retention

What working at Intel taught me about Employee Retention

Working at Intel taught me a lot.  They did a lot of very smart things, especially in the area of people management.  Not only did they put a huge emphasis on training (for example mandatory manager training & 7-Habits training), but also they really had a great program for employee retention.  Recently, I have been thinking about retention, and I have solidified my thoughts into a simple sentence that should be the driving for of HR and all things retention… here it is:  “We can’t expect every employee to stay here their entire career, but we can try to make it so good that they might want to, simply by providing Training, Opportunity for Advancement, and creating together a Great Place to Work.” -H.Beverly 4/8/2014.


This sentence is not just bullshit.  It’s what I really believe.  I know I’m going to lose people, but hopefully, I can make it hard for them to decide to leave….

My goals are:

1.) Offer the training to help people develop their career on company time.

* I do this with a monthly or quarterly meeting with all employees to discuss career vision, training opportunities, and growth.  * I also do this by offering company funds for seminars and education opportunities.

2.) Make available new roles for people as they advance in their career.

* This isn’t always easy, but sometimes, you just have to make a role, even if it doesn’t make sense.

3.) Makeing a Working Environment that is rewarding, safe, empowered, and most importantly that everyone knows that what they do matters, and the People who don’t contribute will be cut loose!

* This is not easy… but starts with free coffee… really!  Free coffee, fun company sponsored events, and great work-space is a start.  I follow that up with what really matters:  Empowerment -> Giving control over to others for their responsibilities, Purpose -> Making it clear how what people do effects the bottom line.   And lastly, cutting dead weight.. people that just don’t care, cannot stay!

So, Am I the best at retention?  No.  I make mistakes.  Sometimes I get angry (withdrawls from the emotional bank account).  Sometimes I fail to notice when reward or promotion is ready.  But I try.  It’s all we can do!

Marketing to Whales

In the gaming business, a Whale is defined as the 2nd or 3rd sigma of spenders.  This means the 95th (or 99th) Percentile of your spenders.  Depending on the game, this might represent a very significant portion of your total revenue (in a Whale dominate game).  Therefor, “marketing to whales” is a very important task/challenge.  My good friend Bart Bohn at AuManil have developed algorithms that help identify and monitor the Whales in your game… but the key question I have is, how do you EFFECTIVELY market to these whales?

The Whale challenges are:

  1. How do we Identify Whales (AuManil has this solved! -Thanks! :))
  2. How do we get ATTRACT new Whales to play our game? (Acquisition)
  3. How do we get Whales who play to STAY in the game longer?  (Retention)
  4. How do we get Whales who play to SPEND more? (Monetization)
  5. How do we get Whales who have left to COME BACK?  (Re-acquisition)
I don’t have all the answers, sadly.  Each of these are very hard…  I do have some ideas, and am constantly testing these ideas while running Marketing in the real game Dungeon Overlord.  Obviously, I can’t share data or any big secrets, but I would love to hear from my friends/readers if they have any ideas on how to solve these problems.
Focusing on ATTRACTING new Whales; Facebook has some new “target” groups that let you supposedly target Whales with your ads.  Has anyone tried this yet?  I hope to try it out soon.
Targeting players of other similar games seems to work fairly well, but I wonder if “Bids” for ads effect weather or not we reach Whale players?
Thoughts?
Any ideas for the other Whale challenges?