Greg Anderson, Vice President, Human Resources, Janssen-Ortho Inc.
by Laurel Hyatt
Janssen-Ortho Inc.,
a research based pharmaceutical company, traces its roots to predecessor firms in Canada going back more than 50 years. The company was formed in 1995 through the amalgamation of Janssen Pharmaceutica and Ortho-McNeil Inc., two members of the Johnson & Johnson worldwide family of companies.
|
Greg Anderson
Janssen-Ortho Inc.
| | |
The company develops and markets a variety of prescription drugs such as birth control pills (under the brand name TRI-CYCLEN* norgestimate and ethinyl estradiol tablets) and medicines to treat patients who are suffering with anemia (EPREX* sterile solution), dementia (RISPERDAL* risperidone, antipsychotic), and fungal infections (SPORANOX* itraconazole, antifungal).
Janssen-Ortho has about 1,000 employees in Canada who work in research and development, distribution, regulatory affairs, and sales and marketing. Just under half of the employees work in the Toronto head office and the others are involved in sales and medical education across the country. The products are manufactured outside of Canada.
Janssen-Ortho’s Vice President of Human Resources, Greg Anderson, spoke to Workplace Today about being recognized as a top employer and the HR challenges facing the pharmaceutical industry.
WT:
I’ll start off by talking about Janssen-Ortho being number 2 on this year’s 50 Best Companies to Work For list compiled by Hewitt Associates and reported in the Report on Business magazine. Do you think that that particular recognition is important because 70% of the rating actually comes from how your own employees assess the organization?
GA:
I think it is very important. It’s one of the things that attracted us to that survey. We use it as a tool for benchmarking ourselves and seeing how you could improve the organization. We liked the idea that it had a high employee feedback element to it.
We were particularly delighted that we got back information on what Hewitt calls the “alignment factor.” It assessed the congruency between what employees saw as our strengths and weaknesses and what the senior leaders saw as our strengths and weaknesses. It’s one thing for employees or the leadership to think a certain way about an organization, but it is more important to see how well these views are aligned, and our results were particularly satisfying. It says the leadership is well connected to what is going on in the business.
The other thing we particularly liked was the way Hewitt looks at “engagement” of employees. I think we were number one on engagement and that’s one of the things you really strive to do in running a business: to have your employees totally engaged in the business.
The actual survey results from employees said we were doing pretty well in their eyes. While we’re delighted with it, it wasn’t a complete surprise to us, in that we survey our employees regularly and have for years. We look at how they feel about how we’re running the company, how we’re looking after customers and employees, and how we’re responding to the community and the shareholders. We develop action plans from that feedback, and we’ve done that for as long as I can remember. It wasn’t like the Hewitt survey was the first in-depth view we were getting of how our employees felt the business was being run.
WT:
One of the things that Hewitt found is that the best employers have engaged employees who trust their leadership. I understand that one way that Janssen-Ortho does that is by your president, Jim Mitchell, holding informal monthly meetings with employees. Is that just one of many ways that you develop trust from the top down?
GA:
Certainly it is a nice, very visual, and easy-to-see reason why an employee might improve their trust in how the organization is being run, but I think trust in an organization is a much deeper value. It begins with core values of the company in terms of how you feel employees ought to be treated, the respect and dignity that an individual working here ought to receive, and that they ought to know on a very regular basis what’s going on in the business.
But developing trust in employees goes deeper. It gets into how managers and leaders interact with their employees every day and how thousands of issues are handled. It gets down to being a core value that we look for in leadership here, the core value that we expect people to have between fellow employees. It’s not dealt with solely by having an informal meeting, although it is a good and very visible tool and it does make our employees feel like they know what’s going on. When people feel like they know what’s going on, they feel more in control and therefore more trusting of where the company is going.
WT:
Speaking of leadership, I understand the company makes an effort to coach and mentor future leaders. Is that a formal program?
GA:
It’s not a formal program. We actually dislike formal mentoring programs and I think the literature tends to support they often don’t work.
We do openly encourage mentoring and coaching situations. We encourage senior people to be open to people who want to be mentored or coached. We tell employees that we’re open to helping people who want to be mentored or coached. We ask them to find more experienced people they feel they could relate well with, and see whether the person will help them out. We talk about it openly; we talk about mentoring being both valuable in terms of a person’s personal development, their personal growth, and even in the continued growth of the mentor.
