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David
Lee
Consultant
Speaker
Author |
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For
More Information:
David Lee, Principal
HumanNature@Work
P.O. Box 430
Bar Mills, Maine 04004
Tel: 207-929-3344
E-mail: info@HumanNatureAtWork.com |
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AR
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How
to Create a Magnetic Employer Brand Part III |
| By
David Lee |
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| Reprinted
from ERExchange.com April 13, 2004 |
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| In the
first
part of this series, we explored
five essential components of effective
employer branding: |
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1. |
Putting Together a Team
That Understands, Influences, and Experiences
All Facets of Employer Branding and Your
Employer Brand |
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| 2. |
Involving Employees In Every Facet
of the Process |
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| 3. |
Becoming an Expert on Your Target Market |
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| 4. |
Finding Out If You Deliver What Employees
Want |
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| 5. |
Thinking “Experience” |
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In the second
segment, we explored
how to identify your default employer brand.
Your default employer brand refers to your
organization’s current reputation in
the labor marketplace, along with its unique
personality or ethos. As discussed in the second
segment, regardless of whether you and your
management team have consciously addressed
employer branding, your organization already
has one by default. You already have a reputation
in the labor market and a corporate personality.
Once you’re clear on your default employer
brand, you’re ready to build your Magnetic
Employer Brand. You do this by building upon
the strengths of your default brand and paring
away the flaws. In this article, we will examine
how to do that.
To put the following thoughts in context, I
recommend reviewing the first two articles
in the series and the article The
True Power of a Magnetic Employer Brand, so you get the
philosophical and conceptual underpinnings
of this approach.
Analyze Your Default Brand For
Strengths and Weaknesses
As discussed in Part II, when you identify your default brand, you will
generate a list of attributes and emotions associated with your organization
as an employer. You then want to go through these associations and identify
those that lead to a Magnetic Employer Brand, and those that don’t.
So, for instance, people might associate the attribute “accepts only
the highest quality work” with your organization as an employer.
This would obviously attract talented people, because they want to feel
proud of their employer and work with winners.
However, let’s say that you also have the following attribute associated
with your organization as an employer: “management doesn’t
provide adequate support or resources to meet quality standards.” Such
a perception (brand attribute) would be accompanied by brand damaging emotional
associations such as wariness and anticipated frustration. This negative
perception and accompanying emotional associations would obviously counterbalance
the “accepts only the highest quality work” attribute, and
weaken your employer brand.
Thus, your first step in building your desired employer brand – your
Magnetic Employer Brand – is to identify the perceptions (brand attributes)
and emotional associations that comprise your default brand. From there,
you will explore how to change the negative associations and perceptions
and build upon the positive ones.
Reverse Engineer Your Negative
Attributes and Emotional Associations
Reverse engineering your negative attributes and emotional associations
means deconstructing the experiences that create the negative perceptions
and emotional associations connected to your default employer brand. This
reverse engineering process, called Employee Experience Mapping [1], allows
you to take each employer brand damaging experience and break it down into
a step-by-step process. Doing this enables you to identify which parts
of the experience, which steps in the sequence of interactions, create
brand damaging emotional and mental associations. This reverse engineering
process enables you to fix employer brand damaging experiences with great
precision.
Reverse engineering your negative attributes and emotional associations
with Employee Experience Mapping involves taking each negative attribute
and emotional association and identifying what experiences are creating
them. So, let’s say one of the negative perceptions you discover
people have of your organization as an employer is “It’s a
chaotic, slipshod outfit.” You would then ask your Employee Advisory
Council and perhaps some employee focus groups: “What employee experiences
have lead to that perception?”
This inquiry will provide you with a list of experiences that have contributed
to this perception, this negative brand attribute. Let’s say one
of the major sources of this perception is the new hire experience your
organization delivers. Using Employee Experience Mapping, you would create
a flow chart, mapping each step of the “new hire experience. You
would then ask your Employee Advisory Council which steps of the process
are creating the negative perception.
Minnesota’s HealthEast Care System has effectively used this process
to analyze the weak links in the “new hire experience” it delivered.
Concerned by the soaring costs caused by the vacancy rates common in healthcare
institutions today, they identified the new hire experience as one of the
critical employee experiences that needed improving. It is often in these
first few months that an employee decides whether they’ve chosen
a good employer, or whether they’ve made a mistake. Thus, doing the
new hire experience right is vitally important to retention and employer
of choice status.
From interviews with employees about their new hire experience, the New
Employee Engagement team enabled HealthEast to identify weak links in those
critical first months. By fixing these weak links and adding employer brand
strengthening components to the new hire experience (which will be discussed
later), HealthEast’s vacancy rate dropped from 10.6% to 2.6% in the
past three years (national vacancy rates range from 12%-16%). This led
to an estimated $12 million dollar savings due to a reduction in the need
for staff overtime and costly temporary healthcare workers. Besides the
huge financial savings reaped by these changes in the new hire experiences
and other facets of the overall work experience, HealthEast now enjoys
Employer of Choice status: they were just recognized as Minnesota ’s
best hospital workplace. |
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the more common employer brand damaging
employee experiences that are likely
to be creating negative perceptions and
emotional associations are: |
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“The New Hire Experience” |
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“The Performance Review Experience” |
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“The Ask Employees For Input
Experience” |
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“The Communicate About Upcoming
Changes Experience” |
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Given that most organizations
botch these experiences – and therefore
damage their employer brand – these will
probably be among your list of experiences
that get mapped, analyzed, and then improved.
The improvement phase involves both redesigning
the various steps and facets of each experience
that have been generating negative perceptions
and emotions, and adding employer brand building
components.
