 |
|
| |
David
Lee
Consultant
Speaker
Author |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
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 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
AR
|
| |
How
to Build A Magnetic Employer Brand™ - Part
II |
| By
David Lee |
|
|
|
| Originally
published in ERExchange.com |
|
|
|
| In the
first
part of this series, we discussed
five principles and practices involved
in building a compelling employer brand: |
|
| |
1. |
Put Together a Team That
Understands, Influences, and Experiences
All Facets of Employer Branding and Your
Employer Brand |
|
| 2. |
Involve Employees In Every Facet of
the Process |
|
| 3. |
Become an Expert on Your Target Market |
|
| 4. |
Find Out If You Deliver What Employees
Want |
|
| 5. |
Think “Experience” |
|
| |
In Part II of this four part
series, we will discuss the process of identifying
your “default employer brand”.
For Better or For Worse, You Already
Have an Employer Brand
The process of building a powerful employer brand starts with identifying
your default employer brand – the perception people already have
of your organization as an employer. “Many companies start the Employer
Branding process thinking ‘Since we don’t have an employer
brand and we’re starting from scratch, we can mold and shape ours
to be whatever we want it to be,” says Chris Johnson, Director of
Employee Communications Services at Shaker Recruitment Advertising & Communications.
What they don’t realize is that they already have an employer brand – for
better or for worse. The myriad of encounters their organization has had
with employees, customers, and their community has left an impression.
Thus, the first step in building a compelling employer brand is to identify
what that impression is. Discovering how you’re perceived as an employer
will show you both what to accentuate and what to fix. This discovery process
will help you identify your organization’s unique positive qualities – the
building blocks to be used in constructing your desired employer brand.
It will also help you identify negative perceptions people have of your
organization as an employer, and the practices that have created these
perceptions. Later in the process, this information will be used to make
changes that will strengthen your employer brand. In the rest of this article,
we will focus on how to gather the information necessary for identifying
these perceptions.
Find Out What Mental and Emotional
Associations Have Already Been Created
A brand comprises the thoughts, emotions, and images customers associate
with a particular product, service, or company. These associations are
created through a customer’s interactions with that product, service,
or company. When customers think about the product or service, hear or
see a marketing message about that product or service, or prepare to interact
with that company, these associations are automatically triggered. |
| |
| Thus, when
strategizing on how to strengthen a brand,
marketing experts first seek to identify
what associations consumers currently
have to that brand. Similarly, you will
want to identify what associations people
have made to your organization as an
employer. To identify these associations,
you will want to interview: |
|
| |
• |
current employees |
|
| • |
former employees |
|
| • |
people who have turned down job offers
with your company |
|
| • |
people in your industry – your
vendors, competitors & industry associations |
|
| • |
people who represent the various job
disciplines and levels for which you
continuously hire externally and/or promote
from within |
|
| • |
managers from all levels within your
company |
|
| • |
the community in which you reside |
|
| • |
colleges that you may recruit from |
|
| |
Find out what people have heard
about your organization as an employer. Find
out whether your company is seen as a “first
choice” or an “if nothing better
comes along” employment prospect. Ask
them about what words and phrases come to mind
when they think about your company. Do you
hear phrases like “sweat shop,” “They
have great ads about being a wonderful place
to work, but in real life it’s nothing
like that” or do you hear comments like “top
shelf,” “fun place to work,” ”They
care about their people,” and “They
expect a lot, but they give a lot”?
From your employees, ask for words and phrases that capture the essence
of their work experience and your organization as an employer. The responses
you get from your employees and people outside your organization will give
you a glimpse into the mental and emotional associations that have inadvertently
been created in the minds of employees and job seekers. Later in this series,
we’ll explore how to manage your employer brand so that every interaction
your company has with employees, job seekers, customers, and the public
builds positive associations that strengthen your employer brand.
Collect Stories That Capture The
Essence of Your Organization
Ask employees and managers at all levels to share stories that, in their
opinion, define what it’s like working in your organization. To help
trigger their recall, offer a list of employee/employer moments of truth – interactions
that impact and shape an employee’s perception of their employer.
These include such perception defining moments as how they experienced
your hiring process, orientation, and first sixty days on the job. Other
critical moments of truth include how your company deals with difficult
news and uncomfortable changes, whether their supervisor shows appreciation,
whether they feel their requests for adequate resources are ignored or
heard, and whether or not management solicits employee input on changes
that affect their jobs. With the help of your Employee Advisory Council,
create a list of the critical moments of truth that shape an employee’s
perception of their employer and use this to help interviewees recall brand-defining
stories.
Such stories don’t have to be dramatic or long drawn out epics to
be powerful and telling. They can be as simple as the following: at Lincoln
Financial Group of Portland , Maine , one of their call center customer
service representatives left the company to work in another call center
because it was far closer to his home. He soon returned. When I asked him
why, he replied: “They just didn’t value quality customer service
like we do at Lincoln , and I couldn’t work in a place like that.” This
simple vignette captures one of the most important drivers of employee
satisfaction and a strong employer brand – pride in one’s work
and one’s employer.
