Culture Care Technologies
  Human Resource & Organization Development Specialists in Company Culture

Employment Branding

A major challenge in many industries is attracting and retaining the best and brightest in a tight labour market. An increasing number of companies are using the process of branding to successfully recruit and keep top talent.

The Employment Brand

Similar to a marketing brand that describes the experience a customer can expect from a service or product, a company's employment brand describes the workplace experience an employee can expect in working for the company. A description of the expected workplace experience generally pulls from the same three categories used in employee engagement surveys -– satisfaction, motivation and commitment:

•  Satisfaction is reflected in feelings of being supported, respected and treated fairly. Towards this end, employers provide above average salaries, consult employees on key decisions and offer an endless array of benefits like flex time, day care and college tuition.

•  Motivation is based on factors such as a sense of achievement, recognition and professional growth. These arise from providing challenging and rewarding work, responsibility and the opportunity for advancement

•  Workplace commitment is experienced through deriving meaning, a feeling of being part of something special and a deep personal engagement in the business of the company.

The first two categories, satisfaction and motivation, are mainly products of the work climate or environment. Feelings of being supported and respected or deriving a sense of achievement can be generated by the employer through measures such as HR policies and job design. The third category, commitment, is primarily a product of the culture of the company. Deriving meaning or becoming personally and emotionally engaged in the business of the company don't lend themselves to being produced by management. The dynamics of commitment preclude it being provoked; it can only be evoked through culture.

Commitment arises through a "merger" of an individual with the company culture. He or she finds the company mission compelling, is inspired by the vision and shares, with other employees, the beliefs and values required to accomplish the mission and realize the vision. It's through a series of such individual mergers with these beliefs and values that the culture comes to be held among and between employees. These "merged" employees are the carriers of the company culture.

The fusing of individual and organizational mindsets allows both parties to experience the benefits of commitment. For the employee, it's that work becomes much more than just a job, a source of meaning, not just money. For the company, benefits include the employees' discretionary effort and personal energy, contributions it's not entitled to and can only be given voluntarily.

Until a company has developed a sufficiently healthy work environment, one that makes it a very good or even a great place to work, it's fruitless to try to nurture the kind of culture and evoke the commitment that will make it a great company. A more common mistake with the climate-culture relationship is just the opposite. It's a company failing to leverage its (often sizable) investment in developing a healthy work climate and motivated employees into nurturing a highly effective culture with a committed, even devoted, workforce.

Such companies are at quite a disadvantage when it comes to competing employment brands. For the choice of the best and the brightest is obvious; it's not company X that promises a workplace experience of support, respect, achievement, recognition and growth, but company Y that offers all of the above plus meaning. This advantage is akin to a service company promising customer satisfaction while another promises customer delight or even “WOW”. It's no contest.

The Employment Branding Process

Employment branding brings together two fileds of expertise, branding and and organization development, into a 4 step process of assessment, design, development and communication. Properly executed, the process enables an employer to become the employer of choice in its industry.

Successful employment branding provides a company with a significant competitive advantage in hiring and retention. Not only does it increase self-referrals of potential qualified candidates, but it also boosts referrals from current employees. Besides active job seekers, the target audience includes top talent employed elsewhere who are unaware that there's potentially more to a workplace experience than just the satisfaction associated with a healthy company environment (a.k.a. "passive" applicants).

In addition to these primary outcomes, there are several important by-products of employment branding. One is an improvement in employee loyalty and pride as members are reminded of the highlights of their workplace experience. Another is that the dissemination of the employment brand reinforces the cultural values and beliefs that enable strategy implementation, mission accomplishment and, over the long term, realization of the company's vision of a preferred future.