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Working
with the Company that Employs the Duck: How AFLAC Recruits
and Empowers Employees:
| An
interview with Sharon Douglas, Vice President and
Chief People Officer, AFLAC, Inc. |
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By Jack Speer,
Co-publisher BizWatchOnline.com |
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Sharon
Douglas
Vice President
Chief People Officer
AFLAC,
Inc
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Could a desperate,
quacking little duck become the spokes-bird for a
Fortune 500 company with a difficult name? Could
this duck make a company like AFLAC become the most recognized name in
supplemental insurance in a matter of a few years?
Improbable.
Yet that's what the duck did for AFLAC. The
commercials were made using a
combination of live Pekin ducks and a lifelike,
mechanical duck that was
made by the same company that created the dinosaurs
for the movie, "Jurassic
Park."
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How do you treat human beings in the
workplace? It’s the most difficult issue we face, whether we’re
recruiting people or laying them off. It’s an issue that some
argue is even more important than the product made or the
service rendered.
How do you get them to do their best and to
stay engaged in what they’re doing? How do you create a work
environment where they feel fulfilled and challenged? How do you
get them to stay with you long enough to make a difference?
AFLAC, Growing Fast in Columbus,
Georgia
If you’re growing as fast as AFLAC and
located in Columbus, Georgia (190,000 population) you really
have to hustle to recruit and retain employees. The total
estimated workforce in Muscogee County is 83,000 people with
only 4,000 who are not employed. At year-end 1996, AFLAC had
1,966 employees in the United States (almost all are in
Columbus). Today there are over have 3,100, monumental growth by
anyone’s standards.
Yet Columbus is where Paul, John and William
Amos founded AFLAC in 1955 and today the company’s assets
exceed $37 billion. AFLAC has become a world leader in
supplemental insurance. Paul just stepped down as chairman after
46 years. The company is family led (Dan Amos is the new CEO),
family oriented, and the company philosophy is to treat its
employees like family.
And a diverse family it is. For the fourth
consecutive year, AFLAC has been named to LATINA Style
Magazine's listing of "The 50 Best Companies for Latinas to
Work for in the U.S." Almost 50% of Muscogee County
is African American.
I spoke with Sharon Douglas in her office in
Columbus, Georgia, along with Abby Spinello of Corporate
Communications, who put the meeting together.
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K. Jack
Speer
President
The Delta Associates
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Sharon Douglas is a
passionate advocate for employees, their well-being and development. She has an infectious
laugh and well-honed
communication skills from her years as a television anchor.
Jack Speer:
Sharon, thanks for speaking with me today. I’m intrigued by
your title "chief people officer." How did this
title come to be created?
Sharon Douglas: Well actually, Jack, this
title isn’t original with AFLAC. A number of Fortune 100
companies use this title. It makes a statement that as you have
a chief financial officer to take care of company finances, you
also have a chief people officer who takes care of the needs of
the people.
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Jack Speer: Sharon,
I became extremely intrigued by AFLAC’s approach to employees
when I was speaking with one of your training professionals, Jim
Krause.
Jim explained to me that only 50% of AFLAC
employee evaluations are based on achieving their goals. Often
productivity is 80 to 90 percent of what companies evaluate. In
extreme cases the unwritten policy is "hire ‘em, tire ‘em
and fire ‘em." I asked Jim what the other 50% at AFLAC is
and he explained to me that the other 50% of the evaluation is
leadership skills and modeling AFLAC Core Values.
Sharon Douglas: Well
this approach reflects the values of the company from the
beginning. The founders wanted their employees to feel as if
they were part of the company. There were get togethers with
employees in the beginning and the company created a family
environment that has evolved over the years.
As the mentality of the workforce has changed,
we have all the more reason to take care of our people, to
nurture them and help them have happy, productive lives.
Jack Speer: And how has the AFLAC
workforce changed?
Sharon Douglas:
Well, as with other companies, people no longer intend to stay
long-term. The GenXers are an example of this. They don’t feel
the kind of loyalty to a company that would make them want to
stay for a length of time. We’ve found that there’s a high
cost involved with employees who leave. That’s why we try to
give them every reason to stay.
