Tess Reinhard – Managing, mentoring and retaining high tech employees

Steve

Hi, this is Steve Hunt with People Performance Radio. This week we spoke with Tess Reinhard, who’s the Director of Organizational Capability for CDW, and CDW is one of SuccessFactor’s clients, and one of the things we’re going to be trying to do in our podcast is talk to different clients, really about some of the challenges that they face and the opportunities and techniques they use within their particular industry, given their particular kind of workforce, and Tess talked about CDW, which really largely a sort of technology, sales and support company, growing very very fast, and employs lots and lots of new college graduates, and it really has to deal with the issue of educating these new college graduates with limited job experience, and very quickly getting them to speed to fulfill very specific technical job roles, and she talks a lot about the stuff they’ve done around mentoring and career pathing and retaining when working with a very large population of relatively new employees, so I’m very interested, some great insights, and let’s listen to Tess Reinhard from CDW.

Hi, this is Steve Hunt with People Performance Radio. Today we’re talking with Tess Reinhard, who’s the Director of Organizational Capability for CDW. Tess, thank you for appearing on People Performance Radio.

Tess

I’m happy to be here, thank you.

Steve

So Tess, can you tell us a little bit about what CDW does, and what your role is within the organization?

Tess

CDW is a internet technology space, an $8 billion company, we have about 6,500 employees, we’re mostly located in the United States, and we sell to small business, medium and large business and to government groups all the technology that they would require.

Steve

So what is it that, when you look at that workforce that you’re working with, there’s such a technology focus on a highly specialized skilled workforce, I’d imagine – what are the talent management challenges and issues that are really key for CDW’s success?

Tess

Well first off, we are an inside sales model, as such we have approximately, almost 55% of our people are co-workers that are in sales, and they are young, it’s a young workforce, so relatively young, the average age in the sales group is about 28, so one of our first challenges is, many times people come to CDW to work fresh out of college, so we have whole developmental requirements that we need to do to get them up to speed with all the technology that they are selling.

The second opportunity we have is, because we’re in the technology space, it’s a very cash-rich space, but at the same time it’s very changeable, so we have to be able to be very flexible in these kind of turbulent times.

A third one is the need for mentoring, we have some senior people that are fabulous at making sure that they’re getting out there, they understand that part of their legacy is to be able to develop the next generation of folks, and so we’re trying to do a lot of succession, as far down into the organization as we can, given the size of our workforce.

Steve

That’s interesting, so I can see these being related, so you have a typical very young workforce in a very, what sounds like cash-rich but also somewhat volatile industry, so by that you mean, does it expand and contract very quickly?

Tess

Yes, that, and we’re growing, we have been growing in a very very fast pace for the last 25 years now, this year certainly is different, just like it is everywhere else, but up to this point it’s been volatile, on a positive standpoint, double-digit growth year over year, until this past year. The volatility is also around the technology, what we sell, there’s so much that needs to be, the constant development, the constant change in the product lines, pricing, everything else that these salespeople have to be aware of, specialized in, etc.

Steve

So it really sounds like rapid learning is the key, because you’ve got a young workforce and then some very skilled, more experienced workers, constantly changing new technologies, so you’ve got to get processes that allow you to take new talent, and really quickly teach them what I imagine are pretty complex things, is that a good characterization of the situation?

Tess

Yes, it is, that’s a good way to put it Steve.

Steve

So what processes have you put in place that has really worked in helping educate your new workforce?

Tess

We’re doing a lot, I mean we started a few years ago actually with SuccessFactors, and we started with both the performance management effort, and our succession planning efforts. That has been very very helpful in getting a baseline of what is the talent that we have out there, and how are they tracking to performance? In terms of performance management, we try to be very very specific on what are the goals at the individual level, each person is going to be merited, receive merit based on, but also what is it about their performance of how it can be aligned to the overall goal of the company, and how much do they understand the strategy of the company, so that they can down a similar path of what the company wants them to do.

From a succession standpoint, we’re trying to make sure that we get down to at least the manager level and above, so that we know who are the superstars in the organization, so that we can start accelerating their development, and making sure that they’re ready for the next challenge year over year.

Steve

So it sounds, the way you describe this, basically one is saying, we need to be very specific about what people need to learn to succeed in their job, but we also want to make sure they understand what they’re specifically working on is relevant to the big picture, and doing that in a way that supports our succession plan, and you had mentioned mentors as a crtical part of the three things you’re focusing on, I can see them being so critical for supporting that learning process and tying it to the organizational strategy. What is it that you do to identify, develop and basically set up people in good mentoring roles?

