To boost the profits, keep the workers

Nobody at Brogan and Partners was surprised when management announced early this year that the entire staff would be taking a field trip to Amsterdam to unwind.

Last year it was Reykjavik.

The 60 employees at the marketing firm, with offices in Detroit and Research Triangle Park, N.C., have been taking "mystery trips" for nearly two decades.

Brogan also offers its Detroit workers the use of on-site personal trainers. At the North Carolina operation, a call went up for concierge services instead.

Request granted.

Sound familiar? It's not a return to the roaring '90s. But experts say ensuring loyalty may soon be job No. 1 at many firms.

As a long-gloomy job market finally sees rays of light, studies now show most American workers have happy feet. Fully three-quarters are actively or passively in the hunt for new jobs, according to the Society of Human Resource Management.

Also, by most accounts, a skilled-labor shortage looms. That means the cyclical worker/employer power dynamic - chocolate pedicures and "bring in the pooch" when times are flush, extra hours and that be-glad-you're-working pall when the economy flags - may be in for its first real tilt since the end of the 1990s era of exorbitant expectations and little-guy clout.

"It really is now the beginning of a sellers' market environment," says Roger Herman, a management consultant who has studied retention for decades. "About 10 different [regions] across the country are already in that mode. But employers have not shifted gears, and that's going to cause them to lose a lot of people."

Not all firms will see flight. "We have practically zero turnover," says Marcie Brogan, a managing partner at Brogan. "People who leave do it because their spouses are changing jobs" and have to move.

What Ms. Brogan calls her company's "deliberate retention strategy" requires corporate agility. "We run very lean," she says, whatever the prevailing economic conditions. "And we never hire unless we have the money in hand." The extra benefits, she says, cost about what one more senior-executive salary would.

"The partners and board of directors would take cuts before we would short our staff," she says.

Her strategy reflects the extreme leading edge of a morale-minded attitude that workplace experts say is fast becoming critical for attracting and keeping talent.

The keys: an approach tailored as much as possible to nonmonetary incentives and the placement of frontline managers who understand and can translate the mission - and for whom people like to work.

"All things being equal, you can attract, retain, and motivate the best and the brightest by recognizing that what motivates me might not motivate you," says John Putzier, author of "Get Weird," a book about creative practices that firms can embed in their cultures. "And most of those things aren't necessarily financial, they are 'What's it like to work here day to day?'

The point, he and others say: Strike a mutually beneficial deal with each employee within the framework of a broad and liberal policy that gives them more of what everyone still seems to want: time to live.

"For young people, it might be looking at flexible hours in order to have long weekends; for others, it might be flexible arrangements that allow for the care of aging adults; and for others, it might be child care," says John Peoples, managing partner at Global Lead Management Consulting in Baltimore. "What's important is to have a philosophy that embraces the holistic life of the employee and a variety of tools that support that philosophy."

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