Digital Thoughts – The Gap

Eleven months ago at Ad:Tech New York 2004, everyone had smiles on their faces. The crop of acquisitions harvested this year had yet to fully ripen, but the relief from having weathered three and a half years of bad weather was more than evident. As we approach Ad:Tech New York 2005, I expect an above average amount of last year’s unbounded optimism to remain. But, for some, their carefree attitudes will be replaced by a healthy amount of anxiety. Unlike year’s past, the anxiety of this year will have nothing to do with doubt over future paychecks. Instead, the anxiety comes from challenges the environment of success has brought. Wondering what that is? It’s your people. They are leaving; if some haven’t already, they are thinking about it and some good ones will leave.

Employees leave for a variety of reasons. A desire for more money belongs in this list, if not at the top, and it’s a topic that gets its own treatment in a bit. Location often plays a role in a move. If you live where I do in Los Angeles and have to drive to work, the thought of a reduced commute is enough to swing the vote in favor of a seemingly equal company. There’s not much you can do with location. Some people will want to be in the city, others just outside the fray. Pick an area with easy access and one that has a close proximity to talent. People also switch for a new role. Our industry tends to create flat companies that offer little room for upwards mobility. Similarly, the lack of personal growth, not just job title growth can send someone packing. Combine that with the all too familiar situation of an employee not liking their boss or feeling that role doesn’t offer the right fit for them. Culture fits, along with manager-subordinate relationships and job fit, also cause employees to leave. Creating an environment that has employees wanting to contribute and feeling tied to the company goes along with keeping employees. A good bet is to err on the side of transparency and perceived generosity.

Good goal setting and an effective review process can help identify many of the situations that lead to employee unrest. The more insidious one and the one harder to uncover is money. It is the least obvious to spot, but rarely is the real reason people leave. Money acts as a catalyst – it compounds and magnifies any other issue that might already exist. Money, however, is often a symptom and not a cause. And the influx of money to so many companies only makes the grass seem greener on the other side by magnifying the flaws of the current company. So if money is a symptom what is one of its causes? It’s a term I have borrowed from a colleague, and it’s the “gap.” The gap is the feeling where a person believes they can make substantially more money using the same contacts with the same skill sets, all while putting in the same amount of work, and feel more appreciated doing so. This gap is a state of mind, and you will want to learn to identify it and get rid of it immediately.

Getting rid of the gap means understanding some of the contributing factors to it, and there are three predominant ones – behavior from the top, internal communications (or lack thereof), and ignoring disproportionate employee contribution. The first of three, behaviors from the top refers to the environment set into place by the person driving the business. Google’s co-founders kept their behavior consistent, placing the work above their lifestyle, keeping the focus on employees on the business and not their ever growing wealth. Scott Ferber, co-founder of Advertising.com, still drives his POS Jeep and lives in the same house as before the 2004 acquisition that made him very wealthy. As a founder or other beneficiary, have you kept the focus on the company, making sure to continually reinvest and reward the employees, or has your attitude, commitment to the company, and lifestyle changed dramatically such that it might have a disruptive effect on other employees?

The communication style also changes during rapid growth; in the beginning, everyone sits within earshot, keeping people connected and motivated requires, simply, taking off the headphones and speaking up. Not so as the company hits such critical sizes as 50 and 100 people and beyond. Communication requires discipline and will at first feel like a distraction as its benefits won’t appear immediate. Yet, without such communication, the glue holding onto people will stretch and weaken. It’s human nature to infer and without proper context, the inferences people make will often be wrong. If you don’t set the tone and provide the dialogue for others to carry on, they will make it up themselves and it generally results in a company with less cohesion, greater fragmentation, and significantly reduced morale. Don’t let the series of islands happen within your company.

Our third major cause to the gap comes form not recognizing disproportionate employee contributions. As a general rule, if one person’s efforts help drive more than 10% of the business, stay on top of them. They could be anyone from the PPC manager, to an ad sales contact handling key clients, to a media buyer handling the best affiliates, or a technologist who has built the infrastructure by which a majority of the business is run. These contributors often had a fraction of the responsibilities and influence when hired. If that is the case, make sure this group, whose contributions have grown along with the company growth, gets rewarded. Even though they owe the company for the job and often the knowledge they have, the initial salaries and options granted to them simply won’t keep them there if the market gets hot. They will see new people making double their salary, and will leave so that they can have their turn, or at the very least the recognition they feel they have earned. In other words, you’ll need to give back to the people that helped you carry the company forward.

Bosses and other managers don’t beat yourselves up yet, even if you indirectly contributed to existing departures. Growing the business and taking advantage of the market opportunities often means not having the time to dedicate towards internal examination. Rapid growth mode has ended though, and now it’s time to work on the internal glue so that your organization that has been stretched and pulled in hundreds of directions can feel whole, and those outliers who ended up carrying up a disproportionate amount of the burden don’t decide to part ways. The gap is more than an employee’s state of mind, you can also picture it as the bonds holding your organization together, ones that in many places have stretched so that certain people no longer feel connected. Some employees will leave regardless. They key point is that while you probably have lost a few, it’s not too late to save others who might be in danger of departing. Other companies are waiting to take your talent, and you’re the only one that can prevent that.