Jack Speer: What are
some of the ways you try to motivate AFLAC employees to maintain
satisfaction with the company?
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Does your team have an off-site or
team-building
coming up?
| Consider a program that will help your team
achieve its goals and will be wildly popular.
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Carol Kallendorf, Ph.D. and K. Jack Speer
facilitate off-sites using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
(MBTI). We do teambuilding sessions that are life changing for
participants that teach self-understanding, understanding
others, and how to make teams effective.
Participants do the MBTI at our website,
receive telephone debriefings, and participate in sessions that
are insightful, interactive, and fun. Clients include American
Express, Blue Cross, Enron Energy, and many more.
Call Carol or Jack today at 512- 498-9780, or
email jspeer@delta-associates.
com. We’ll give you the details.
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Sharon Douglas: We
have a wide variety of events, programs, and incentives for
AFLAC employees and we develop ways for employees to choose
among many benefits and services. We do things throughout the
year. There are spot awards for outstanding employee
accomplishments. We have profit sharing before Thanksgiving, up
to six percent.
Jack Speer: That’s
generous. What else?
Sharon Douglas: Since
we are a family-oriented company we think it’s important to
provide childcare for our people, so we developed two Child
Development Centers that house 540 children. They're staffed by
childcare professionals, and parents and grandparents can stop
by to visit and check on their children to maintain the family
relationship while at work. We were the first company in
Columbus to do that.
Jack Speer: This is
a very valuable benefit that is badly needed by parents and
children, but that you don’t see in many companies around the
nation. Is there more?
Sharon Douglas: We
think it’s important that employees be happy in their personal
lives. If they are happy people, they will be more effective at
AFLAC.
We offer all sorts of educational programs such as Lunch
and Learn, where we present programs on parenting, leasing,
home-buying, a whole array of subjects that equip people to
live better.
We have Employee Appreciation Week, which is a
week set aside to have a good time. We begin with a traditional
southern breakfast of, eggs, grits, and ham and go on from
there. We collect the whole range of gifts from T-shirts, denim
shirts, water bottles, and gift bags. We have drawings for DVDs,
television sets, weekend getaways, and trips to resorts. We send
a number of people to Hawaii. Last year the president emeritus
gave $10,000 out of his own pocket. We send people to the Braves
games and give them "Braves Bucks." We also have
spirit day and a wide variety of other events and programs.
Jack Speer: After
all you’ve told me, I can just hear the sound of cars with
U-Haul trailers starting out and headed to Columbus.
But AFLAC has to be more than awards and good
times. How do you manage people for better performance? I
recently read that the average person would rather have a root
canal than go through a performance evaluation. Do you think
that’s true?
Sharon Douglas: Yes,
I think it is true. Managers need to evaluate employees, but we
have worked hard to take the string out of it. We do our
appraisals in three parts: 1) my goals and objectives on which I’ll
be evaluated, 2) my learning objectives 3) my future objectives.
We’ve worked a lot with managers to help them in the process.
We’ve created a guidebook that gives them specific examples of
behaviors and specific verbiage to use. We create training
opportunities so that employees can be successful in achieving
their goals.
Jack Speer: Sometimes
evaluations are given and the manager and the employee sign off
on a remedial development plan, but really, do you think that
poor performers ever improve?
Sharon Douglas: Yes,
they can improve, but poor performance must be dealt with early
on. Patterns of behavior are hard to change. Managers must work
with an employee as soon as these patterns appear.
Sharon Douglas,
vice president, Chief People Officer, is responsible for
employee relations/diversity issues, corporate training and
development, employment services and recruiting and internal communications,
as well as AFLAC's outreach in work and family initiatives. She joined
AFLAC in 1996 as second vice president, Human Resources, and was promoted to
vice president, Human Resources, in 1999. She holds a bachelor of
science degree from Southern University and A&M College. Before joining
AFLAC, Ms. Douglas was vice president of customer and employee services with
Columbus Water Works. She also spent several years as a television news anchor
with WTVM.
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