Get Behind the "Employee Only" Doors
February 29, 2008
Wondering what your company looks like to the front line workers you recruit, and who deal directly with your customers? A new book shows you what you're missing.
Curious to know what happens behind the "employees only" doors of big companies? Journalist Alex Frankel embarked on an undercover reporting project to find out how America's well-known companies win over their retail and service employees. To find the information he was after, Frankel went under cover. The result of his efforts is "Punching In: The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee (Collins, $24.95)."
Over the course of two years, the author infiltrated a half-dozen companies: he wore the brown uniform of the UPS driver; folded T-shirts at Gap; brewed espressos for the hordes at Starbucks, interviewed at Whole Foods, enrolled in management training at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and sold iPods at the Apple Store.
Key to Frankel's quest was learning how these companies transform thousands of average job applicants into loyal—even fanatical—workers. How do these companies identify and recruit workers? How do they indoctrinate employees into their corporate cultures and make them perfect messengers of their brands?
Here are some highlights of the knowledge Frankel gained, and shares in the book:
• Companies as diverse as Whole Foods, Best Buy, The Container Store, and Home Depot all use high-tech questionnaires, artificial intelligence software, and group interviews to shape hiring decisions and predict whether applicants are a good fit.
• The Apple Store chain of more than 200 computer stores is one of the greatest retail successes in history, and uses a unique training system, including innovative sales tools, to convert already passionate Apple fans into prolific salespeople who are able to connect customers to stores.
• Working at Gap, Frankel watched the retailer fumble as it tried in vain to fix all three retail pieces: its products, its display systems, and its people. Frankel had a chance to work alongside Gap's former CEO Paul Pressler as they folded merino sweaters.
• As a $6 billion company, Enterprise Rent-A-Car is one of the largest employers of recent college graduates. Rather than hire passionate fans that already celebrate the brand, as Apple and The Container Store do, Enterprise prides itself on its ability to mold anyone into their corporate culture with a weeklong training program at an airport hotel that includes memorizing corporate values and learning how to sell insurance.
• The best service companies use a series of feedback loops to produce better service quality in the field: At Starbucks this means roving "snapshot" takers who measure coffee temperature and note how they are greeted by baristas; at Enterprise this feedback is generated through the ESQi system of polling recent customers on how well they were treated.
• The Container Store seeks out employees who are fanatical about organizing. They use group interviews to see how employees interact with each other.
• A company called Unicru processed more than 14.6 million job applications in 2005, and helped 10 out of the top 20 retailers pick more than 1.2 million employees. The system gets smarter over time and incorporates data from payroll and customer service performance to help clients make statistically informed decisions. If someone gets fired for performance reasons, this person’s online job application will be studied so the employer can avoid hiring someone of this profile in the future.
After applying at a dozen companies, and working at five, Frankel emerged from the experience convinced that though generally he was not cut out for service work, the work and corporate culture at UPS best matched his personality. He felt a sense of purpose in getting a package to its destination, and he felt proud to be a part of a global workforce that delivers over 15 million packages a day.
Buy "Punching In: The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee."
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