Identify Desired Employer Brand
Attributes and Emotional Associations
To build in employer brand strengthening components to each employee experience,
you need to first identify what attributes and emotions you want people
to associate with your employer brand. To identify these desired attributes
and emotional associations, refer to the information you have gathered
during the earlier stages of this process about what your target markets
are looking for in an employer. As discussed in Part II, you need to know
what it is that the best people in each demographic and profession you
employ, value most in a work experience. Once you have this information,
you will then start exploring how to create experiences that naturally
lead to such perceptions and emotions.
Design Experiences That Elicit These Attributes And Emotional
Associations
As discussed in previous articles, to create a Magnetic Employer Brand,
you need to “think experience”. One of the most important questions
to guide your employer brand building process is: “What kind of experience
would lead to the perceptions and emotional associations we want to create?” Organizations
wanting to create a truly Magnetic Employer Brand would be wise to emulate
businesses known for their sophisticated - as in discerning, intentional,
and disciplined – approach to creating memorable, brand building
customer experiences.
Companies like Anthropologie, Disney, Washington Mutual, Southwest Airlines,
and Ritz Carlton pay attention to each moment of truth in a customer’s
interaction and examine whether it builds or diminishes their distinctive
brand. They examine each moment of truth, each step in the process, in
terms of the perceptions and emotional associations it creates. Do the
perceptions and emotional associations created by this interaction build
the brand? Do the perceptions and emotional associations created by this
interaction support the brand’s identity, or do they conflict with
- and therefore damage - the brand’s identity?
For instance, if calling Southwest Airlines to make a reservation meant
being greeted by a bored, crass, or morose call center rep, this experience
would obviously not contribute to Southwest’s brand identity as a
fun, customer-centric airline. Thus, managing their brand means making
sure that the “call to make a reservation” experience doesn’t
produce perceptions and emotions that are inconsistent with those they
want people to associate with their brand.
All successful brand managers, especially those responsible for a branded
customer experience, bring tremendous levels of discernment, intentionality,
and discipline to the way they execute on their brand promise. They realize
that, in the word’s of Starbuck’s Chief Coffee Buyer Dave Olsen: “Everything
matters.” If you use that same level of discernment, intentionality,
and discipline to the various employee interactions that together create “the
work experience you deliver”, you will engineer experiences that
build a Magnetic Employer Brand.
Returning to the example of HealthEast revamping its new hire experience,
we see what happens when you bring this level of discernment, intentionality,
and discipline to designing the new hire experience. This is especially
telling because most organizations treat this employer brand critical experience
in a careless, “fly by the seat of their pants,” “sink
or swim” manner.
According to Trudy Knoepke-Cambell, the Director of Workforce Planning,
a key part of the experience redesign was starting with a different perspective: “The
orientation process isn’t over in the first day or first week. It
spans several months, as the employee learns his job, learns about the
culture, and begins to feel part of the organization." With this perspective
as a foundation, HealthEast's New Employee Engagement team created a systematic,
intentional process that spanned an employee’s first 18 months. This
process now includes meetings with managers and classes designed to create
high employee engagement. HealthEast’s New Employee Engagement team
also added simple, common sense steps like providing each new employee
with a buddy to help show him the ropes and answer questions he might be
afraid to ask the boss.
Compare the perceptions and emotional associations such a well thought
out, employee-centric process creates in new employees with those created
by the typical “fly by the seat of your pants,” “sink
or swim” experience many organizations put their new employees through.
The typical new hire experience leads to perceptions such as: “They
don’t seem terribly professional here,” “Mediocre seems
good enough here,” and “They say employees are important, but
it’s clear that’s just talk.”
Along with these perceptions, the typical new hire experience leads to
such emotions as frustration, insecurity, resentment, and “buyer’s
remorse.” Contrast these associations with those created by HealthEast
Care System's new hire experience. Their employees’ experience working
for their new employer is likely to lead to such perceptions as: “They
do things right,” “They really do care about us,” and “They
walk their talk when they say employees are important.” With this
kind of new employee experience, when they think about their job and their
new employer, they’re likely to feel a variety of positive emotions,
such as confidence, security, pride, and respect.
Thus, by consciously designing a new hire experience that leads to employer
brand building perceptions and emotional associations, along with redesigning
other employer brand critical employee experiences, HealthEast has established
a strong employer brand, as evidenced by their being recognized as Minnesota’s
best hospital workplace.
Remember To Make Your Employees An Integral Part of This Process
As mentioned in previous articles, you will want to involve employees in
every facet of the employer branding process, including this phase. Just
as companies with strong customer service brands involve customers in the
process of assessing and improving the experience they deliver, you want
to involve your “internal customers” – your employees – in
designing work experiences that lead to a Magnetic Employer Brand. Because
they are the recipient of the work experience you deliver, they can give
you insights you’ll get nowhere else.
Coming Up In Part IV
In the next segment of this series, we’ll explore how to use stories
to capture the essence of your Magnetic Employer Brand, communicate it
to the labor market, and strengthen your employer brand. We will also examine
other critical components of building and maintaining your employer brand. |
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[1] This
term is based upon the customer service
strategy of Customer Service Mapping,
where you break down a customer’s
experience into each step as a way to
identify how to improve the overall experience.
For more information on employer branding services by David Lee, click
here. |
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About the Author: David Lee is an internationally recognized authority on organizational and managerial practices that optimize employee performance. He is the author of Managing Employee Stress and Safety, as well as dozens of articles on employee and organizational performance that have been published in trade journals and books in North America, Asia, Europe, and Australia. For information on his programs and service, click here.
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