A chance to excel

To say that employee retention is big business at the moment would be something of an understatement. The war for talent and the shift it is creating for recruiters and jobseekers alike is everywhere you look, and it's sadly no longer commonplace to hear of an employee that has stayed with the same organization for more than, say, 20 years. But then, FedEx isn't your average employer, and Judith Edge isn't your average employee.

“At FedEx our people are our greatest asset. We truly believe that. Our founder and CEO rooted the company in this philosophy and we continue to stand by it”
-Judith Edge, Corporate VP of Human Resources at FedEx

FedEx, which already ranks in Fortune's 100 Best Places to Work is currently 68^th on the Fortune 500 and was also, in 1983, the first US company to reach revenues of $1 billion within 10 years of start-up without a merger or acquisition. It was in that same year that Edge joined the firm. At that time, FedEx was just a US express company, but today the firm operates in 222 countries and territories across the globe. And Edge, who began her FedEx career as a call center representative is today Corporate Vice President of Human Resources. "Back in '83 you didn't have the technology that you have today," she says, remembering how the organization looked when she started out there. 'When I think back, I don't think it's that long ago, but when I look at how much has changed, it feels like an eternity."

What used to be the case was that HR tended to focus on administrative tasks, but today, that's totally different. The focus now is much more technical and analytical, and Edge realizes that it is the role of HR today to be more collaborative and more proactive in its processes. "We live in a very litigious society, so we have to protect the company," she says. "The way we do that is making sure that we have access to data, that we're analyzing data, that we're noticing trends and are identifying risks for the company and preventing them happen."

HR has become much more of a strategic partner to the business than it perhaps was in the past. It can be a driver of profits, and is something that really sets the tone for the wider organization. "HR today has the capabilities to be that strategic partner whether it's in the recruiting field or the performance management field or in employee relations or compensation," adds Edge, "all of those functional areas have the opportunity to really help the business achieve strategic objectives."

As the company has grown over the last two decades, so that growth has been mirrored by Edge's steady rise through the ranks. "The experience has been great," she says about her time at the firm. "I actually started here while I was finishing up my undergraduate degree and used the FedEx tuition assistance programs to help with that. I then used the internal promotion from within policies to move around the company and advance my career, and then the company paid for my MBA later on in life." Edge goes on to joke that, "at one point or other", she has been accountable for all of the functional areas of HR - from designing sales incentive plans to establishing new companies, to overhauling existing programs and processes to drive a different culture and the change management that comes with that. It is in her current role that she not only reports directly to FedEx's chairman and CEO Fred Smith, but is also part of the firm's strategic management committee. "We focus on the strategic initiatives of the company," she explains. "We have a corporate strategy of managing collaboratively, competing collectively and operating independently, and my role is to look across all of our operating companies and work with those heads of HR to ensure that we're driving the strategic elements that support our overall strategy."

Edge, who herself has clearly reaped the benefits of the company's attitude toward developing business leaders, says that this is something employees across the company are beginning to take advantage of - with Smith in particular being highly supportive of FedEx's emphasis on leadership development. Edge explains that every manager is required to complete a leadership principles and diversity course. "And we have some very unique programs," she goes on, detailing the 'Purple Pipeline' as one major example. For the first six months of this program, managers who are aspiring to the next level of leadership are immersed in different managerial environments. She pinpoints one environment in particular that was offered in partnership with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra to help participants realize they were really part of a bigger team. "They each played a crucial role," remembers Edge, "but unless they all came together as a team, the music they produced wasn't very good."

Coming together is something of an obsession with Edge. Alongside her role at FedEx, she is also a passionate advocate for HR issues in on a wider scale, spending much of her time working alongside organizations such as the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and World at Work in trying to influence some of the decisions made in Washington that affect the HR world. "I think those organizations are wonderful and I encourage employees at FedEx to participate with those," details Edge. "It helps them develop a network and contacts within other major corporations. Their certification programs are wonderful and as we don't have a CPA equivalent in the HR world, that's probably about as close as we can get." Her belief is that organizations like these offer exposure to new products and services so that employees can stay on top of existing and new trends within the industry, while allowing them to ensure they are driving efficiencies and supporting their businesses' strategies.

In fact, the day before we spoke with Edge, the Human Resource Policy Association had been trying to draw attention to how the current economic situation is impacting pension plan funding rules. "These groups work with the benefit councils up in Washington just so the government doesn't forget issues like these," notes Edge. After all, considering the extraordinarily busy times the government is currently facing - global economic uncertainty, an era-defining presidential election ­- these issues risk being forgotten. It has to be the job of organizations like those cited by Edge - and of HR professionals across all industries ­- to ensure these issues remain on the radar. "These are busy people and we need to make sure that they are hearing about these important issues so that they don't fall off the plate somewhere."

The economic crisis has become a thorn in the side of just about everybody in business, regardless of the sector they work in. It is no different with Edge, who is well aware that there is pressure all around during these difficult times. "Our company tends to focus on other avenues of cost-cutting before we'd look into negative employee actions," she says, referencing the plethora of organizations who have seen job cuts affect their workforce. She goes on, "we will manage through attrition, we will put on a hard freeze so we won't back fill positions, we will redistribute available hours and we might cut back on variable compensation ­- but all of those things allow us to pull levers before we have to go down the path of some negative downsizing activity." What's more, with such a global organization, FedEx sees the added challenge of trying to keep a clear picture and a clear control over disparately cast employees and offices. But Edge is keen to both acknowledge this issue and address it proactively.

