How people feel about their employer brand is increasingly critical to business success or failure.
Whether you’ve defined it or not, you already have an employer brand. The key question is whether you’re clear about the distinctive benefits you’d like people to associate with you (commonly described as your employee value proposition or EVP), proactive in communicating and delivering against this promise, or happy to live with an unclear and inconsistent employer brand by default.
How people feel about their employer brand is increasingly critical to business success or failure. Leading companies realise its importance in attracting and engaging the people they need to deliver profitable growth.
A good example of this is Microsoft whose corporate brand proposition focuses on enabling both personal and business customers to realise their full potential. Reflecting this core purpose, Microsoft’s employer brand proposition focuses on employee development, ensuring that the people who work for Microsoft can “come as you are, and do what you love.” This has helped to move the agenda on a step from the generic focus on becoming an “employer of choice” that dominated HR efforts for a number of years, before it became apparent that aspiring toward an ideal blueprint of employment was unlikely to deliver on the more distinctive fit for purpose requirements of the customer brand and business strategy.
This progression toward a more integrated view of the brand has also promoted a recognition that employer brands need to play a dual purpose. The employer brand proposition needs to clarify what both prospective and current employees can expect from the organisation in terms of rational and emotional benefits. However, it also needs to clarify what will be expected of employees in return. Microsoft promises employees that it will help them realise their potential. In return (in accordance with Microsoft’s core values), it expects employees to “take on big challenges and see them through.” Inherent in most “integrated” employer brand propositions is a “give” and a “get” that aligns the employer brand promise with the customer brand and corporate performance agenda.
Turn around A number of years ago, the global retailer Tesco’s customer satisfaction scores began to plateau. Realiing that the solution to this issue did not rely solely on the price, quality, range, and display of its product offering, but also on the satisfaction and engagement of its front-line employees, Tesco developed an EVP that committed the organisation to improving the Tesco working experience in a number of key areas. For example, Tesco’s research revealed that employee engagement was closely related to the amount of time and quality of recognition they received from their managers. By providing managers with better people management training and freeing up more of their time to coach and encourage their employees, Tesco made a significant impact on the company’s engagement scores. In turn, this was correlated with a 5 per cent improvement in customer satisfaction, and 2.5 per cent like-for-like growth in sales. People are understandably cynical about brands which promise much, but fail to live up to expectations, brands that are all show and no substance. These are the brands that give branding a bad name.
Vision and reality gap This gap between vision and reality is extremely pertinent to employer brands. Corporate policy and value statements appear particularly prone to aspirational over claim. It is not only the expensive gloss of the paper that makes employees feel that corporate literature is out of touch. It is also the tendency of corporate communication to gloss over the everyday realities of the employment experience in their assertion of what the company claims to stand for or offer its employees. The task of most brand managers who inherit an existing brand is to close the gap between the current brand reality and the brand vision. This requires them to steer a course between what may initially appear to be two contradictory goals.
The first goal is to maintain the clarity, consistency, and continuity of the brand.
The second goal is to introduce changes that will help to develop, stretch, and refresh the brand.
Striking the right balance between these two tasks is a constant challenge.
Change too much and the brand will lose focus, change too little and the brand will lose relevance.
Edited excerpts from “The Definitive Book of Branding”. Edited by: Kartikeya Kompella, Founder, Purposeful Brands. 2014 / 440 pages / Paperback: ₹895 (9788132117735) / SAGE Response