Tess

We have a program called Mentor Match, and what we do is, it’s a co-worker driven process, so we had started off with mentoring as a very structured mentoring process, where we matched up directors with specific high-potential people, and that was successful but highly time-consuming, and it wasn’t necessarily a good chemistry, if you will, across the group, so we realized that there were several things we wanted to do differently. One was we wanted to make sure it was co-worker driven, so that the co-worker himself or herself would say, “This is what I want to learn, this is how I want to develop myself”, and then he or she picks the mentor that he thinks can help the most toward that goal. Then they go into the system and they send a request to that mentor to become one of the ones that is chosen. The mentors that are in the system only, there’s a rule that they can only have two mentees per year, actually it’s a six month process, and the mentors indicate what areas of their expertise that they would like to be able to share with co-workers, if they were chosen.

It’s been a highly successful process, we’ve got about 30% of the workforce that have participated in our mentor match process.

Steve

Wow, that’s really impressive, I’ve never seen benchmarks in mentoring, but I have to think you’re probably in the top, when you say 30% of the people involved in the mentoring match process. Is there a technology that you use to facilitate people identifying, this is what I want to learn about, who are the mentors that are available, and people sign in, saying “I’m available to be a mentor?”

Tess

Yes, we do, we purchased a system that did the Mentor Match process for us, so we’ve been very very pleased with having that available to us.

The other thing we’re going to do next year, this year in our succession planning discussions, is have pools of mentors. We want to be able to say, all right, for this pool of folks that are critical talent, we want to be able to get a mentoring process going for them as well, so that if there’s folks that might be able to do a group mentoring process, we could be able to do that as well, so we’re pretty excited about it.

Steve

I love this, because I love the sort of organic nature, that you create an environment that enables mentoring relationships to get established, but then you let people drive the actual relationships themselves, but one of the things I wonder about that is, what sort of training do you give people to make sure that they’re effective mentors, and does that training go just to the mentors, do you also train the people, the mentees, on how to be a good mentee? Is there any training that goes into that?

Tess

Yes, we put together guidelines before they even got into the program, both guidelines for the mentor and guidelines for the mentee, so folks realized before they signed up what we were asking them to do, things like, making sure you have an agenda, so that when you meet with your mentor, you know exactly what you’re trying to ask, things such as providing the mentor with a resumé, or something else that you think is relevant, depending on what your goals are.

From the mentor’s standpoint, we use the live meeting technology to have panel discussions of some mentors, and to say what they’ve done that they thought was helpful for their mentee, and then people ask questions in that format, to be able to say, well really, what is it that has been so, has had such an impact on your mentee, and how did you get to that level of trust that you were able to do that?

Steve

What are some of the things you’ve learned in that, have some themes emerged in terms of what makes a really effective mentor/mentee relationship? Are there certain techniques in doing those live meetings that you hear come up again and again, to say this is something that anybody who’s established a mentor relationship should focus on, in addition to the agendas that you mentioned? Are there any other techniques or aha's that have come out of that?

Tess

Well, one of the things is, we’ve recognized that, although we wanted to be very co-worker driven, given the age of our workforce, we wanted to have a little bit more management parameters around it as well, so that people would not just, that a brand new hire wasn’t the only one that was calling our Executive VP, and saying, “I want you to be my mentor”. We recognized we had to have a few more parameters around how the selection was done, and how the matching was done, that’s been a lesson learned.

I think the second lesson learned, as I said, was this whole idea of pools, we realized that there is a critical pool, in our case it’s our specialists, our critical talent pool. In some cases, some of those more technical people were not signing up to have mentors, even though we really wanted them to be, and we recognized that in some cases we needed to match skill sets with skill sets, and have a group of mentors that were highly technical, satisfied if you will, for those kinds of pools.

Steve

So you did set up, in addition to creating an environment that enables the organic growth of mentor relationships, there are some places where you need to get in and specifically direct it around critical skills and experiences in the organization, I think that’s so cool, just to need to see how that design unfolded during your mentor approach.

One question I have, and I’m just curious, you hear so much about Generation Y and they’re different, they have to be managed different, and you’ve got this huge workforce of Generation Y people – what are your thoughts on that? Is Generation Y, if you have a large proportion of Generation Y people in your workforce, do you need to approach them differently? Is there anything you’re doing differently, just because have so many new graduates, or is it just because they’re new graduates?

Tess

It's been interesting because I’ve been doing a series of workshops at CDW on Generation X and Generation Y to talk specifically about the opportunities for working more effectively with Gen X and Gen Y, and I think the first thing to remember is not to stereotype, we all want work/life balance, we all want development, we all want a certain level of pay, so we try to encourage folks to not look at each other with a certain collar, if you will, of just saying, oh well, here she is, at a certain age level, therefore it must equal X.

At the same time, we recognize that the Generation X-ers and the Generation Y are way, the use of technology is incredibly important, to make sure we make use of all the technology that they are so willing to do, obviously instant messages, blogs, using Twitter, Yammer, everything that we can find there, the more we can do in terms of their development, the happier they are, and we’ve been pretty pro-active in our developmental strategies of using those kinds of technologies.

