A Note On Employer Brand

Properly articulated, a great employer brand serves as both a rallying cry or a call-to-arms – the brand equivalent of Reagan’s ‘Shining City On A Hill’ – and also a clear message about ‘how we do business around here’; the psychological contract between employer and employee.

A great employer brand is a statement of who we are, but also where we are going.

It can help you attract and retain the best talent. It can – and should – make those that you want to promote and those that you want to hire feel excited, and it should make those who the business needs to move along feel uncomfortable.

A great employer brand is the starter culture for your performance culture, and it is how you preserve and maintain what is special about you as you scale and grow.

The best brands know that ‘what you measure is what you get’ – per the seminal Netflix slideshare deck:

‘the actual company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets promoted, rewarded or let go’

– so they build their employer brand into their performance appraisal systems.

They also – very publicly – use those same competency frameworks to hire fresh talent.

As a result, great employer brands are ‘alive’ internally.

The opportunity is enormous and typically comes in three key stages: the experiences that people have before, during and after their time with you.

Before:

There’s no point telling your consumers how cutting-edge, beautiful and different you are if your candidates and new starters are put through a paper-heavy, bureaucratic, inflexible recruitment and induction process.

Would you ever send your newest clients a brown envelope stuffed full of A4 forms for them to fill in? So why send these out to your newest and most enthusiastic people?

What’s day one like? Do you greet your new people warmly in person, with a big smile, shiny stationery and a big team lunch, or do they get locked in an HR induction on health & safety, or an afternoon of death-by-spreadsheet IT training?

They’ll pick all that stuff up along the way; much more important and much more effective is to start their cultural immersion in your business.

Get them out on the floor as soon as you can. Show them as much of the business as you can. They’ll never be this interested again. Have them fall in love with your brand, your products and your customers.

Make sure you’re ready for them. Get the small things right - have you arranged for reception to greet them by name, set up a meeting with some big cheeses, got their desk ready and sorted a security pass that works? Get them as comfortable as you can as soon as you can. They’ll be delivering the goods much faster for you if you do.

During:

How do you talk to your people about changes? We’re not talking about putting up a letter from the CEO on the intranet.

It’s about how you answer your employees’ main question – what does this mean for me?

It’s no good telling people about huge growth plans and wonderful structural changes if they’re unclear about what this means for their family finances or whether they’ll have to give up the Thursday triathlon training that means so much to them.

Don’t increase the outward communication; increase the amount you listen to the people who work for you. Be patient and available enough to be there for them when they have questions.

After:

What happens when someone resigns? Do you sulk and stop their invite to the annual conference? Do you cut off their access to the system?

Even when you’re happy that they’re leaving, the people that move on are about to become your most vocal PR agents. They may well be working in your market. People will listen to what they have to say about you.

After all, it’s not hearsay with them; they know what you’re really like. What will be the stories that they tell? Will it be that you were fair and patient and reasonable as they left?

Or will it be that you begrudged them taking an extra day’s holiday in their last two weeks, or that you didn’t let them keep their security pass long enough for them to get to their own leaving party?

How do you keep them as fans? The best alumni networks send out updates, products, invitations, merchandise to their former colleagues - and in doing so ensure that these people will always be ambassadors for their ex-employers.

The little things go a long way.

People don’t tend to tell their friends that their ex-employer was kind enough to maintain their health insurance premium, but they might well chat about that £100 behind the bar, or that you let them leave a bit early for a meeting with their new employer, or the thank you card you arranged.

Like them or loathe them, rate them or not, many of your leavers will go on to be senior, big-budget-holding potential clients.

If you’ve treated them well on the way out, chances are they’ll take your call.

Before, during and after:

At every one of these three stages, you can be sure that employees - potential, actual and former - will be talking about you; telling their stories.

A great employer brand helps frame what you’d like those stories to be.

Contact Joanna Keeling at joanna@ibisideas.com 

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americas@ibisideas.com
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