Strategy

Delivering a signature employment experience

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The key moments of truth for your employer brand

Companies are increasingly realising that looking at only one part of the employee lifecycle e.g. recruitment, is simply not enough! Employee’s needs and motivators change over time during the course of their tenure. These changes may be influenced by lifestyle factors such as age, gender, experience, qualifications, marital status, stage of life, career aspirations, etc.

Your employer brand strategy must consider the complete picture and leaders need to carefully consider and plan how the employee experience impacts people at each touchpoint across the lifecycle. Smart Executives realise that a ‘one-size-fits’ all lifecycle strategy fails to optimise productivity.  Companies that segment and align the employee lifecycle as part of their employer brand strategy will benefit from maintaining higher levels of engagement, productivity, customer satisfaction and profit!

Where to begin!

A lifecycle mapping audit will identify any gaps in employee experience from pre-hire to re-hire and your future strategy will need to address these gaps to ensure your people policies, processes and systems are working to provide a signature employee experience. In theory it makes good sense, in practice, much work needs to be done as there are many moving parts to join up.  Segmenting and effectively managing the employee lifecycle will require a culture change for many companies.

The fifteen moments of truth

Whilst there will be variances depending on company size, scope and scale, the key ‘moments of truths’ across the employee lifecycle which will require your focus include:

Build your employer brand

Original article published in HR Future Magazine click here to read the published pdf version

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This article provides insights from Brett's new book "Employer Brand Leadership - A Global Perspective?" For full details please visit the publisher's website click here>

Building market based assets with employer branding

Your employer brand is “the image of your organisation as a ‘great place to work’ in the mind of current employees and key stakeholders in the external market (active and passive candidates, clients, customers and other key stakeholders). The art and science of employer branding is therefore concerned with the attraction, engagement and retention initiatives targeted at enhancing your company's employer brand."

A strong employer brand is built upon mental (image) and physical availability (market reach) so your creative should work towards building consistent associations you want your employees, candidates and other key stakeholders to have about ‘what it’s like to work at your company.’ Your strategy should work towards expanding your market reach to your target audience using the most effective internal and external communication channels.

However the biggest challenge I find for managers responsible for the employer brand strategy is they don’t understand the science of branding and lack knowledge in branding principles and practices which have been informed by decades of research into how brands grow.

Common employer branding mistakes

Some of the most common mistakes I see made by companies include:

The profit v engagement paradox

Original employer branding article published in South Africa's HR Future and New Zealand's Human Resources Magazine

Have you read Brett's new book "Employer Brand Leadership - A Global Perspective?" For full details please visit the publisher's website click here>

The Profit v Engagement Paradox

Optimising employee engagement has been a common objective of companies over the past five years. This shift in focus has been driven by a more informed view on the relationship between employee/customer engagement and profit.

Studies by global consulting firms such as Gallup, ISR and Hewitt have shown higher levels of employee engagement lead to higher sales revenues and profits. One of the most well know examples that demonstrated this relationship is Sears who used an ‘employee-customer-profit chain’ to analyse aggregated data from 800 stores, finding that employee attitudes towards their company and their jobs lead to positive employee behaviours toward customers. Sears found that a five percent increase in employee satisfaction drives a 1.3 percent in customer satisfaction, which results in 0.5 percent increase in revenue growth.

Studies also show higher levels of customer engagement lead to stronger financial performance. A 2009 study by Wetpaint and Altimeter Group found companies that are both deeply and widely engaged in social media surpass their peers in terms of both revenue and profit performance by a significant difference. The study found Mavens (defined as brands that are engaged in seven or more channels and have an above-average engagement score) had significantly higher revenue growth, gross margin growth and net margin growth over the previous 12 month period compared to their peers that engaged in fewer channels and had below-average engagement scores.

The Profit & Engagement Matrix
The main objective of a company is to maximise profit whether this is measured in financial outcomes (e.g. private and publicly listed sector) or social good (e.g. not-for-profit and Non-Government Organisation (NGO) sector) or a combination of both (e.g. Government sector)

To encourage companies to define their strategic focus and develop strategy that achieves a better balance between profit and engagement objectives I developed The Profit & Engagement Matrix.

The framework will assist leaders to develop strategies that consider the needs of all stakeholders and do not favour one (e.g. shareholders) at the expense of others (e.g. employees). The framework can also be used as part of the strategic review process to assist leaders to better understand when and where profit, and employee/customer engagement trade-offs will need to be made based on the strategic priorities of the company at the time.

Building employer brand equity

This article provides some insights into "Building employer brand equity as featured in Brett's new book Employer Brand Leadership - A Global Perspective.

Original employer branding article published in South Africa's HR Future Magazine

A company has one brand and the art and science of employer branding provides a focus for the role of the ‘employee’ in building brand equity.

In addressing the challenge of measuring the ROI of your employer brand strategy your approach can be informed by previous research in marketing, specifically in the area of brand image and brand equity.

Brand image
Brand associations are the determinants of brand image. Keller defines brand image as an amalgamation of the perceptions related to the product related/non-product related attributes and the functional/symbolic benefits that are encompassed in the brand associations that reside in consumer memory.

Marketing literature supports the concept that product brand equity is strengthened when the brand image resonates with the consumer. As brand awareness heightens, consumers begin to develop positive identification with the brand. The more positive the brand is perceived to be, the more highly identified the consumer becomes with the product. As social identity theory suggests, in the end, the consumer purchases the brand because of the positive self-concept that results from feeling membership with the brand. In a similar manner, as potential employees find positive aspects of the employer image, they are more likely to identify with the brand, and will more likely choose to seek membership with the organisation for the sense of heightened self-image that membership promises.