A guide to employer branding
‘The Employer brand’
Provoking thought Generating discussion Delivering results Making a difference
These are the questions that we • What does it mean? answer in the latest • How useful is it? • Is it just a new term for an thinkBox paper on old and intuitive concept? best practice employee • And, critically, how do you engagement. establish, build, shape or change it?
Employer branding
What is an ‘employer brand’ when it’s at home?
In theory, an ‘employer brand’ has the ability to attract and retain the right people, influence productivity, engage, motivate, innovate, and therefore fend off competitors. An organisation’s wellbeing and reputation relies on more than the sum-total of its varying operations. Everything an organisation says and does plays a part in shaping its employer brand. How inextricable is the ‘employer brand’ from an employer’s overall identity and reputation? Some companies possess an innately strong and distinguishable brand presence -The BBC, Marks & Spencer and Proctor & Gamble, for example. All have made appeals to job-seekers, who formed queues at the door as a result. Specific communication efforts were part of the plan. But an employer brand is built on far more than any slick roadshow or induction brochure. This is because potential employees have worn other stakeholder hats before, whether as investors, customers or members of the community.
Any marketer knows that brand reputations are built on perceptions matched by experience. And that is no different with employer brands. Employees know what it is really like working for the organisation; they ‘live’ it every day, good and bad. This is a key differentiator between overly-clever employer marketing or positive spin and effective employer branding. Good employer branding might accentuate the positive but, ultimately, it paints a picture that people can and will relate to.
“ the mission, recruitment processes, internal culture, leadership behaviours, working environments and feedback mechanisms all tell employees and potential employees what it is like to work there.”
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Employer branding
Who owns the employer brand?
No one and everyone is the trite response. But it is also true. HR is often tasked with being the midwife and nurse to the concept of the employer brand within an organisation. However, too often it is seen as being the sole responsibility of HR. Employer brands and associated values that are the exclusive preserve of HR or internal communication teams will, more likely than not, end up as meaningless words translated into glossy posters, mouse mats and expensive videos. This is where organisations get it wrong. An important dimension to successful employer branding is the role played by an organisation’s leadership. Visible direction setting by leaders is a vital component in showcasing to employees the desired behaviours and culture. Organisations which try to encourage employees to understand and engage with their
Chicken or egg?
Do you start from where your employees currently are, basing brand-building activity around existing cultural traits? Or do you set a marker for where you want employees to be and change culture and behaviours accordingly? The answer is that you need a bit of both. Some may say this is the ‘cop-out’ answer. However, to shape a successful employer brand which supports your organisation’s strategic goals you have to set a marker in the sand. You need to define what kind of culture, values and behaviour will help deliver the organisation’s goals. And you have to get leaders to be very clear about what kind of organisation they want to lead.
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employer brand will invariably fail if their leaders are not actively living the brand themselves. Another argument is that any successful employer brand comes from within the guts of an organisation – based on the innate culture, values and traditions of the workforce. It is not artificial, based on an expensive branding consultancy’s musings or simplistic focus groups findings. But what if an organisation wants to move its culture on – changing behaviour and the way people understand, experience and relate to what their employer stands for?
But – and it’s a big but – this vision of the desired employer brand has to be realistic and achievable. It has to be rooted in the organisation’s current cultural traits so employees can recognise aspects which are important to their self esteem and why they joined the organisation in the first place. As such, knowing where you start from and where you want to get to will help define the journey of step-by-step culture change.
Employer branding
How many ambassadors does it take to make a light bulb?
The notion of an ‘employer brand’ can be defined by using two simple parameters: what an employee knows about an organisation and how they feel about it.
Positive examples of what these parameters mean in practice are: Understanding and experience
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I know where this organisation is headed.
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I am receiving a good pension scheme and training and development opportunities.
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My company gets us involved in a variety of community-based projects.
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My organisation’s leaders do what they say they will.
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Emotive engagement
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I know what our priorities are and what my role is in delivering them.
