Is your Employer Brand just a perception?

Chapter 3, Part 2 - Corporate Brand Personality

THE WORKING ENVIRONMENT

In reality, the actual working environment can sometimes be far removed from the perception created, due to the behaviours of people.  There is a significant height to fall from when an employer brand is created but out of alignment with reality, and you may not easily be able to recover from this. Negative comments will spread quickly. It is simply good practice to project an accurate employer brand to the outside world and for employees to take ownership of the importance of their role in portraying it.

Every senior manager I’ve spoken to agrees that an internal culture will spill out to the outside world too. It is simply not possible for a culture to be contained inside closed corporate doors only. For example, for years Google had a great reputation for what they do and as a fabulous company to work for. However social media often reports the opposite of Google as an employer. Whether it’s accurate or not, as an outsider we really have no way of knowing, but the risk to Google’s reputation as a result of these social media titters can spread, diluting the employer brand significantly. Google is no longer a start-up, it is a major corporation with all the challenges this encompasses.  Perhaps therefore the image they always projected is not in alignment with the present reality.  It is crucial to present an accurate employer brand picture, and then make sure every one of your employees lives up to it, by believing in it themselves. 

 This is a statement made by a previous client of mine, the Dorchester Collection of Hotels:

‘Our people are our most important asset. We are committed to treating every member of staff with dignity and respect, with processes that are fair and open.’ This is a worthy statement to make and one that I suspect, from our work with them, is reinforced consistently by the Dorchester staff. However, how many organizations make similar claims in the way they treat their staff and then pay no attention to the monitoring of this and to ensuring it actually happens to the degree they advertise? The gap between statement and reality is often significant.

 We know that most employees leave their job because of their direct line manager.  A bad line manager can take a good team of people and destroy it, causing the best employees to leave and the remainder to lose all motivation to stay. The way your managers behave is critical to your employer brand and it is very often overlooked because it’s a challenge to deal with. However, these people will become ‘weeds’ in your teams and your company – they will create an undercurrent of bad behaviour which affects the overall culture in a team and the whole organization, that eventually eats up the good people and they leave. Too often this situation is ignored in the hope it will improve, rather than addressed head-on, especially when the issue is with senior management.

 While you need to find a way to eliminate the ‘weeds’ from your business, and it will of course take time if you allow it to happen through natural wastage alone, you can start to work on bringing about a culture in which the ‘weeds’ cannot thrive or survive.  This is where employee brand comes in.

Employee brand is all about influencing the behaviour of employees to reinforce your corporate brand values in their everyday work.  It is a strategy for creating behaviours that are ‘on brand’ and that reinforce the attributes that an organisation wants to promote as part of its reputation or brand. The behaviours it seeks to create are both internal and external with the result that the corporate brand is strengthened with every communication.  Sarah Dickins , (former) executive people director of Friends Provident says; ‘Keep it simple, be clear what your key messages are, and line everything up behind it - hiring, training, communication, reward systems, etc. Reinforce it at every opportunity as a leadership team’.

Simplicity seems to be a common theme amongst the companies getting the employee brand right, or that are at least on the right track.  Peter Merrett , (former) Head of Customer Experience at JLL Australia says; ‘Our values are simple – making people’s lives at work as easy and enjoyable as possible, is a key one for us. We believe it creates the right attitude of respect amongst the whole team’. He goes on to question, ‘Trusting and empowering people is so easy to do so why don’t all employers do this?’ My view is that the mechanisms are not always in place at line management level in order for this to happen consistently, and often senior leadership and boards are not aware of this barrier.

In Chapter 1, we looked at the business model of the Swedish bank Handelsbanken. At Handelsbanken they have no formal employee or employer brand policy, and see no need for one. They simply have a culture to help and respect each other. By keeping it simple, they believe they achieve a high level of understanding and engagement with the overall culture they want to create that comes through to the outside world too.

When looking at the whole brand-to-people process in organizations, I spoke with Claire Harrison-Church , (former) marketing and brand director of ASDA. I asked her how at ASDA they ensure the people element of the brand works to improve brand messaging and ultimately increase return on investment of the marketing and brand budget. I also asked her how closely the marketing department work with the HR and learning & development teams to maximize the effect of brand awareness through training to create a strong employee brand. Claire said that they realize through recent metrics that brand recommendation is the most important piece to track. She added that, ‘customer recommendations have the closest correlation to sales growth. If we can get our customers to love our brand, our business and our people, then they will talk about us positively and naturally shop more with us.’ This reinforces my statement in the Introduction to this book, that ‘the most important part of any corporate brand today is what your customers say about your brand to their contacts.’

