Finding your Pharmatopia

pharmafile | September 28, 2004 | Feature | |   

Somewhere out there is the dream marketing job with the ideal pharma company – Pharmatopia. The trick is finding it – navigating your way through the maze of potential employers all jostling and hustling their corporate qualities, seducing with package and promotion promises.

How do you cut through all this and make the right decision? What makes a good employer and how do you know when you've found one? It is often said that the single biggest change in pharma recruitment over the last ten years has been the growth of internet business. The pharmaceutical corporate site is often the first hit for a prospective employee. Do they contain the answers sought? A few clicks are revealing.

Where brand meets bland

Targeting three sample sites – Boehringer Ingelheim, AstraZeneca and Aventis quickly reveals a number of issues. Dripping with corporate platitude – were the mission statements dreamt up by the same person? (Value Through Innovation, Life Inspiring Ideas and Our Challenge Is Life) they all sing the siren song: progressive and flexible, trust and openness, freedom to challenge. They tell you nothing about the reality of working for the corporate machine or differentiate themselves.

Interestingly, the three pharma companies listed above all score well in The Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work For 2004 survey, with Boehringer leading the way in 15th, up from 33rd in 2003. This study helps to identify the best employers (across all sectors) from the viewpoint of employees and the policies and the processes of employers. It identifies best practice and ranks companies according to employee satisfaction.

Boehringer was also ranked 23rd in a similar 2004 AccountAbility/Financial Times 50 best workplaces in the UK survey, the second year in a row it has made the top half of the table.

In 2003 employees of both Lilly and Boehringer  thought that their companies made the world a better place – 85% of Lilly and 79% of Boehringer's folk to be exact.

New entrants to the 2004 list were Novartis Pharmaceuticals UK (31st) and Merck Pharmaceuticals (49th), with Eli Lilly maintaining last year's good work in 48th place.

Surveying the scene

These surveys are interesting – external measures often reveal the things that corporate broadsheets fail to show. Surveys abound, but are often driven by the financial side of things: Fortune 500, The World's Most Admired, etc. There are quality measures involved like retaining top talent and quality of marketing but there are also financial soundness, corporate assets and long-term investment scores. But how does improving working conditions get such positive results from internal staff?

Julian Denmark, Boehringer human resource manager, says: "We embarked on a consultation process in 2002 to find out what our employees thought about what we needed to change and ways to make improvements. We adopted a number of different approaches to gathering this information. One of the key ways was the World Cafe- we invited a wide range of internal personnel, from the field as well as office locations, to discuss identified key issues informally over lunch. Each attendee then identified issues that they felt strongly about and formed an individual discussion team and moved from group to group."

Questionnaires as well as the FT survey and the focus groups' activities highlighted the issues important to people, and the company has now responded by innovating in providing flexible benefits and working practices.

Consultation process

Within Boehringer, this consultation process has heralded an impressive number of changes which has had a significant impact on employees. These have included the introduction of an on-site coffee shop for relaxation or informal meetings and new facilities like a cashpoint, dry-cleaning and video rental.

"It's not just about facilities: the flexible benefit and working groups have been looking into new ways to reward people and working to respect employees' work/life balance," adds Denmark.

New performance benchmarks have also been set up, resulting in a progression and reward scheme which helps employees understand how their pay is set, how their performance is assessed and how they can develop. This all fits in with the findings of another focus group, examining career development opportunities such as management and personal development programmes.

One of the smaller pharmaceutical businesses to feature in the 2003 FT survey was Cambridge Antibody Technologies (CAT).

According to Rowena Gardner, director of corporate communications, CAT scored particularly highly in categories related to the fair treatment of staff, training and development, work benefits and special leave policies.

CAT's commitment to its staff has been demonstrated by a number of activities – in December 2002, everyone moved into new, purpose-built facilities, complete with a staff bistro. Internal communication has always been taken seriously and the CAT intranet has recently been relaunched.

There is a staff representative body which has been working hard to increase its internal presence, acting as a forum for staff and any concerns and ideas they might have. Training and development and particularly comprehensive special leave policies are all results from staff discussions.

Pfizer regularly survey the workforce to see how they measure up to their published 'Core Values' – they have recognised that such values are meaningless unless they are translated into actions and ultimately measurable behaviours.

"We've run our Values Survey for more than four years now," says Sharon Warre-Dymond, Pfizer HR director, "the return rate is impressive as we get back more than eight out of ten. It's the best way to pick up whether policies are really working and it's great to see that 80% of colleagues are happy and enjoy working for Pfizer."

Staying in touch is important to the senior managers with regular exercises like 'birthday breakfasts' and sales conference question and answer sessions.