I like working for this company.
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I am proud of what the company stands for.
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I feel valued through the work that I do. My organisation’s leaders care about me and my future.
”
”
I’m not afraid to voice my opinions about issues that matter to me.
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How emotionally engaged are employees in your organisation? And how positive is their understanding and experience of what your organisation stands for? By knowing the answers to both these questions, organisations can see how many of their employees are ambassadors for the brand. These ‘ambassadors’ are people who both ‘understand’ and are ‘emotionally engaged’.
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Employer branding
The ambassadors’ matrix is used by a number of organisations to understand how many of their employees are brand ambassadors, and how many are ‘bystanders’, ‘loose cannons’ or ‘wreckers’. The challenge for every employer is to move employees into the top right quartile (see below) and minimise the number of employees in the other quadrants. Loose cannons Employees who are highly engaged whilst having a relatively weaker understanding or experience of the organisation and what it stands for
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Wreckers Employees are both emotionally disengaged and have a weak understanding of the organisation and what it stands for
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Ambassadors Employees who are emotionally engaged and have a strong understanding / experience of the organisation and what it stands for
Bystanders Employees who have a strong understanding / experience of the organisation and what it stands for but are emotionally disengaged
Employer branding
Taking employees on a journey of understanding and engagement
Building, shaping, or reinforcing an employer brand does not happen overnight. Nor is it a onehit process. Many organisations put their employees through ‘sheep-dip’ brand engagement experiences that are often no more than a marketer’s or event manager’s wet dream. Lots of money is spent in a short period of time to achieve limited employee understanding, motivation and engagement. Deep and long-term employer brand building encompasses the life-span of an employees time with an organisation. From before joining to after leaving it, and including every experience in between, an employer has to positively shape and reinforce an employee’s relationship with the brand.
This approach is known as employer brand journeys. Employers define the significant experiences employees have when working for an organisation and seek to influence each experience in ways which improve brand understanding and engagement.
The employer brand journey
1 Getting the right people on board
2 Welcome to the company
5 The power of goodbye
3 Getting to work
4 Entrenching the brand
The experiences along the employer brand journey can be as significant as being inducted into the organisation, receiving recognition for a job well done or being made redundant, through to receiving their pay slip, or talking to senior managers. They also include experiencing the way their organisation is positioned or represented in the media and advertising compared with the reality of working there.
The next section: Find out about the journey a typical employee experiences in the life-span of one job and examples of how some organisations have brought to brand the life at each stage of the employee’s journey. 6
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Employer branding
Step One
Getting the right people on board At this stage, the prospective employer is wearing his or her external stakeholder hats. This is where the employer brand journey begins. What might external branding suggest about what it is like to work for Orange, Cisco, DHL or Royal Mail? Even for the outsider looking in, organisations have an identity, a story, and a culture, that targets the right audiences at the right times, and differentiate them from their competitors. Employer rankings such as The Guardian’s ‘Ideal Employer List’, FORTUNE’S ‘100 Best Companies to Work For’ or even Working Mother Magazine’s ‘100 Best Companies for Working Mothers’ help to shape perceptions in a more definitive way. Organisations which land on ‘top employer’ lists often offer challenging assignments, exciting training and development prospects, and therefore recruit bright people selectively. Or they may offer marketleading products and services and people are attracted by the external perception. Quite simply, they have developed clear messages about who they are and what they stand for and communicated them consistently.
Great Idea
#1
The Royal Navy
Recently the Royal Navy launched an original recruitment campaign for the Royal Marines in a popular men’s magazine. The campaign entitled ‘Are you man enough?’ ran for 6 weeks, and was conducted through Zoo magazine and online at www.zooweekly.co.uk. An advertising campaign, to invite the target audience to take part in Royal Marine training competitions at ten regional sites followed. Recently the RAF and Royal Navy began recruitment campaigns on YouTube and through mobile phones.
