BUSINESS LIFE: General of Manpower's temping army
31-10-2006
Jeffrey Joerres has a sunny disposition to match the London weather on the day he meets the Financial Times.
Indeed, the air of joviality hardly wavers during an hour-long interview with the tall and avuncular leader of Manpower, even when the conversation turns to the contentious subject of off shoring.
Only once does Mr. Joerres express distaste: a sudden narrowing of the eyes at mention of hedge funds, whose short-term buying and selling of stock sits at odds with the "built to last" philosophy of his business.
Not that his company has anything to fear from investors of any kind just at the moment. On July 19 Manpower reported second quarter earnings up 29 per cent, beating even the most optimistic forecasts. The share price has risen 35 per cent over the past year, and has almost tripled during Mr. Joerres's time at the head of the company, which began seven years ago when he was just 39.
Mr. Joerres inherited a troubled company which, though well-known as one of the world's leading temporary employment agencies, had lost the top spot after the merger of Adia and Ecco formed Adecco in 1996. The past six years have seen first steady and now accelerating growth, with new acquisitions and growing international demand for employment services. Last year Manpower placed 4.1m people in jobs and took $16bn (£8.4bn) in revenues.
Setting a seal on this improved performance, in February the company unveiled a new corporate logo and identity, the result of two years' work with design consultants Wolff Olins. The 58-year-old Manpower was getting a fresh look, partly to help it explain to potential clients what services it has to offer.
"I am tired of hearing from clients or prospects: 'I had no idea you did that!' Because when you have a brand that has been around a long time you carry baggage with it," Mr. Joerres says. "Insiders knew what we were doing, long-time clients knew it, but that's not good enough. We had to refresh ourselves. . . It's not supposed to be a secret."
The five-pillared structure of the new logo hints at the company's five different businesses (see below). As well as the core temporary worker operation - still generating around 65 per cent of profits - the company has four other arms. Manpower Professional offers more specialist coverage, filling vacancies in engineering, healthcare and some finance and accounting roles.
The other three businesses have all been acquired since Mr Joerres took charge. Elan provides specialist information technology and telecoms contractors. Jefferson Wells focuses on financial project management contracts, where staff are charged out at a rate of $100 an hour or higher. Right Management, bought in 2004, is an established outplacement and coaching business.
Structured in this way, Manpower is able to respond to most of the flexible working needs of today's more project-based corporations, providing staff on a temporary or more-or-less permanent basis. "One client said to me: 'I get it: you bring 'em in and you take 'em out!' But that's far too cruel," Mr Joerres says.
Although Manpower is headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, around 85 per cent of its revenues are generated outside the US, with three-quarters coming from Europe.
This explains why Mr Joerres - whose name, incidentally, is Prussian in origin - displays a more profound understanding of the peculiarities of different labour markets than your average chief executive.
Take France, for example, which happens to be Manpower's biggest single market. When the plans of Dominique de Villepin, French prime minister, for reforming the youth labour market - the contract de première embauche or CPE - were withdrawn after provoking noisy protests earlier this year, most US employers would have looked on in disbelief.
"The story was: students will not agree to two years of 'at-will' employment if you are under 26," says Mr Joerres ("at-will" means that either the employer or the employee can terminate the relationship at any time without notice or reason, the typical contract in the US).
"Fifty-year-olds in the US were reading that saying: 'I'm 50, I've worked for the company for 20 years, and I'm at-will! What are they doing?' But in the French context it makes perfect sense because their labour market functions in that way," Mr Joerres says. Unlike the US president, Mr Joerres does "do nuance".
But this is his challenge: running a global business that operates in 72 countries, where each market throws up a unique set of circumstances. To meet this challenge Manpower has developed a distinctive and devolved management approach.
"For a lot of multinationals, if the centre is strong, you're global," Mr Joerres says. "And there is something therapeutic to that, but I'm not sure how well it really works. We never really had that kind ofimperialism."
Mr Joerres prefers a more decentralised approach, using local managers rather than expats to run Manpower businesses on the ground, in spite of the extra training this involves. "It has been frustrating at times because what you can't do is snap your fingers and have it done," he says. But the latest results suggest that even if the strategy takes a little longer, the outcome is worth waiting for.
Shifting employment patterns around the world have also thrust Manpower into the heart of the offshoring debate - even if the company does not seek out political controversy.
Mr Joerres makes his views clear. "Offshoring is going to happen and, in fact, it has to happen," he says. "From a macro perspective, if [companies] do not offshore they will not have the talent to grow their business. It's not there. The demographics in France, Italy, Japan are saying: you are not going to have the growth."
But in Democrat-voting Milwaukee, this may be a tough sell. The paradox is not lost on Manpower's boss. "I'm an American," he says, "and I have 85 per cent of our business outside the US. If we open a new call centre in Mumbai, we just created jobs in India. If I open in the US we create jobs in the US. So I have to lead a 'schizophrenic' life. I'm agnostic, to some extent, as to where those jobs are created, because I have as much responsibility for the health of our Indian or Frenchoperation as I do to the US operation. But I only get to vote in one country!"
Similar business logic leads Mr Joerres to be a strong advocate of managed migration. "I think it's tremendous for most countries," he says.
"In the US, we have the H1B visa - the high skill visa. That's the best kind of immigration you can get - it's the PhD from Delhi. That's beautiful, that's great - you want to bring in every PhD you can get your hands on."
But all around the world this movement of people is creating political tensions, which risk constraining the choices business leaders can make. "There is this difficulty of politicians needing to do what they need to do on a nationalistic level. But the world is moving at a whole different pace. The world is global but the politician is local. And it's going to create some real stress."
Mr Joerres is Milwaukee born and bred. Although he is a global manager running a large corporation, with four children at home he would rather not travel quite as much as he does. He estimates he spends about two-thirds of the time on the road, visiting Asia five or six times a year, and Europe two or three times a month.
He does a long day, getting in to work before 6am to make time to think, to read his FT and other media. Efficiency is everything. "I have no problem with taking an overnight flight, getting to the airport at six, doing the meeting at nine, and leaving at two o'clock. Pack it all in there, and I'm back in the office the next day."
The world of work may be changing fast but Manpower's boss is still doing it the traditional American way - flat out for 50 weeks a year.
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