Steve

Well I’d imagine you’d have the double-whammy of the Generation Y and their technology specialists, so it probably is …

Tess

Right, it’s a fun environment, let me tell you, in CDW fortunately there’s a lot of laughter here, in spite of the downturn in the economy, there’s a lot of engagement, and I think a part of it is, is truly the affinity that folks have for each other, because they understand where each other’s coming from in that technology space.

Steve

That’s cool. Now as you look to the future, what are the emerging challenges or opportunities around talent management that you are working on at CDW?

Tess

We’re recognizing that, because we’re growing, that the scalability of some of our practices are not as scalable as we would like them to be, so we’re being much more intentional in collecting data that we can use on an ongoing basis, rather than having so much that’s anecdotal, if you will. Some of our talent management challenges have been specifically around data – how do you make sure that cradle to grave, if you will, you’ve got a strategy where you know who you’ve brought into the organization, and you track how they’ve been developed from an experience standpoint, from an education standpoint, from a skills knowledge and ability standpoint, and how that will help them determine their next best move.

As it relates to Generation X and Generation Y, we know that career development is a very important part to retain them, so we’re doing a big effort called My Career GPS, which is a process to help them understand where are all the jobs in the organization, how can they do internal transfer based on some of the opportunities in the company, and how will they arm themselves with the talent and skills to be able to apply for some of those opportunities.

Steve

That’s cool, I think that’s interesting to look at that cradle to grave and long term, because a lot of that, where you look and track people over the whole life cycle, so that all this stuff is very long-linked, programs like in the pharmaceutical industry, I know they have some very impressive things, that look, it’s going to take us 10 or 15 years to develop this new drug, we need to keep the talent over that period, but we’ve seen the opposite side on yours, where it’s like, the technology changes really really fast, so we need to have stable people to deal with the change in technology, because it does change so quickly. Something has to be stable in the process.

Tess

Right, and the other part is that, when you’re talking people that can sell technology, and that are in the workforce for not that long of a timeframe when we get them, and they’re well trained, because we train them very well, they are sitting ducks, if you will, for people to recruit, and so we really want to make sure we retain the people that we develop, and make sure that they feel that this is the right place to be and to grow their career.

Steve

The classic question on the retention, do you think what’s more key to retention, is it about constantly the learning and recognition, is it more about the pay and promotion? What do you think, in your workforce, really drives retention of those people, that really could walk out the door and get another job somewhere else?

Tess

I think pay is big, we try to undermine it, but I still believe that people do leave because of pay, if they think they can find something, another golden place somewhere else. We also believe very much that people often leave their manager, rather than the organization, so we’re doing quite a bit with helping managers recognize their incredible influence on making sure that their co-workers are retained, engaged, and feel motivated.

Steve

Cool, well wow, Tess, this has been a great interview, some really cool stuff that CDW’s doing that I think any organization could learn from, that you have a very unique employee set in terms of having so many new graduates that have these high skill sets, that it really pushes you to have to get really good at mentoring, really good at retention, and it sounds like you’ve come up with some really cool ways to do it.

Are there any last thoughts, questions, problems that you have not yet figured out, or that are really puzzling you that you’d like to share with us before we sign off?

Tess

Steve, there is a ton! We know there’s always continuous improvement, there’s so many things that we’re excited about, but at the same time there’s things that we would like to improve upon. I think unwanted attrition is always something we’re looking at, we actually, at the executive committee level, are figuring out a way to show what’s the difference between unwanted attrition versus good turnover versus bad turnover, that’s a big effort, and that’s been fascinating too, once we get the metrics for all of that, so that’s a challenge I just left a meeting on, so there’s a lot of wonderful things happening here, but at the same time we recognize that we’ve got to continually improve and continually challenge ourselves to get better.

Steve

Now, on your business, it sounds like the business leaders of CDW really are fully engaged around talent and the importance of talent – has that always been true, or has there been something that has happened in the organization that’s made them more actively engaged in talent?

Tess

I think it’s always been true, I think CDW, because of the age of the workforce, has always had a real idea of development, and talent is critical. In fact, one of the reasons I came here is I recognised that, just the number of conference rooms and training rooms they had in proportion to the workforce was pretty high, and if you look at a facility, and you look at how much of a facility is dedicated to getting people together for problem-solving teams and for training itself, it is somewhat of a barometer of how much they believe in it, and so fortunately for us, our executives get it, they definitely recognize that we don’t do anything but we don’t have patents, we don’t have manufacturing, we’re only as good as our co-workers are, and there’s a strong recognition of that here at CDW.

Steve

Well cool, I think that’s a great metric we’d like to see more, maybe on organizations’ websites, the percentage of square foot dedicated to meeting spaces! So the newest talent management metric.

Tess, thank you so much for sharing your experiences and insights and look forward to hopefully having you again, maybe it’s People Performance Radio in the future, in a year, and I’m sure you’ll have even more you could share with us. Thank you very much for appearing on the show.

Tess

It was my pleasure Steve, thank you.

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