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"Sticky" 101: High-RPM HR
Fast-growing American Skandia's Winston looks at HR through a different lens
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Business New Haven
2/5/2001
By: BNH
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Brett Winston is senior vice president for intellectual development for the American Skandia Life Assurance Corp., the 14-year-old, Shelton-headquartered financial-services company, a subsidiary of the 146-year-old Skandia Insurance Co. Ltd. of Stockholm. IN a skilled-worker-starved marketplace, Skandia is among the region's most aggressive and most creative recruiters. Winston tells BNH how - and why.
Tell me a little bit about American Skandia.
We are one of the largest investment-management firms in the country. In the first quarter of last year, we attained the rank of No. 1 provider of variable annuities in the country; we have since slipped slightly to No. 3. Our additional product areas include a very rapidly growing mutual-fund platform as well as products in the variable life [insurance] area and qualified plans like 401(k)s.
Your company has been very aggressively hiring. Tell me a bit about your personnel needs in Shelton.
We have 1,300-plus employees. We have more than 100 positions we are looking to fill. We were as high as 250 last year; we hope that with the additional products we've rolled out this year that our hiring needs may become even greater based on the growth of the business.
In a squeaky-tight labor market, where do you find qualified workers?
We hire a lot of employees from this immediate region. We find that our best hiring sources are our employees. We have an state-of-the-art employee-referral program in place called the “Capital Rewards” program…
How does it work?
We pay our employees handsomely for referrals of individuals, and once those [new] employees are on board for six months, the person who referred them receives a payment of up to $3,000. In addition we have an annual drawing for all those people who made a referral; [the winner] and [his/her] significant other win an opportunity to travel to a major capital around the world. In 1999, 42 percent of [new] employees were referred; last year the figure was 24 percent.
The second thing we do is we have a fantastic branding campaign for careers. We have some significant challenges because we are not in the retail market with our products. Our business model is to sell to independent financial advisors. We have a sales force of about 90 wholesalers who sell to about 30,000 independent financial advisors. My staff here has done a fabulous job in mounting a branding campaign about our careers by creating interest and generating ideas from our employee base. From those ideas we created a campaign called “You'll Love It Here.” We had employees identify all the reasons why they love it here. We took that slogan and put it into all forms of print including billboards, train ads and we attached various reasons cited by employees and even put the employees' names on it.
So why do employees love it there?
The reputation of the culture of this organization. This organization is one that greatly empowers its employees at a time when 'empowerment' is an overused word in other organizations. Our best employees are those who have been at other organizations where they talked about 'empowerment,' but they came here to actually live it.
Beyond recruitment, what are some other HR challenges in a rapid-growth environment?
It requires a team that is bright and passionate. It requires that team to approach all its activities with a strategic focus. In a rapidly growing company, the desire is to keep turnover low; the desire is to bring in people who have a yearning for learning so that they can contribute in the role [for which they are hired] and then be able to be promoted to the ever-growing number of opportunities in the organization. There is also a great need to be patient and bring in people who [are] the right match with the skill sets we need and who fit the cultural profile.
What's it like to work at American Skandia as opposed to working at Brand X Financial Services Inc.?
Having worked on Wall Street myself, I can contrast it for you. This organization is about a community of people. Those other organizations are often about a high-paying job. This organization is about people who are mutually committed to their self-development and the development of the organization. It's about people who live and work in the same general community. It's about people who are committed to the long-term viability of the organization and have a lot of their pay at risk based on the viability of the organization. This is an organization that's housed on a great campus [developer R.D. Scinto's Corporate Drive towers in Shelton], so you don't have people tempted to leave by what may seem like greener grass elsewhere.
What is 'best practices' as it applies to the HR world?
Best practices in HR are creating a culture that is incredibly 'sticky' - a culture where employees gravitate to that organization, don't want to leave that organization and want other people to come and be a part of that organization. It's about identifying and walking the talk with great values including teamwork, ownership, innovation and integrity. Those are our four cornerstone values.
One of the keystones of best practices is benchmarking. Is it harder to benchmark in HR than in, say, manufacturing, where it's easy to count widgets and how many are defective?
Benchmarking in HR is largely done through networking with colleagues in other HR organizations. We stand out among many of our competitors: No. 1, we have the Fortune 100 ranking of No. 38 [among] the Best Employers To Work For; No. 2, just by virtue of the [HR department's] title, Intellectual Resources, a lot of people within the HR field are drawn to us to understand what are those distinctions. Then we can begin to engage in conversations with other organizations to understand: what are they doing and what are we doing? Benchmarking is [also] done as it pertains to hiring practices - for example, learning what other organizations have done so that we can create the best job fairs, compensation, benefits, policies that are part of total packages that are second to none. Those are things that are done by continual comparison in surveys to what other organizations are doing. Also, when you're hiring as many people as we are, every hire is a benchmark: We're able to compare what we offer to what they are leaving.
What's so special about your job fairs?
Because of how fully engaged our management personnel are who are at the job fairs, who are able to speak with candidates intelligently about what the opportunities are here, while they assess the abilities of those individuals - and able to move through those discussions and make a decision that same day.
What about employee development after they get here?
This is an organization that is incredibly development-oriented. We ask people during their interview about what their development needs are. So there's an understanding before the person even accepts a position here as to how focused this culture is on development of each individual toward their betterment. We also test [new hires] to assess key competencies and provide a road map to how job assignments are structured, type of coaching they receive and which learning experiences they can participate in at our university, American Skandia University. [Many new employees] go through a five-week training course at ASU. It starts with a three-day program we call “Beginnings,” in which employees are briefed by the most senior managers in the company on our business practices. From that very first day, [new hires] see how we share more information about the financials, the business goals, our product results, new product design. Through the balance of their training they learn in the classroom and in hands-on simulation how to interact with the customers before they're actually put into a live position. We have a fabulous facility and a great training staff.
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