Insight from Joe Solmonese

Improve Your Corporate Culture, Productivity, and Profitability With an Employer Brand Strategy

If you’re in business, you understand the value of a brand strategy and how it reinforces your business position and distinguishes you from the competition. But do you know how important your employer brand strategy is to business performance?

Like a brand strategy, the employer brand strategy communicates your company’s mission, vision, value and reputation, but does so directly to your employees and potential employment candidates. It serves to attract the best and most diverse talent and therefore increases productivity and profitability. Data show that diverse groups create better results, whether those results are more sales, better service, more compelling R&D, or more efficient business processes. All that leads to a virtuous cycle of increasing returns.

You may think this initiative should fall under the purview of the HR director. But data reported by the Harvard Business Review indicate that 60% of CEOs say this responsibility lies with the CEO.

Best practice insight

Employer brand strategy is embraced by many of the world’s most successful companies. Marriott International has a full corporate team dedicated to communicating its character as an employer. This team focuses on creating a sense of belonging for all employees. Their strategy is a success—Marriott is continually recognized as one of the best places in the world to work.

Citigroup is another corporation that is expert at employer branding. Their employer brand mission is to foster a culture where the best people want to work. To accomplish that, they incorporate employee-led networks that serve to broker connection and communication, mentoring, and professional development activities that enhance the diversity of the company. There are more than 100 Citigroup employee networks around the world, all working to forward the employer brand. They are aligned as inclusive affinity groups, each focused on a diverse community including parents, women, LGBT, people with disabilities, ethnic heritages, and more.

Alignment with diversity initiatives

Having a plan in place to effectively communicate your corporate character is becoming strategically more important as companies compete to attract and engage the best-qualified talent, secure their long-term recruitment needs, and differentiate themselves from competitors. But it also helps align your diversity and inclusion goals. By discovering and developing your character as an employer, you also can construct a more inclusive environment.

An inclusive environment rings true with your employees and customers, all of whom want to feel like you have insight into who they are as individuals. If your goal is to extend your brand influence, then you need to have an extensively diverse team of employees who have different backgrounds and levels of experience. Your customer base isn’t homogenous; your workforce shouldn’t be either.

Develop your own strategy

When you are ready to develop or refresh your own employer brand strategy, consider these important action items:

• Define your corporate personality. Start by making sure you have clearly defined your corporate mission, vision, and values.
• Seek out employee insight. Survey your current and past employees to find out how well your corporate culture matches your outward facing mission, vision, and values. Identify top talent, and ask these employees what they especially like about working for the company.
• Address problems. Using the data from your surveys, address the issues you uncover that indicate your corporate culture is not living up to your consumer brand promise.
• Craft an employer value proposition. Using the data from your surveys, realistically assess your strengths as an employer. What’s special about your company? What do your top performers appreciate? Translate that into an employer value proposition that aligns with your customer value proposition.
• Define your employer brand. Because the employer brand should resonate with and be reflected by your employees, you must develop specific employer brand guidelines. This will define the messages that must resonate in each communication outward to potential employees, and inward to existing employees.
• Review all existing employee communications. Curate all current employee and recruiting communications. What do your website, social media, and job posts say? Revise those messages to be in line with your employer brand guidelines.
• List appropriate channels. Identify what communication channels you should use to disseminate your employer brand. From electronic to print, there are dozens of communication channels to use.

Leverage social media

Data show that social networking is an important component that job-seeking adults of all ages use to find job opportunities, learn about the character of employers, and understand corporate culture. Your customers use social media as well to inform buying decisions. From career websites and social raking sites to your own corporate website, there are multiple ways you can and should engage with potential employees and your customers. Be sure to engage on a human level to further your employer brand. For example:

Share instead of sell. Use social media to publish inside highlights about your company that authentically illustrate your employer brand. Give your employees a platform for telling their stories about working in your company and encourage them to share.

Show as well as tell. Show visuals (videos or photos) on your website of diverse teams working together, with attending captions or audible descriptions about how different skills and experiences serve to produce stellar results at your company.

Finally, you will need to measure and fine-tune your strategy as you go. Marketing your employer brand is a dynamic process just like the other aspects of your business.