As a result of these new findings and therefore the focus at ASDA on what their customers say about them, they are now starting to work on socializing this through to their colleagues. Claire believes that ‘because there is a very strong affinity between ASDA colleagues and ASDA customers, we know when we're doing a good job and a not so good job - by talking to our ASDA colleagues.’ The intention is for the advertising to help engage colleagues in the same way as it does with customers. This emotional engagement piece has been missing until now.

I personally wonder if this will be enough for individual colleagues to be able to interpret and internalize the brand as effectively as is needed in order to truly maximize brand investment. I put the question to Claire and her response was: ‘We feel that ASDA colleagues know the company well. The ASDA brand is actually our ASDA colleagues, more so than other retail brands.’   Only time will tell of course, how effective the advertising is in this respect.  However perhaps organizations in the retail world understand and achieve this with their advertising, more than other sectors.

Claire finished by saying; ‘The best advertising is, at heart of it, expanding on the brand truth.’  I would add, that if the brand truth is the true experience we all have as clients and customers, then you have to be absolutely sure that what you are advertising truly replicates what your customers experience on a consistent basis.

I interviewed Jeremy Goring , CEO of The Goring Hotel in London.  The Goring Hotel is the last remaining family-owned luxury hotel in London and is known for its Royal guests, its impeccably English manners and its sense of wit and fun. I was intrigued to find out how they manage to maintain the consistency of service and their unique brand experience with every member of staff that guests encounter when they visit.

Firstly of course they are a small hotel so managing their brand could be perceived as slightly easier than say a large multinational brand. However, this could go the other way too - because they are small there is more of an expectation for every element to be up to standard 100 per cent of the time. This is tough. However as Jeremy Goring says, ‘There is nowhere to hide in a small hotel – everybody has to be on the same page with the service and behaviours and maintain the standards, all the time.’  In fact, this could apply to any small business.

Fun is top of the list when it comes to the reason they all work there and this they achieve incredibly well. In a subsequent interview with a range of employees there, fun and the feeling of a home-from-home for their guests were high on the list of reasons they love to work there.

In summarizing Jeremy Goring’s key points on how they maintain the brand standards at The Goring with every member of staff, he said that they consistently:

·      believe in what they are trying to achieve and are passionate about it;

·      live the brand value of ‘fun’ every day in all they do;

·      ensure employees are trusted to make the right decisions for guests;

·      share positive guest feedback with all the staff to motivate;

·      Treat all employees as individuals and encourage them to use their initiative (they are not told how to answer the phone for example);

·      Make training less formulaic and more intelligent, with some twists.

Interestingly, when asking a selection of the staff about the brand of Jeremy Goring himself, the key words that consistently came through were: eccentric, fun, impeccably English, passionate, genuine. A pretty good match I would say, with the words he used himself to describe the uniqueness and success of the business!

WHY WE HAVE TO GO DEEPER

I have found that many more companies state that an employer brand and/or an employee brand are key to success, than those who actually have a clear and structured plan for each. I frequently experience organizations who have a fabulous positive intention to engage their employees with the corporate brand values. They have their values displayed on walls all around their offices in the hope that employees will then live and breathe these values every day. However, it hardly ever works to the level they expect it to and need it to. Many times I have had a group of senior managers in a training session and have asked them to give me their corporate values and vision – rarely can they give me them without a concentrated team effort! This tells me that they are not totally embedded in their hearts and minds. Internally there can often be a focus on the values or words per se, rather than going further and getting to the heart of the individuals, and giving them the tools to interpret and project these values consistently in their own authentic way.

In Chapter 1, I referred to my interview with Andrew Murphy OBE , (former) retail director of John Lewis. John Lewis is a great example of a brand that has built a reputation that is consistently experienced by customers every single day. From the helpful, welcoming service, the attention to the personal details, the personality of the staff coming through and the handling of the ‘never knowingly under-sold’ ethos they live by.  We know what to expect and that expectation is met time after time.  It is clear that the employee brand is managed closely. We’ve already heard some of the elements that make John Lewis a great company to work for, however it is the emphasis on the role of the individual and how they are valued for what they personally bring, that makes for a great employee brand there.

