Saturday, 14 June 2014
EMPLOYEE BRANDING
INTRODUCTION
The term "employer
brand" was first publicly introduced to a management audience in 1990,and
defined by Simon Barrow, chairman of People in Business, and Tim Ambler, Senior
Fellow of London Business School, in the Journal of Brand Management in
December 1996.This academic paper was the first published attempt to "test
the application of brand management techniques to human resource
management". Within this paper, Simon Barrow and Tim Ambler defined the
employer brand as "the package of functional, economic and psychological
benefits provided by employment, and identified with the employing company".
By 2001, of 138 leading companies surveyed by the Conference Board in North
America, 40% claimed to be actively engaged in some form of employer branding
activity. In 2003, an employer brand survey conducted by the Economist among a
global panel of readers revealed a 61% level of awareness of the term
"employer brand" among HR professionals and 41% among non-HR professionals.
The first book on the subject was published in 2005,and the second in 2006.In
2008, Jackie Orme, the Director General of the UK Chartered Institute of
Personnel Directors confirmed the growing status of the discipline in her
opening address to the CIPD annual conference, with the observation that:
"When I started out in the profession, nobody talked about employer
branding. Now it's absolutely integral to business strategy—resonating well
beyond the doors of the HR department". Similar recognition of the growing
importance of employer brand thinking and practice has also been recently in
evidence in the USA, Australasia, Asia, and Europe, with the publication of
numerous books on the subject.
EMPLOYER
BRAND
While the term
"employer brand" denotes what people currently associate with an organization,
employer branding has been defined as the sum of a company's efforts to
communicate to existing and prospective staff what makes it a desirable place
to work, and the active management of "a company's image as seen through
the eyes of its associates and potential hires".
While the term
"employer brand" denotes what people currently associate with an organization,
employer branding has been defined as the sum of a company's efforts to
communicate to existing and prospective staff what makes it a desirable place
to work, and the active management of "a company's image as seen through
the eyes of its associates and potential hires".
Employee branding is a
new twist on identity regulation. Employee branding shapes employees’ behavior
so that they project the brand identity of their organization’s products
through their everyday work behavior. Employee branding is intended to induce
employee-brand identification, a psychological connection between the employee
and the brand, to provide an unobtrusive, seemingly unproblematic engine for
“on brand behavior”. To introduce organizational scholars to issues involved in
employee branding, this essay outlines some of the assumptions, tactics and
practices of employee branding. I draw on theories from marketing and
organizational studies to define employee-brand identification and to develop a
preliminary model of how employee branding programs could induce employee-brand
identification. In addition, I raise questions about the relationships between
the organization, the employee, and the brand that employee branding
reinforces, and propose directions for future research.
The
8 Elements of a Successful Employment Brand
Many organizations are
starting to see glimmers of faster paced growth. As a reaction, many are
becoming more aware of the need to build their employment brand as a
well-managed company and good place to work. And while senior executives long
ago realized the value of building product brands, and now credit portions of
their market value to such brands, only recently have executives realized the
importance of managing their brand as an employer. Due to the infancy of the
employment brand management concept (it did, after all, only rise to popularity
in the late 1990s, only to be stifled by a downturn in the economy) many
individuals are unaware or misuse the terminology related to employment branding.
Combined, these two issues have contributed to a great deal of confusion about
what is and is not employment branding. Employment branding is a targeted,
long-term strategy to manage the awareness and perceptions of employees,
potential employees, and related stakeholders with regards to a particular
firm. The strategy can be tuned to drive recruitment, retention, and
productivity management efforts. It works by consistently putting forth an
image surrounding management and business practices that make your organization
an attractive, “good place to work.” The net result of successful employment
branding is that your organization’s exposure and reputation increases,
creating consensus among your employees, magazine editors, managers in other
organizations, and high potential applicants that you are one of the top
employers of choice. A successful employment brand management effort increases
both the number and quality of applicants, reduces the turnover rate among top
performers, and increases overall workforce productivity. Because employment
branding is a targeted strategy it cannot be successfully managed using a
hodgepodge or uncoordinated effort. In order to be successful, it must contain
each of these eight essential elements:
A
culture of sharing and continuous improvement
No employment branding
effort can succeed in an organization that is afraid to expose or “brag about”
its best management practices. Many organizations today practice a false
modesty by discouraging or even forbidding managers from spreading the word
externally about best practices. Such an attitude might have been acceptable
prior to the 1990s, when the value of PR was highly doubted and models for
placing a dollar value on such exposure were highly theoretical. However, in an
era where technology can track spikes in sales and market value that correlate
to such exposure, public touting has become a way of life in leading firms like
GE, Cisco, Southwest Airlines, and Wal-Mart. Unless your firm wants to be left
behind, becoming more and more obscure each year, it’s essential that senior
management recognizes and encourages employment branding and the sharing of
best practices. Therefore, the foundation element of a good employment brand is
a senior management team that encourages, measures, and rewards the development
and sharing of best practices. (This element is strengthened by the development
of processes the enable the rapid sharing of best practices between business
units.)
A
balance between good management and high productivity
Having unique benefits and doing great
community work both have some impact on a firm’s external employment image.
