Editor’s note: Kathleen Knight is president & CEO of BAIGlobal Inc., a Tarrytown, N.Y., research firm.

The primary asset of a service business is its staff. Proprietary techniques and models can help differentiate a market research business, but eventually a firm’s success depends on the professional nature of its staff and their determination to deliver a quality product. Consequently, recruiting and retaining a competent, enthusiastic staff is a crucial and constant management challenge.

In years past there was a plentiful talent pool for the market research industry to tap. The challenge was simply to locate, meet, and hire top-notch candidates. Today, staffing is perhaps the most difficult issue facing our industry as we approach the year 2000. There are several contributing factors:

  • Full employment: In the research arena, as in several other professions, we appear to be near full employment. There is a small pool of job seekers from which to choose.
  • Growth of research products: Employees who develop their research skills selling and administering standardized research products have a different skill set than that needed for custom research. These individuals have not learned how to originate their own custom research design, nor have they supported senior researchers conducting custom work. Thus, finding talented custom researchers is a growing challenge.
  • Budget pressures: Non-stop client pressure to reduce research costs is now a way of life. This adds a difficult element to the conduct of business overall. It puts pressure on salaries and has an impact on training costs as well.
  • Rapid data delivery: Technology has expanded our ability to produce mountains of data rapidly. However, it has not necessarily increased our capability to integrate and ascribe meaning to that information. An ability to manage rapid time frames and mountainous data is now a requirement. In our experience, this requires significant learning for most people and can be quite frustrating.
  • Corporate downsizing of research departments: Today there are fewer seasoned researchers within corporations, making the outside research firm’s task ever more challenging. Some of the "downsized" senior professionals have become consultants. When these sole practitioners function as low cost operators and further drive down price levels, they create additional budget pressures for our industry. Recruiting costs, salaries, and other human resource expenditures all feel the budget pinch.

In sum, for our industry as elsewhere, this is a time of very great change.

Managing the staffing challenge

These business conditions exist today and are likely to continue. For rapidly growing research firms, the challenge is even greater. They must continuously recruit, hire and retain talented employees if they are to continue to grow.

At BAIGlobal we’ve given significant thought to how to manage our firm, attract the best research talent and nurture top business performers. We offer these concrete recommendations to those who face a similar task:

1. Create an environment that encourages risk-taking, experimentation and responsibility. The benefits to the research firm, such as new service development, new techniques and business growth, outweigh any potential risks. However, to encourage employees to try out various ways of doing things, they need to feel support in taking risks. New ideas and different business approaches need to be treated with respect and given room to develop. At the same time, entrepreneurial employees have to take ownership and responsibility for their endeavors. Those who take ownership have a commitment to themselves, their co-workers and clients to do the best they can to get the job done well.

2. Foster recognition and accountability. Recognize good effort and reward it. One of the best forms of reward is visibility within the company. Make sure that everyone knows when an outstanding job was done and that excellence matters. To do this, it is important to give employees enough freedom so that real accountability can develop. Management must take a step back, since it’s difficult for researchers to take full ownership of their work if supervision is "overcontrolling."

3. Provide job autonomy within a certain structure. Market research is a technical science and the numbers have to add up. But it also is a business and projects have to generate money to pay the bills. Within these boundaries, there are many different ways to get the job done. Let employees put their personal stamp on a project and they will feel like true partners in their work.

4. Attract and support people with entrepreneurial attitudes. The dictionary definition of entrepreneur is "one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise." Entrepreneurs are those with a can-do attitude who actually get the job done. We want new employees with enthusiasm as well as technical proficiency. (Negativism is catching and not profitable.) Once hired, we need to support some risk-taking within a business structure. We can set business goals and management parameters, then let the staff determine the path to take to get the job done. This allows each person to leverage their own abilities and achieve their highest level of success.

5. Connect rewards to a business result. Providing open financial data to researchers seems to create a business consciousness that is exciting for all. Often we find that very talented researchers know little about the financial dynamics of their own industry. They welcome the chance to learn and thus become more accountable for bottom-line results.

6. Open your financial books. Research firms can provide senior employees with full financial information to truly show them how they are doing. Part of the satisfaction in doing research is in knowing how well you’re doing across the months and years. Your bottom-line is the best aggregate measure of how you’re doing - individually, as a group and as a firm. Opening the books establishes a common mission and goal across the organization. It can be used to educate all employees about their contribution to the business and encourage the balance between teamwork and entrepreneurship that leads to profitable growth.

7. Establish a profit center system to connect senior researchers to the bottom-line. Researchers who have a bottom-line responsibility and understanding of their own business have several advantages. They realize the full dynamics of how the research business works. They feel empowered as important partners in the research firm’s success, which indeed they are. They grasp the bottom-line implications of their research’s results for their clients more easily.

8. Offer diversity within your organization. It’s fun and exciting to learn new products, serve new clients, and work with a new research team. A chance at a new position is often the spark someone needs to really do well within a firm. And the possibility of this kind of job change seems to really add to the satisfaction that employees feel. By paying attention to individuals and creating a career path across disciplines within your organization it’s more likely that talented researchers will stay.

9. Provide clear promotional paths. Employees like to know how they can advance and want to feel some control over their careers. Clear criteria and expectations go a long way toward helping researchers feel comfortable. Plus, in our business, the best training is as an apprentice, working with other senior researchers doing interesting work. Talented people will grow and prosper where there’s an expectation that senior managers will be mentors, junior staff will learn, and that excellent work produced together will lead to everyone’s career advancement.

New kind of thinking

For market research to attract practitioners of the caliber of those who founded the industry, current management must realize that a new kind of thinking is needed. A good, fair bargain must be struck between research staff and management - one that goes beyond mere dollars to restructuring the organization. Without this change, the very talented will choose other careers and our staffing challenge will continue.