WT:
You have Credo values formalized for the way the company treats its customers, the community, shareholders, and of course, employees. For employees, the Credo reads: “Everyone must be considered as an individual. We must respect their dignity and recognize their merit. They must have a sense of security in their jobs. Compensation must be fair and adequate, and working conditions clean, orderly and safe. We must be mindful of ways to help our employees fulfill their family responsibilities. Employees must feel free to make suggestions and complaints. There must be equal opportunity for employment, development and advancement for those qualified. We must provide competent management, and their actions must be just and ethical.” The Credo is posted on your Web site, and I assume it appears in other company documents for all your employees to see. Is that correct?
GA:
It’s posted in many places, and it’s introduced in all orientation and initial training sessions. A lot of companies have values and principles printed up and put on their walls and make them public, but it is very common for me to hear back from an employee who joined our company, say a year ago or nine months ago, to be sitting talking to us and saying, “You know, the whole time I was being interviewed and hired I heard about the Credo and I saw the words and I knew what it was by the time I came onboard here. But the interesting thing is that having been here for the better part of a year that I have seen the Credo constantly being part of decision making, constantly being what people use as a basis for deciding how they’re going to act in certain situations, and it really is embedded in the business.”
I think the surprise for people is not that it’s on the wall, but that they see it in meetings and they see it in discussions that take place every day and every month that they’re working here.
WT:
You use your Web site as one method of recruiting. It has the slogan, “Small company environment, big company impact,” which refers of course to the fact that you are one of approximately 200 Johnson & Johnson companies and yet within Janssen-Ortho itself you say you have fewer management layers and little bureaucracy. Do you think this contributes to employee satisfaction?
GA:
I think this contributes to how engaged our employees are in trying to deliver the business results. Engagement and feeling like they’re impacting the business leads to employee satisfaction. The “small company environment, big company impact” philosophy is one of the reasons J&J has been so successful over the years, because many managers around the world and many employees in their particular business unit feel they’re very close to the customer and what they do really will impact what happens. They stay far more focused and far more engaged.
Then the contributions of each of the 200 companies creates this major health care player in the world known as Johnson & Johnson. J&J has a big impact on the world; we impact people’s lives in many positive ways and lots of people, because of the decentralized approach, feel very engaged and close to what we’re trying to achieve with customers.
WT:
I understand that you give stock options to employees at all levels.
GA:
Actually that’s not right. We give stock options, but not to employees at all levels.
Beginning with our middle management levels, people become eligible for stock options. We try to reach down to this level of managers as we feel those are the people who will impact on the long-term growth of the company, which is the kind of growth stock options are meant to support. We want people to see a clear link between managing for the long-term, which we ask them to do every day, and a long-term reward, which is what stock options can deliver.
WT:
And yet as you’re aware there’s quite a controversy brewing at the moment where there are several accounting bodies, regulators, and even some big investors like the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board who are saying that stock options don’t necessarily align management and shareholder interest. Do you agree with that?
GA:
Stock options are a good tool for building employee commitment to the long-term growth of the business, but like any tool, if it’s misused, it can be detrimental to the long-term growth of the business, which becomes detrimental to shareholders. What we try to do is make sure that stock options are part of a mosaic of ways we recognize and reward employees and we don’t try to make options so significant that they would get people behaving in inappropriate ways in the long term. I think that within the business community, J&J is seen as being a sound user of stock options, and not an organization that abuses the use of stock options.
The other thing is that if stock options take a while to vest, then what it says to employees is if things go well for the next number of years and if the company’s better off down the road, you will be better off. So stock options that mature in 12 months or stock options that are trying to make up for cash or regular bonuses at year end may get some companies into more trouble. I don’t think the use of options as we employ them does anything to reduce long-term shareholder value.
WT:
Stock options are just one of a long list of benefits, perqs, and rewards for employees. You have everything from a subsidized cafeteria to educational tuition loans. Is the pharmaceutical industry so competitive for talent that you end up giving your employees all the bells and whistles to try to attract and retain them?
GA:
There’s an element of competitiveness in the pharmaceutical industry, whether it’s the clinical research area, the regulatory and drug safety area, the sales and marketing area—just about every part of the company requires a very high level of talent. I would say that the pharmaceutical industry has probably more university grads per population of employees than most companies. And so the kind of talent that helps drive our business is a top level of talent and there is competition for that and we try to make sure that we are very competitive.
We spend a good deal of time and effort making sure that what I call core compensation in terms of cash compensation, bonuses, and core benefits are certainly competitive. We do that on a regular, routine, ongoing basis. But we also try to add in benefits that would make us a little better than the others out there. I think in the Hewitt survey 68% of our employees said that in their view, our benefits were clearly better than those offered by the competition, and that was well above what the average of all the people who responded to the survey said. So our employees do recognize, more than at most companies, that our benefits are pretty strong.