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The Army has also been using so-called viral videos on their website to entice possible recruits and encourage them to pass the videos onto other people. The Royal Navy advertising campaign challenges men to see if they have what it takes to be a part of the Marines. It is less about current skills and more about required behaviours, values and mindset. These new recruitment approaches ensure that an engaging message reaches the target audience with greater accuracy – and through the right interactive channels.
Employer branding
Step Two
‘Welcome to the company’ First impressions matter, so the induction process is the first opportunity to offer new recruits a taste of what an organisation stands for, its current priorities, and what it will be like working there. New recruits should leave informed, confident and inspired, having spent no longer in induction meetings than absolutely necessary. There’s only so much information someone can digest on their first day or week, but armed with tools such as Employee Handbooks and company intranets, that doesn’t necessarily matter. Nobody enjoys spending the day watching mind-numbing health and safety videos and listening to lots of ‘motivational’ management speak, so interactivity and creativity are critical. Another dimension is how to distil what working for an organisation means into a simple and symbolic induction experience. This can matter more than the hours or days of presentations, meetings and information. It packs it all into a one-hour experience which brings the employer brand to life very quickly and powerfully.
Great Idea
#2
Warburtons
Britain’s favourite baker takes pride in its focus on the quality of its products. That’s why a number of its bakeries invest a lot of time and effort making sure new employees understand the history, focus
Great Idea
#3
Landrover
Landrover and Hackney Council may not, at first glance, share much in common. However, their induction processes share one important similarity. Both organisations use the power of symbolism to communicate what it means to work there.
Great Idea
#4
Hackney Council
Hackney do something just as powerful. Every employee who starts at the east London council gets on a red double-decker bus and given the I ♥Hackney experience. Touring the borough, they are shown not only the area’s highlights but places and activities that the Council are responsible for.
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and culture of the business. Job rotation, where an employee spends time in most functions at a bakery, is complemented with one-to-one meetings with senior managers at the site. In their first week, an employee experiences every aspect of what it takes to be part of the Warburtons family before they start baking bread or doing any role in the bakery.
Landrover’s ‘dipped in green’ induction is famous. As well as the usual induction meetings and information, each employee is given firsthand experience of driving or being driven in one of the car marker’s vehicles around a test track. This brings to life what Landrover is about in a very simple, practical and symbolic way – the thrill and delight of the Landrover driving experience.
This gives employees information, a sense of perspective and pride in the breadth of services the Council offers local people. A sense of place and role is established in a very short space of time. This induction experience is fronted each month by one of the council’s executive management team acting as a tour guide – giving employees early and informal access to the organisation’s leaders in a way that builds rapport and empathy.
Employer branding
Step Three
Getting to work This is where getting the knowledge and goodwill established at induction to stick becomes harder. Has the organisation lived up to expectations? It can be hard for new employees to reconcile a miserable workforce, lack of training and poor management interaction with the organisation’s slick, sparkly external branding, for example. That is why it is important that external and employer brands align closely – otherwise, disappointment and cynicism sets in. A comprehensive and integrated approach to every aspect of the employee’s working experience is required to ensure employees remain engaged and motivated by the organisation’s mission. Do employees know what the current business priorities are, and how their role supports these? Does the workforce feel that it has a voice, and can offer feedback on issues that affect them and their work? A culture of open and honest communication takes time and planning, and should not be considered a ‘given’ within any organisation. Inside the organisation, employees see everything, warts and all. And that includes what the organisation’s leaders are saying and doing. Do leaders walk the talk or, as so many employee surveys show, do they say one thing and do the other? This is one of the most powerful elements in the employer brand mix. Leaders set the tone and pace of an organisation’s culture. It requires visible demonstration of what the leadership team believe is important for success leaders also need to take related action which shows they are serious. Of course, it would be unrealistic to imagine CEOs stopping at every desk for a chat with each employee. That is where cultural ‘trickle-down theory’ is important.