At a seminar I was leading a couple of years ago, I had a supervisor from
MBNA, a perennial member of Fortune’s 100
Best Companies to Work For list, tell the group a story about a moment of truth he had with his
employer. He had been wondering if working in this particular division
of the company was right for him and whether he even wanted to work in
a call center at all. When he experienced the following moment of truth,
he realized he was in the right place: an elderly gentleman called to thank
MBNA for extending his wife and him credit. He told the customer service
representative that his wife, in her late 70’s, had always dreamed
of getting her college degree and had used their credit card to help finance
this endeavor. She would be graduating that spring. The customer service
representative who took the call relayed it to the supervisor. The supervisor
went out and purchased a graduation card, everyone on the team signed it,
and sent it to the new graduate.
By gathering these kinds of stories, especially those around critical moments
of truth, your employer branding team will be able to assess your organization’s
strengths and weaknesses as an employer, gain diagnostic clues about your
default employer brand, and gather the building blocks for creating your
desired employer brand, a step that will come later. These stories will
also become an integral part of communicating your employer brand both
internally and externally.
Identify Your Organization’s Personality
Just like people, every organization has a unique constellation of attributes,
talents, shortcomings, charming qualities, and quirks. Getting clear about
your organization’s personality is a prerequisite to communicating
your uniqueness as an employer. Having a clear sense of your organization’s
personality also improves your hiring process. “The more clear you
are about what your company is about, the better you’ll be at getting
the right people.” notes Scott Helbing, VP of Global Brand Strategy
at Dell Computers Just as in dating, the more you know about yourself and
the more you know what you’re looking for, the fewer frogs you end
up kissing.
Because Dell’s management is clear about who they are – a company
whose phenomenal success has been built upon operational excellence – they
both attract and actively screen for individuals who share that passion
for action. Contrast Dell’s corporate personality with another famous
technology company, Apple. Apple’s iconoclastic, visionary corporate
personality and its focus on leading edge product development offers a
work experience different from Dell’s. By knowing clearly who they
are, both Dell and Apple can articulate their unique work experience offerings
and more effectively attract and recruit people who can contribute to their
success. When it comes to employer branding, it pays to “know thyself”.
Strive For Unflinching Honesty
Just as “knowing thyself” in the personal realm isn’t
always easy or necessarily pleasant, asking for feedback about your organization’s
personality will bring you a mixture of good news and bad news. Avoid the
tendency to believe your own press and to deny the validity of perceptions
that don’t fit your views, especially if the feedback contradicts
your published materials.
How your employer branding team responds to unflattering perceptions, especially
those expressed by employees, will be a critical moment of truth. Will
you write them off as inaccurate and uninformed or will you take them seriously?
Remember that to the perceiver, perception is reality. Whether the perception
is real or not in actuality, the consequences of a person’s perceptions
are very real. Likewise, when looking at your employer brand, consequences
of employee perceptions hold very real consequences for your ability to
be viewed as their employer of choice.
One common example of the very real effect of employee perceptions – whether
they’re accurate or not – comes from the call center industry.
A frequent lament among customer service representatives (CSRs) working
in call centers is that management cares more about quantity than quality.
They feel they are judged more by how many calls they can take, rather
than how well they serve their customers. This perception has significant
employee satisfaction implications which translate to serious employer
branding implications. Now, depending upon the company, this perception
ranges from very accurate to inaccurate.
For companies where CSR perceptions are accurate – management doesn’t
value quality as much as quantity – the understandable consequences
is diminished “company pride” and job satisfaction. However,
for companies where management truly does value quality as much as quantity – and
therefore CSR perceptions are inaccurate – the consequence is still
the same: diminished corporate pride and job satisfaction.
In the latter case, the moment of truth becomes whether management dismisses
CSR perceptions (“They simply don’t get it, no matter what
we say”) or whether they take it seriously, even if they disagree
vehemently with that perception. Taking it seriously would mean adding
to the organizational improvement action list the following: “Find
out what we’re doing that sends out the wrong message” and “What
can we do to both communicate how strongly we value quality and to reinforce
it by our processes?” This list will be addressed later in the employer
branding process.
As you work on this step of the process, remember that identifying your
default employer brand is different from building your desired employer
brand. It isn’t about how you want things to be, it’s about
what is.
Get Ready For Phase Two
By doing the research described above, you will have identified your default
employer brand. You will have a mosaic of attributes and emotions associated
with your organization as an employer. You will have a library of stories
that add depth and nuance to your employer brand analysis and – when
it comes time to tell your story – will bring your employer brand
to life. With the guidance of the branding expert(s) on your employer branding
team, these attributes, emotions, and stories will coalesce into an image
of your default employer brand. This will be the foundation upon which
you will build your desired employer brand.
At this point, you will also have a list of organizational and supervisory
practices and processes that need to be improved upon for you to deliver
on your employer brand promise. In the next segment of this series, we’ll
explore how to define what that promise will be. |
| |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
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.
|
|
|
| |
|
print this page
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