We do try to enhance it with things that help our employees cope with work better. We have a valet service here for drycleaning so that it’s one less worry for somebody heading home at night. We have meals to go, where our dining area will take orders for meals to go home because people are maybe pressured and we don’t want them to feel like this is becoming a burden for them. And we have a lot of female executives in our business, as well as men who are part of very busy families, so we’re aware of all the family balance issues they have to deal with and we try to do things that help with balancing work and family environment. We offer a maternity leave “top-up” benefit as well as parental leaves.
WT:
And of course an intangible benefit of working in the pharmaceutical industry is that employees must get an incredible satisfaction from knowing that they’re literally helping save people’s lives, right?
GA:
I’d say that is a major motivation for our employees who like working here. That goes not only for our company, but for almost anyone in the pharmaceutical industry. The employees who work there truly believe that they are making difference in people’s lives in a profound and positive way and they feel very strongly about that.
I know personally it was a big attraction to me. I had a choice years ago to work for an oil company or somebody who made brake shoes and when I compared that with working in the health care industry, it just was a bigger motivator for me. Although it doesn’t motivate everybody, I think for most of the people who work here, that’s one of the big rewards they take home at night.
WT:
Now we can talk about your own career for a minute. What is your background, both workwise and education wise?
GA:
It’s very eclectic. I did not join the organization in HR and when I began, I would not have said that HR was my career. I actually started in the finance area; I’m a chartered accountant by training and a graduate of Queen’s University before that. After a very few years in finance, I went in to the sales and marketing area and I spent most of my career in sales and marketing and got to a senior level in that area.
Then an opportunity came up to move to HR and I felt it always fit with what I liked about making companies perform well and being very successful, so it was an interesting and enjoyable transition to me. That line management experience also helped me recognize that HR executives have to be very grounded in moving the business forward and understanding how talent drives the business forward. I would say that in today’s world, HR is not really just about people. HR is about high performance through people, so HR is strategic when it’s helping drive the business forward and it focuses on the human element of doing that.
WT:
Do you think being a CA helps you get taken more seriously at the executive table? This is a theme that I’ve heard is HR executives saying, “We don’t necessarily have the line experience and we’re kind of at a disadvantage because people see us as warm and fuzzy.” Do you think your background helps you?
GA:
I don’t think the CA has anything to do with it. I don’t think anybody on the board, unless I mentioned it to them, would even remember I had a CA.
I think what does bring a lot of weight to HR at our table is the fact that I spent a number of years actually trying to run the business in one of the line management areas. So your comment about line management is very important; in fact, if you’ve got a top HR middle manager who knows a lot about HR and you think they could be a vice president of HR some day, what you ought to do is figure out how you can get them into line management for a while. I don’t think that an HR person can really understand how HR drives the business and a high performance culture until they’ve actually tried to drive the business forward managing people.
HR is about helping make the business more successful by making the human element sing better. For HR people to be really successful, they have to be interested in driving the business forward and not only being warm and fuzzy and people-oriented. HR people have to be high performance and business-oriented. They just have a wonderful ability to help others get the human element of the business right.
WT:
The next question was going to be whether you are striving to be number one on next year’s list of top employers, and I’m assuming your attitude is, “Well, lists are nice but the key is that your employees are happy and that you’re driving the business results,” is that true?
GA:
Yes. I’m not striving to be number one. If you take the top few companies in that survey, you could weight the numbers slightly differently and come up with a different order. Being among the top is gratifying and rewarding and it tells us we’re on the right track, but you’ve always got further to go.
The worst thing would be for anyone to think that a company that was among the 50 best employers in 1970 would be there today doing the same things—that would be totally foolish. The goal is to continue to improve in all critical aspects of the business, and to recognize that how good you are today or what’s critical today is going to be different in the future. How do we continue to grow the business in the right direction? How do we continue to succeed as customers? How do we continue to make human talent part of our business?
Figuring out how to make our managers at a younger age capable of creating a high performance work environment for their group of people is a major priority for us going forward in an area where I think we’ve got lots of growing to do. We would also like to be able to develop our talent for leadership faster, because we find that as we continue to grow, we need more leaders ready at a younger age who are capable of taking on the burdens and responsibility of looking after customers, employees, the community, and our shareholders. That’s a big responsibility and they’ve got to be ready for that.
*All trademark rights used under licence.
|