Cultural ‘trickle-down theory’ Child psychologists will tell you that children copy the behaviour (intentionally or subconsciously) of their parents. It is no different in organisations, where employees see leader(s) as substitute parents – to follow, adore, please, be frustrated and embarrassed by, and, ultimately, imitate. Leaders set the behaviours and cultural ways of working, and then live them, demonstrating to those working around them closely that they are serious about this. Direct
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reports start to behave in the same way (voluntarily or out of a keen interest in their own career prospects). Practical demonstration of the behaviours and culture by this next layer of managers encourages others to live the employer brand. This process is replicated until most of the organisation understand and live the desired behaviours. Without the visible direction setting and ongoing demonstration by leaders, employees assume that, say, a new set of values is not really important and just ignore it.
Employer branding
Great Idea
#5
British Gas
British Gas was experiencing a revolution in its consumer markets. Up against ever tougher competition, the one-time monopoly had to fight tooth and nail with other energy suppliers. That meant brushing up on the way it served customers. With a culture where customer numbers mattered more than customer service, this was going to be tough. It had to get employees to understand the importance of customer service, and create a culture where this was a reality not just a slogan. Former Director of Strategy and Marketing, Nick Smith, was very clear what British Gas needed. “A root-and-branch re-evaluation of how each employee experienced the new employer brand focus on the customer. We wanted employees to behave differently and that could not come from a poster or slick video.”
Functional leads were responsible for specific actions that contributed to the wheel moving in the right direction. A number of ‘spokes’ often had to work together. As such, leadership development and internal communications were tasked with challenging and changing a hierarchical, top-down, fearful culture. The organisation wanted its employees to think more creatively and independently to serve customers quickly. But failure was inevitable if its people were afraid of taking any initiative without being punished for making mistakes. The importance of a more open culture was accepted by the British Gas management team. And they knew they had to lead the way. Nick Smith acknowledges that he and his colleagues had to change the way they behaved to give permission and encouragement to others to do likewise. “Open dialogue and the invitation of constructive criticism; more informal, discursive focus groups led by a different leader every Friday; a change in dress-code; being comfortable with employee debate on issues in fora such as the employee tabloid newspaper and in face-to-face meetings – all these played their part in loosening up the culture.”
The importance of a more open culture was accepted by the British Gas management team. And they knew they had to lead the way.
Hence, the employer brand wheel came into existence. Every part of the business that had an impact on the employee’s brand experience acted as a spoke on that wheel. Each spoke was involved in re-assessing and re-shaping to align itself with the required culture and behaviour set. Activities such as leadership development, frontline training, operational KPIs, external marketing, HR processes, internal communication were all redesigned to reinforce the new behaviours.
The employer brand wheel very part of the organisation that has an E impact on and responsibility for employee behaviour acts as a spoke on the wheel. ach spoke is accountable for defining E what action it will take to reinforce the employer brand behaviours. If one or more spoke is broken, the effectiveness of the wheel is reduced.
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Employer branding
Step Four
Entrenching the brand: Reward and recognition For the organisation to entrench the employer brand, it needs to retain the people most likely to actively ‘live’ that brand. That requires the right employees being recognised and rewarded for demonstrating the right behaviours – as well as going the extra mile in achieving the organisation’s goals. This is not about employers ‘dangling carrots on sticks’. Money talks, but a reward and recognition package that is solely focused on financial gain will not get the most out of your workforce or help to retain them either. It also sends the wrong messages about what your organisation thinks is important. Psychologically, financial rewards have a diminishing return. They have a time-limited impact on motivation. Many workforce surveys show that personal fulfilment and being recognised for jobs well done, is a surer and longer-term way of motivating and mobilising employees.
To pay or not pay? According to a recent Gallup survey of more than 80,000 employees, recognition is a key factor in employee engagement and retention. Recognition and praise ranked fourth among the twelve dimensions that consistently correlated with those workgroups that have higher employee retention, higher customer satisfaction, higher productivity, and higher profits. The dimensions do not include pay and benefits. That does not mean that pay and benefits are not important. But it does mean that compensation levels do not differentiate great workgroups from the rest.