Clearly, creating 'destination workplace' – an aspirational haven for talented pharma workers is a worthy corporate goal – recruiting and retaining skilled and experienced personnel is a key performance exercise for every HR department across the land. The benefits of reducing staff turnover and minimising loss of key people to headhunting predators has been elevated from the HR handbook to become a core strategy.

Size is truly in the eye of the beholder. Many surveys show that small is beautiful – that people work better in small units, with no management hierarchy, knowing everybody on-site.

CAT scored particularly highly in this area – employees felt trusted by the management, there was a strong camaraderie on-site, it was friendly and there was pride in what was achieved.

For others, big is best – biggest campus, best facilities, etc. Pfizer has scored highly in a number of surveys and Warre-Dymond is justifiably proud of the new facility at Walton Oaks.

"We are set here in 35 acres of parkland and we won the Royal Institute of British Architects highest award in 2002 for the design of the facility, which is particularly pleasing as the very design was a product of cross-functional teamworking. Input on areas like the informal breakout areas mirrors the working style and culture of Pfizer."

The trick is knowing yourself and what is important to you don't go for the widest coffee range or the most exotic salad bar in the designer atrium if it's not really important.

Location, location, location

It's easy to suggest that London and the Home Counties get the top location vote, with pharma companies shoulder-to-shoulder along the M4/M25 corridors and lots of career opportunity and all of the real marketing venue meetings in town. It can be more specific than that – being sited in the northeast quadrant of the M25 often rules out the southern Home Counties – the commute sometimes isn't worth it.

Again choice is all, otherwise the AstraZeneca site in Cheshire would have difficulties or the newer regional offices of the likes of Pfizer in Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and Watford would be vacant. They're not.

Warre-Dymond says: "For us, regionalisation has meant increasing the opportunities across Pfizer in marketing, finance and HR for real career development and serious project management or secondment. Supporting our 'top talent' is an important part of our strategy.

Culture

Company culture is one of the more indefinable areas – certainly don't bother consulting the company website on this one: "at (guess who?) we've developed a culture that recognises performance at all levels, and rewards it, and values everyone's contribution – big or small. Where everyone has the development opportunities to reach their full potential".

Going there and seeing it and experiencing meetings first hand is the only real way to 'get under the skin' – that's why alliances and cross business dealings are always interesting. It's also why they carry heavy clauses about recruitment and headhunting from business alliance partners. Visiting head office sites is a great way to check out future employers and it works the other way too.

Portfolio

Products and therapy areas count for a lot. No self-respecting marketer wants to be saddled with the fourth market entrant for toenail fungus. These are subjective areas – cardiovascular medicine is seen as glamorous, incontinence and skin diseases less so. Current portfolio is only secondary to 'pipeline' – what products are in the 'launch tube' in the next five years.

The ability to launch products is variable across companies – some are very good, some very bad; often it comes down to frequency and experience – one new molecule every five years usually means poor; one to two a year and they start to get better at it. A poor pipeline usually means the tricky combination of huge internal expectations and low field and marketing experience. A current portfolio can look good and glossy now but can collapse rapidly in the face of patent loss.

Chris Doyle, head of commercial operations at Napp says: "The size of the marketing job is not necessarily determined by the size of the product. It is far more satisfying as a marketer to have 100% control over one or more smaller products than to be responsible for just a slice of the marketing effort for a bigger product. It's hard to beat the satisfaction of managing products right through the marketing process. Yes, we'd all like a 'blockbuster' launch on the CV, but in reality, the team effort involved usually undermines the individual responsibility.

Shiny, happy people

"The most common reason why I see marketers is organisational change [eg, mergers and acquisitions] and changes to immediate managers – it's nothing to do with money, portfolio or career," says Chris Phillips, managing director of Chase Recruitment.

The appointment of a new marketing director can often mean the exit of a frustrated group marketing manager or senior product managers. Mergers lead to the removal of entire departments in cost-cutting or relocation. Of course, some marketers move for the 'better job': "Does it look right on the CV? has to be the key question for the career-minded marketer," advises Phillips.

Pfizer, CAT and Boehringer have addressed the core issues of honesty, ethics and 'corporate responsibility', which are fundamental to the underpinning of good work practice and the workplace.

Assessing the question 'Is this company right for me?' there could be some sort of league table of corporate responsibility. How would it work?

Points would be awarded for openness and honesty by senior managers and policy makers. Acts of responsibility would be noted – charitable donations, Third World policies, global pricing and fairness would elevate companies up the table. However, boardroom duplicity, inappropriate price rises, infringement of free trade would win no prizes. It would make interesting reading wouldn't it? Maybe it is just Pharmatopia.