IT'S NOT JUST ABOUT CUSTOMER SERVICE TRAINING

Employee branding programmes are often put in place to address the need for alignment between corporate values and people, and they tend to typically include customer service training and brand awareness. However they rarely go to the level needed for individuals to really modify and re-align their mind-set and therefore their behaviours in the way they communicate.

Training that focuses more on the emotional intelligence of an individual, rather than the mechanics of how to do their job, will have a much greater impact on the effectiveness of changing of mind-set and behaviours. The behaviours also become embedded for an individual at this level and start to become a habit and natural way of doing things. Internalising the values of the organization and interpreting them in their own way, causes the employee to feel like they belong and that they are not trying to be somebody they are not. Feeling that they fit in to the culture is important to the way they ultimately behave.

If employees get to the level of feeling that they are doing something in alignment with their own purpose and values, that truly motivates and drives them, then they will be more likely to behave authentically and feel like they are not just doing what is best for the company but for themselves too. This is the point at which you as an organization are truly engaging employees in the brand values and influencing them to behave in a way that supports those values.

 THE ASDA WAY WITH PEOPLE

Hayley Tatum MBE. , chief people & corporate affairs officer at ASDA (part of the Wal-Mart Group), has had great success with employee engagement and I interviewed her to find out what they are doing so well there. When Hayley arrived at ASDA, she found that they were great at addressing the needs of their customers and not so great at deploying similar attention to their ‘colleagues’ (employees). So she initiated and carried out, with the help of PricewaterhouseCoopers, the biggest piece of research they have done in 20 years, to find out what were the common trends and themes to colleague engagement across all parts of the business and at all levels.

The result of this research showed her that there were four key levers needed to ensure a high level of employee engagement:

·               fairness – not meaning that everybody would be treated the same, but that everybody would be treated fairly;

·               respect – having respect for each other, and colleagues wanted to be respected by their line managers in particular - they need to feel valued;

·               opportunity – the chance to progress in their careers at their pace, if they choose to;

·               pride – being able to feel a sense of pride in the company brand. They did not want to listen to bad news or feel embarrassed about their company.

These four levers have now become their pledges to all their colleagues and they guarantee that everybody will experience these consistently in their roles.

Of course, I was intrigued as to how they can guarantee this to over 7000 colleagues, as we are really talking about creating a culture. Hayley believes this has been achieved for the following reasons:

·               They send out an employee engagement survey every year, centred around these four pledges, and this is sent from Hayley herself personally. It is introduced by a video from her, that serves to provide a level of personality, commitment and care, rather than it being faceless and seen as just another anonymous survey that nobody will do anything with.  Interestingly they get an incredible 92 per cent response rate with these surveys.

·               They then act on the results – they form focus groups with colleagues from all levels and parts of the business, and share the results with them, check that they believe these are accurate and discuss what should be done. Colleagues therefore feel a real sense of contribution to the business and they help to shape the plan.

·               Every quarter they do a ‘pulse’ survey with a random 10 per cent of colleagues, again from across the business.  This allows them to keep an on-going read on their performance where changes have been implemented.

They found that the most critical area with regard to the guarantee of the pledges rested with line managers. For all colleagues, the brand of the company is their line manager and how they behave. As Hayley says, ‘We want all our colleagues to feel absolute pride in working for ASDA and the people they work for.’ This means ensuring that their local management and line managers all behave in a way that demonstrates respect to their teams and shows individuals they are valued. This is in addition to learning and adopting authentic leadership styles that are conducive to this environment.

ASDA have an internal culture that truly supports their colleagues to be who they are and be the best they can be authentically. Our programmes at ASDA had to be in total alignment with this. Our work there supported this ethos in providing leaders with the tools for being authentic and developing their own brand as well as recognizing the different personality types in their teams and what individuals need to feel valued and respected. 

What works at ASDA is the fact that their employee engagement is actually a very effective listening and follow-up action exercise. As Hayley says: ‘We’ve got to keep listening, testing and following through with action.’

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