Firstly, each of FedEx's operating companies has their own HR function. Edge speaks very highly of the job that every one of these HR teams do in managing the tactics and strategic elements unique to each particular operating company. She explains her role is to stay close to these teams and ensure they are pulling together on a collaborative basis so there is an enterprise view that runs through the entire corporation. She backs this idea up further by detailing how FedEx operates as a family structure - suggesting that FedEx Corp in Memphis is the parent, and each of the other operating companies is like a child. "We have a core set of values that we honor throughout the company," says Edge. "We have the 'Purple Promise', which is there to make every FedEx experience outstanding." She goes on to suggest that, as with children, while each one is unique, they all have something similar in common. "That's the concept we take to keep our 290,000 employees linked and connected in some way. We connect them through our initiatives and allow our culture to grow from there."

Additionally, there is FedEx's core philosophy of 'people-service-profit'. "The idea is that if you take care of your people, they will take care of the service and the profits will follow," says Edge. This is something that FedEx have remained very true to since starting out, and Edge notes that it has really paid off in terms of employee loyalty, customer satisfaction and strong business results. "At FedEx, our people are our greatest asset. We truly believe that. Our founder and CEO rooted the company in that philosophy and we continue to stand by it."

There are certain things that remain constant in the HR world. Despite all the change the industry may have seen over the last two decades, people are still central to the core values of our industry. It is human resources, after all. It's something that Edge is very much aware of, and is perhaps a further indication of why she has been at the same firm, building her career, for the last 20 or so years. "Our Purple Promise award recognizes and rewards employees who demonstrate exceptional performance achievements that enhance the customer's experience with FedEx. Those types of experiences then become the stories we are able to repeat to other employees when we want to illustrate what it means to be a FedEx employee and live that promise."

"Every one of our operating companies administers an annual employee survey and the employees are able to give feedback on how to strengthen the organization," Edge continues. "Each manager has to follow up on that survey with an action plan. We have initiatives we drive because we try to address opportunities or suggestions that come up through those tools. There's a lot going on that helps to drive the culture, reinforce the culture, and really get that employee engagement to a high level."

And while Edge's personal growth within FedEx may seem monumental, in terms of the firm's culture it is not that surprising. There has always been a preference at the firm for promoting from within. "Doing this has been a really important part of building loyalty and ensuring our employees are able to pursue the type of growth that they're looking for in their career and the job satisfaction that's so important to them," says Edge. The issue is highkighted even further when you consider the fact that FedEx Ground's CEO started out at the company as a driver, and that Edge herself began as a call center rep. These kinds of stories serve as an inspiration for every employee who walks through FedEx's doors. As Edge notes, "Thinking that, 'if Judy did it, I can do it too' helps other employees realize the potential that exists at the firm." Quite simply, that's employee engagement personified, and something that will likely see FedEx delivering in the retention battle for some time yet.

Tech rules

Judith Edge answers some tech savvy questions.

CXO. With the changes we have seen in technology over the last two decades, FedEx's core business must've changed dramatically with the rise of email and digital communication. What sort of wholesale shift did that require?
Judith Edge. It wasn't a major wholesale shift as such, but more gradual over the years. Email came in and the websites took hold and it actually enabled us to communicate much more effectively with the employees that we have spread out throughout the world. We can now do very timely, effective communications and we can deliver it in words and video. It has really opened things up for us in terms of options of getting the message out to our workforce.

How has IT revolutionized the concept of integrated human capital management and other HR technologies at FedEx? How are you employing these at FedEx to leverage the best in your people?
IT is certainly an enabler. It's enabled HR jobs to become a lot more interesting and we've become a lot more efficient as a result. We're now able to improve our compliance ratios and have been enabled to do greater analytics and a more proactive early warning program for our business partners. A good example of this lies in the space where we now have the ability to be a completely paperless system. We're able to provide a portal so that employees can go in through our FedEx.com career site and actually get a glimpse at what some FedEx jobs would look like and what the culture of our company really is.

We're also able to tap in through things like Facebook and LinkedIn to potential talent. We've done virtual career fairs where people didn't have to travel in for interviews and have saved a lot of money in that regard. We also were able to hook managers and potential candidates up through technology so that they could build a relationship, and when a job does come available they've already got a relationship established. IT has allowed us to be been very effective in terms of finding talent and landing talent and staying connected with that talent in a very cost efficient and easy to administer way.

A chance to excel

Judith Edge explains the thinking behind one of FedEx's newest and most innovative company programs.

"Our world can be so complex and we found that we needed to break down some of the perceptions and barriers that exist between our operating companies and make sure our officers had the right exposure to the world in which we operate. Because of this we have just started piloting our Excel program for officers, which saw them sent to China for 10 days, where they were immersed in the culture and in the Chinese marketplace, allowing them to learn how to do business in China from a grassroots sort of perspective.

We've seen this be very popular and we've put a lot of emphasis on it. We've put a lot of investment into leadership and it's really paid off for the company. We feel that our frontline managers are the key to driving our commitment to our customer and to our employees, and that has been one of our critical success factors over the past 35 years."