company's family friendliness but whether its employees are inclined to agree.

Fortune magazine's list debuted in 1998 and immediately became an industry icon, since it measured such disparate aspects as a company's culture, work environment, financial security, and time and support for an outside life - all verified by surveys to 250 randomly selected employees.

"Companies on that list were suddenly inundated with resumes, enabling them to hire the cream of the crop," says Louise Rush, a work/life expert at Tandem Performance Institute in San Francisco, who has analyzed all the major rankings. With the labor-pool tightening and companies looking for ways to boost recruitment and retention, shops scrambled to add so many employee-friendly policies that year that 37 companies fell off the list from the first year to the second - not because they had changed their policies, Fortune insisted, but because they were eclipsed by the offerings of others.

"Getting on these lists is a sure-fire way to aid in recruitment," Rush says. "You can get the great people to want to work for you." It also opens the door to new clients, who are impressed by what you have accomplished. And, perhaps most important, it makes those who work for your organization appreciate what they have - and see the virtue in staying there.