Team manicures. Martinis every Friday night. Extra time off with no questions asked. Free massages. Dogs in the office. Exotic vacations.

The labor market is tight and public relations – especially due to its growing popularity – is no exception. Maintaining a client is cheaper than going out and finding a new one – and the same is true of employees. PR agencies and in-house departments have had to get creative in what they do to keep their people.

Monica Pandolfi, of DTG in Boston, who recruits talent for PR agencies, says that money, title and blue-chip accounts are no longer enough to retain PR talent. Addressing quality-of-life issues has become an important way to keep staff. “I think most companies have realized at this point that happy and well-rounded employees are better performers,” she says.

Says Lee Martin, a leading recruiter with Howard Sloan-Koller: “The nasty bosses of the past are almost something of a memory gone by. Unless the managers treat their staff well, they are in a great deal of trouble.”

Office pets

Morale-building perks have gone far beyond free sodas in the break room. Martin says he has never seen PR agencies do as much as they are doing now to hold onto talent. And some of the approaches can be quite funny. Creamer Dickson Basford’s new director of stress management is a whole new breed of agency pro. CDB chief Darryl Salerno decided to bring Merlin, his new Maltese, to the office as proof of the new approach to agency life. The pooch has proven to be a morale booster. “Last year we had a total of 26 people resign in the first nine months,” says Salerno, who is also known as Merlin’s Dad. “We’ve only lost three this year.” Salerno doesn’t claim that Merlin’s charms cauterized his staff hemorrhage, but the dog is symptomatic of the dramatic change he instituted when he took the helm at the end of last year. “Our people felt they weren’t valued,” says Salerno. “Merlin goes to the heart of how we’re treating people.”

Lyerly Agency, a 22-employee communications firm in Charlotte, NC, has come up with a truly inventive way to hold a carrot in front of employees. In late July, an armored car made a surprise delivery of $16,000 in one dollar bills to the agency’s conference room. Its purpose: a dramatic way to introduce staffers to Lyerly Check Plus, an incentive program for sharing up to $16,000 annually among employees. According to the firm, that’s the average amount an agency pays out for mistakes in production and other client-related errors during a typical year. By avoiding such errors in the future, the savings are shared among employees on a quarterly pro-rated basis (up to $4,000 per quarter). Fewer errors mean more money for employee distribution. Denver-based Schenkein/Sherman, a leading PR firm in the Rocky Mountain region, offers its employees bimonthly massages, a monthly stipend to cover health club memberships and team outings for manicures and picnics.

AgitProp, a New York boutique for fashion and entertainment PR, gives employees an allowance for shopping sprees at a premium retail outlet mall in the New York area, in addition to free services at a Fifth Avenue hair salon. The goal? To boost morale, yes, but also – the ultimate in client assimilation – to expose employees in an intimate way to clients’ products and services.

Traveling abroad

Manning Selvage & Lee has developed a “cultural-exchange program,” in which selected staff members are invited to travel to another office across the country or the globe. The goal is to bring the company closer together. “I have a feeling that I belong in the company whereas in other companies you feel like a drop in the ocean,” says Anne-Laure Loffredi, who traveled from the Paris office to Los Angeles. Creative recruitment incentives have paid off significantly for IT and e-commerce firm I-Cube, which recently merged with Razorfish in New York. M.J. Langlais, I-Cube’s employment and employee relations manager, says that the firm saved over $250,000 in recruitment costs last year by offering Harley-Davidsons, VW Beetles, Mediterranean cruises and the like to provide incentives to employees to recruit their friends to the agency.

Lucrative incentives

“This year so far, we’ve hired 125 people, and approximately 20% have come through employee referrals saving $140,000,” Langlais says, adding that she hopes to see that number double by the end of 1999.

Stacey Hurwitz, PR manager of I-Cube, says that the program has paid off with increased employee morale. “Our employees are getting together as groups to try to win the prizes and split the cash,” Hurwitz says. “They’ve become very creative in their outreach and more energized in general.” A more straightforward way to achieve retention is through professional development. But some agencies have begun to redefine “professional development” to emphasize team building and company morale. When in the mid-90s founder Roger Fischer decided to have Fischer & Partners of Marina Del Rey, CA, specialize in healthcare PR, he thrust the agency into one of the most highly competitive staffing markets. He needed to attract top talent to build his senior management, and he needed the kind of management that would create an atmosphere conducive to retaining account staff.

Fischer interviewed several consultancies before he hired Hutt Bush of Coaching for Results. Bush’s approach to staff training and development included the concept of “socialization,” which Fischer now considers the key to the success of his newly engineered agency.

Part of the socialization process has included each member of the agency identifying the animal they most identify with and explaining how that animal represents his or her core values as a human being, not as a professional. According to Fischer and Bush, this open dialogue – presented in an off-campus roundtable forum – created a new intimacy and respect among the staff.

To reinforce this relationship daily, employees have plaques posted on their office doors with a picture of their animal, their listed core values and their “prime-time” working hours. This exercise enables co- workers to remember the best way to approach and interact with their fellow employees and which times of the day are the most productive for each individual. “It’s about becoming better human beings and how you treat one another,” Fischer says.

Fun with fish

Fischer came up with another incentive involving animals – specifically fish. As a way to increase the fun around the office, one day he put a goldfish on every staff member’s desk. When they arrived they found the fish with a note stating that whoever kept their fish alive the longest would win a trip to Catalina Island, off the coast of Los Angeles. According to Fischer, employees have gone as far as bringing in aquariums and surfing the Internet to learn about the care of fish.

Another straightforward incentive, in addition to training, are sabbaticals. Instituting a sabbatical program has been one of the most significant achievements for CDB’s Salerno this year. He offers his staff four to 12 weeks vacation beginning with the fifth year of service at the agency. He was inspired to do this based on his own good experience taking time off after leaving Burson-Marsteller. In an effort to woo back former employees, he offers to credit them for time accrued before they left the agency.

Malibu, CA-based Phelps Group’s sabbatical program is part of CEO Joe Phelps’s emphasis on what he calls “freedom and light.” He has arranged his office to ensure that everybody gets a view of the windows even if they are in the center of the cubicle bull pen. In addition, flexible hours enable his staff to freely manage their arrivals and departures. This makes child care and commuting on the L.A. freeway more efficient. “I think most smart people want the freedom to look long-term and be treated with the respect that is due to adults,” Phelps says. “If you can keep associate turnover down, that will add to the bottom line.” Creativity and a willingness to throw big prizes and incentives at employees and prospects is natural in such a tight job market. The big question is whether or not agencies will continue to be so generous in the eventual economic downturn.

Recruiter Ted Chaloner of Chaloner Associates has a mixed response. “I think certain companies will only use these incentives in tight times. For instance, I think signing bonuses for [account executives] will disappear,” he says. However, Chaloner thinks that programs such as sabbaticals will survive. “Some of the professional-development programs and such have turned out to be a great selling tool,” he says.

DTG’s Pandolfi is more enthusiastic about what agencies are learning about the benefits of their new programs: “I absolutely think if they keep up this trend, their employees will be less likely to stray if the economy should turn bad.” She thinks the emphasis on quality of life is the harsh medicine agencies learned after the mass exodus in the early part of this decade.

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