However, the primary foundation of any employment brand is first and foremost
the firm’s management practices. Unfortunately, some firms, in an effort to
become known for their management practices, go overboard in an effort to look
good. This “look good” effort might result in managers becoming overly soft or
losing their focus on the importance of maintaining an increasing productivity of
the workforce. Since the basis for any HR effort should be to improve its
workforce productivity (i.e. the value the company gets back for every dollar
invested in its employees) any image building effort must balance “looking
good” and increasing productivity. On the flip side, some managers become
overly focused on workforce productivity and go overboard in the opposite
direction, ignoring good management practices for short-term gain. While
short-term output may increase, such actions almost always cause decreases in
productivity and increases in employment related costs in the long run. Some of
the problems that occur when managers push productivity at the expense of good
management practices include increased employee burnout, increased error rates,
decreased customer satisfaction and increased turnover, especially among top
performers that have come to expect excellent management. Therefore, in order
to insure a strong brand as well as improved employee productivity, firms must
measure and reward balance between the use of good management practices and
efforts to improve employee productivity.
Obtaining
public recognition (great-place-to-work lists)
There’s no doubt that the increased interest
in employment branding during the past decade has been a direct result of the
increased number of organizations and magazines that create lists of great
places to work. While it’s true that many of these lists are heavily slanted
towards firms that offer great benefits, no one can argue against the benefits
of exposure that occur as a result of being listed. Often times the exposure is
not limited to just being mentioned in the list. Local news agencies,
periodicals, and industry trades frequently run features on firms in their area
or industry. This exposure increases the credibility of your firm and
reinforces the mindset among target audiences that your organization is a good
place to work. The most prominent great-place-to-work lists include those
published by Fortune and Working Mother Magazines.
Employees
“proactively” telling stories
One of the prime attributes of a great
employment brand is that employees go out of their way to tell stories about
the firm’s management, business practices, and impact on their life. While
almost any employee will respond to a question about their firm, the employees
at well-branded firms volunteer their stories to strangers both inside and
outside the workplace. Having created such an environment enables viral
marketing, where employees spread the word about the great management practices
to their families, friends, co-workers, and even strangers on airplanes, at
places like professional meetings and social settings. In a well-branded firm,
even the employee’s families know of and help spread stories. Employees
spreading the word about your firm being a good place to work has a
significantly higher impact than the firm spreading the word that it is a great
place to work. No firm or outside consultancy can declare a firm a good place
to work; that designation must come from the employees themselves. Having
employees proactively tell stories within the organization builds pride and
increases retention rates. Having employees that tell stories externally
increases the number and the quality of employee referrals for open positions.
Getting
talked about
The number of agencies that make up the
business press has grown so large and become so segmented and influential that
being talked about in specific publications has become an essential element in
building a strong employment brand. Getting written up is equivalent to getting
a great review for restaurant. Having others talk about you and site your great
management practices has more than impact than any employment ad that you could
place. Getting talked about requires two basic components. First, managers must
speak and write about their management practices in highly visible ways. While
an internal meeting is great for communicating information to a small group of
employees, a conference or periodical column provides greater exposure. By
giving speeches and writing articles, you also increase the likelihood that
writers and editors will not overlook what you are doing. In fact, some
research suggests that up to half of a company’s employment brand is tied to
the CEO and how well they are positively perceived in the business community.
The second component of getting talked about focuses on getting written up in
the business press. By making managers available to reporters and editors who
can dramatically increase the number of times that your best practices are
cited by the business press, you exponentially increase chances of growing your
exposure.
Becoming
a benchmark firm
The best managed firms are those also known as
benchmark firms. These are the firms that have best practices that everyone
else wants to learn about and emulate. A great brand requires management to
participate in major benchmarking studies and to make a conscious effort to
respond to those that highlight your best practices. The net result of this is
that at management meetings around the world your firm’s name will become one
of the most quoted and respected, a fact that filters down to the community
level with time. Since most benchmarking begins on the Internet, you can even
assess your “benchmark shadow” or exposure by doing a Google search of both
your firm’s name plus the functional area (i.e. “General Electric” + HR). Then
compare your score to your competitors to assess how well known your management
practices are.
Increasing
candidate awareness of your best practices
There are many
companies that are well known because of their product brand but that have not
developed awareness for their management practices. A great employment brand
doesn’t just increase the potential applicants awareness of the firm. It goes
one further step and informs potential applicants about the management
practices that make you a good place to work. The basic foundation of this
branding step is to craft messages to your target audience of potential
applicants, so that they apply for your jobs specifically because of your
management and business practices. This element requires each major business
function to make it part of their performance objectives to educate potential
applicants about their best practices. It entails highlighting best practices
at tradeshow booths, in recruiting materials, in the annual report, and
especially on the company’s website. Because so many potential applicants
educate themselves about a firm through the employer’s website, it’s essential
that the corporate website contains information that educates and excites
applicants about your management and business practices.
Branding
assessment metrics
Building a product brand requires intense
effort over time. You can’t rest on your laurels when you have a successful
brand. You must continually improve it and sculpt it to fit the changing needs
of your target audience. Employment brands are no different. They must
continually change and improve. The key to that continuous improvement is the
use of brand assessment measures or metrics. Any branding campaign should begin
with side-by-side comparison numbers that can be used to judge the relative
success and improvement of the effort. Branding metrics should become part of
the assessment criteria for all major business functions and their managers.
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. What you measure, talk about, and
reward sends a clear message to everyone about what’s really important.
REFERENCES
Subscribe to:
Post Comments
(
Atom
)
No comments :
Post a Comment