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According to The Gallup Organization, “Historically, praise and recognition in the workplace has been handled from the perspective of ‘If you don’t hear anything, assume you’re doing a good job.’ In contrast to this ‘old industrial workplace’ mindset, the new knowledge-based worker relies and depends upon praise and recognition as the means of defining what is valued by the organization. Today, praise and recognition are communication vehicles for what is deemed as important.”
Employer branding
Great Idea
#6
Vodafone
Vodafone is encouraging its employees to live the company’s brand values through a powerful recognition scheme. The Legends scheme, now in its third year, finds and recognises individuals who demonstrate Vodafone’s brand values in their everyday work. Unlike previous recognition programmes, Legends specifically ties recognition to the company’s employer brand and the achievement of its’ strategic goals. Employees, excluding senior management, are invited to nominate colleagues and assessors (non-management
Great Idea
#7
employees who are given training to judge nominees) choose the winners. After the assessors’ work is done, 100 Legends are selected for that year. The Legends, drawn from across the organisation, receive senior management recognition and both financial and nonfinancial rewards. The programme’s impact has helped recognition become part of the everyday culture within Vodafone. Encouraging employees to give positive praise to each other not only builds a sense of satisfaction and mutual respect, it also helps drive overall engagement.
British Gas
A similar recognition programme, British Gas ‘Everyday Heroes’, involved employees by asking them to vote for the colleague of the year.
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Over 60% of employees voted by post, online and SMS to choose the Everyday Hero who best represented the company’s values and went the extra mile to bring them to life. The interactivity of Everyday Heroes created extensive viral awareness and understanding and engagement with the brand values.
Employer branding
Step Five
The power of goodbye People choose to leave their jobs for a variety of reasons, some of which are outside of an organisation’s control. For an organisation, saying goodbye to a key player is inconvenient at the best of times, but for the well engaged employee, a professionally handled departure is the icing on the (farewell) cake. This is important as employees who have departed can be stakeholders in other ways – often customers and influencers – who play a part in the organisation’s ongoing success. This includes activities such as continuing to buy products from the company or positively shaping the perceptions of people in their circle of influence. What can organisations do to positively influence the way an employee continues to engage with their former employer’s brand? One example is exit interviews, which are extremely commonplace these days, and offer both departing employee and employer (usually line management) the opportunity to talk about the individual’s work and to gather feedback. For example, how might the organisation improve or better engage their workforce with the working environment, systems or procedures? It is a golden opportunity to find out exactly what is going on. Far more than a formality, these meetings can help instigate positive change for the future, and encourage employees to think back favourably to their time at that organisation.
Great Idea
#8
NASA
What happens when employee debriefing and exit interviews can become a last-minute effort or a chore? Often within organisations, processes and bestpractice examples are not documented and are simply lost when people decide to move on. NASA realised in 2006 that 50% of its workforce were actually eligible for retirement if they wanted it, and realised that unless they came up with a viable solution, years of experience and knowledge would literally walk out of the door. Efforts to retain at least some knowledge or expertise were integrated into – a new knowledge debrief. This ‘debrief’ is conducted through asking employees to complete job manuals,
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write case studies, tell stories, give best practice examples, and provide their top 5 knowledge resources. Depending on the type of role and associated skills and expertise, the information is stored in a way that is the most meaningful for remaining employees. The process adds to the learning curve of newer staff and ensures that valuable expertise and perspectives are hard-wired into the corporate memory. Importantly, the process of asking employees for such information and feedback can both engender fond memories and pride or, where some experiences have been negative, cathartic. All of it contributes to the lasting impression the employer has on their former employee.
A guide to employer branding
Provoking thought Generating discussion Delivering results Making a difference
How many of your employees are brand ambassadors and how many are wrecker? Karian and Box can help you find out. For more information on how or help with developing your employer brand and related activities, get in touch with Karian and Box via email martha@karianandbox.com or call 01904 654454
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