Employees as Consumers – disrupting HR

Lucy Adams (ex HR Director of the BBC) recently presented in Bristol her own thoughts and highlights from her recent book titled ‘HR Disrupted’. Witty, engaging and believable, her presentation was completely refreshing and got me thinking about not only our own business but how we work with our clients. What we do here is designed to be seen and to appeal to a wide range of audiences, internal as well as external.

In my role at Six, I’ve worked with different organisations for many years, with planners, internal comms specialists, HR managers, and consultants. There is no doubt that many HR practices are ready for change and that a one-size fits all approach simply doesn’t work anymore.

External brand propositions change and evolve as new strategies come into play - nothing new there. Yet, with increased pressure on organisations to attract and keep the right kind of talent, along with the huge changes in the workforce, HR departments are up against it these days, in how they and their employer brands remain competitive and relevant.

Bringing diverse teams on board through business-wide changes and embedding new brand values into an organisation needs to be done only after careful consideration. Often it can affect ways of working, highlight skills gaps and magnify organisational processes that need improving.

So, how in 2018 and beyond, do we successfully engage with different sets of people? How do we tackle resistance to change? How do we consider how adaptable people are and importantly how do we make brand values believable, meaningful, memorable and pragmatic to the Baby Boomers right through to the Generation Z’s, who all work side-by-side with their own inherent beliefs? For example, Baby Boomers are generally perceived as more “reserved” while Gen Y and Z tend to view change as a way of grabbing new opportunities. They’re also much less traditional in their learning methods.

One thing Lucy touched upon which really resonated with me was how we should treat employees as consumers. And I think this could help improve how values and behaviours are properly adopted. How employees engage in the outside world with brands is exactly what we should be considering when wanting to do the same with an employer brand. Perhaps internal comms should now be called Internal Marketing… perhaps Marketing and HR could learn much more from each other…

We know we always have to be wary of stereotypes in all marketing and the same goes for clumping internal teams into the same camp otherwise, I think we are in danger of creating negative generational stereotypes. The trend for creating employee personas is an interesting and helpful one as marketing and HR start to grow even closer together in some businesses to create a more customer-centric company culture, making it much easier to communicate through channels that will resonate stronger. 

It really surprises me how many large businesses are not following this trend.

In 2016 LinkedIn carried out research into this disconnect. They found from the brands they spoke to that 77% fail to include their values and purpose on their website or recruitment adverts. Yet, with over 50% of UK professionals considering an organisation’s higher purpose when looking for a right employer match – they seem to be missing a trick. Aligning HR and Marketing can collaboratively help in this competitive, tight labour market to help raise the profiles of employer brands externally as well as internally.

I found Lucy’s book ‘HR Disrupted’ a good place to start to look at different ways of trying something new. HR has traditionally been the most hierarchical and process driven area of a business, it needs to transform before it gets left behind. 

Lucy finishes by advising HR to;

·     Lead by example

·     Be well connected and look outside the business

·     Get to know the people in your business, build personas

·     Trust people to perform well and breakdown processes

·     Embrace tech and social media

And lastly, I’d add to this - Do something different!