Employers hustle to keep workers happy, on the job
DETROIT — When Jason Vazzano and Kurt Steckling started a new tech company in 1999, the best friends who tested disciplinary boundaries when they were in high school together wanted to create a company that they’d love working at: a fun, fast-paced place with few rules.
Eighteen years later, their enterprise, Vectorform, has about 150 employees with a headquarters in the downtown area of Detroit suburb Royal Oak, where workers zip up and down the halls on motorized skateboards, play with Legos to get their creative juices flowing and gather nearly every Tuesday to play board games.
Workers wear what they want to the office, including pajamas, bring in their dogs — and sometimes just work from home. They set their own schedule, as long as they meet their deadlines and put in 40 hours a week, and they have an unlimited number of sick days.
Still, as enticing as that workplace may seem, the labor market is so tight now that Vectorform — and many other companies — are wrestling with how to attract and keep employees.
Vectorform, among other things, creates virtual reality technology, develops software and invents digital products.
The challenge, Vazzano and Steckling say, comes partly from the fact that there a limited number of people who have the qualifications they need, and partly because their competitors also are trying to hire — and hire away — the same workers.
To entice workers, experts say employers need to do more than offer better pay and benefits — they also need to map out clear career paths, provide professional development, show sincere appreciation and project a sense of purpose that goes beyond the job.
The latest forecast from CareerBuilder, an online employment website, shows that 45 percent of employers nationwide plan to hire fulltime, permanent employees in the second quarter. That’s
the highest percentage for the quarter since 2007, up from 34 percent in the same period last year.
“It is the best — and highest number — in a decade,” said Juli Smith, president of Smith Consulting Group in Jackson, Mich. “Clearly, that is speaking to what’s going on in the marketplace and what I see as an executive recruiter and how incredibly tight the market is.”
Companies in nearly every industry, she said, are struggling to recruit and retain talent.
While there has been a lot of buzz about how tech companies are setting up spaces with pingpong tables and video games to lure and keep workers, Smith said those benefits don’t appeal to every employee — nor are they appropriate for every kind of workplace.
“You aren’t going to find that in a law office, in a civil engineering firm, in a manufacturing plant,” she said.
To Smith, the most important thing that a company can do is determine “what is important to your own people.”
“It’s probably easier to keep the people that you have than it is to find people that you don’t — and attract them when everyone else is competing for them,” she added. “But, there’s not one silver bullet for a strong retention plan. It has to be tailored and customized to your organization.”
At Vectorform, the founders said that the best way they know to recruit is by focusing on keeping the employees they have happy — and helping them develop. The best marketing, they said, is when employees tell others how much they like working there and want others to join them.
“It’s focusing on the bird in hand, instead of the bird in the bush,” Steckling said.
In many ways, John Buckenmeyer, a senior interactive designer, is evidence of that. He said he was hired out of college — and after seven years and some promotions, is still there.
The 29-year-old said he’s had other offers, but he turned them down because he’s comfortable at Vectorform.