Getting to grips with employer branding

If the CIPD's recent conference on talent management was popular, its latest event focusing on employer branding was a sell-out, underlining the high level of current interest in the topic.

Held in the agreeable environs of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel ballroom, Knightsbridge, on Tuesday 4^th March, the conference aimed to turn the spotlight on employer branding and employee engagement.  Introducing delegates to the event, chair Helen Rosethorn (CEO of Bernard Hodes Group UK) said that, following work her company had recently undertaken for a global organisation, it had become evident that the one thing people (both internal and external) wanted to be clear about was the "line of sight to their business purpose" - an insight with important lessons for the engagement piece.

Brand strategy

The first session was given over to defining and developing employer brand strategy.  Referring to a Boston Consulting Group report that had identified talent management as a big issue in the war for talent, CIPD organisation and resourcing adviser Deborah Fernon said employer branding was key to winning that war.  She also announced the launch of the CIPD's interactive, practical, online employer branding tool (www.cipd.co.uk/tools) as an adjunct to its recently-commissioned research, produced by Barkers.

Barkers' planning director Andrew Platt-Higgins then took delegates through the key findings of this research, which defined the employer brand as "a set of attributes that make an organisation distinctive and attractive to those who will feel an affinity with it and deliver their best performance within it."  He reminded the audience that most organisations already had some form of employer brand: the key question was, were they actively managing it?

He talked of the importance of defining distinctive brand attributes (not to be confused with the ubiquitous ‘values') and ensuring that the brand proposition was based on a close alignment between expectation and reality.  He also stressed the importance of measuring achievement and making an effective business case.

Robert Nuttall, head of internal comms at M&S, then provided a fascinating case-study of an employer brand makeover undertaken in the context of a major business recovery plan.  With minimal differences between internal and external applications, the new-look brand is intended to be light-touch and accessible, and is already playing a key part in restoring M&S' reputation as one of Britain's "iconic" employers.  The organisation's industry-leading focus on the environmental/sustainability agenda, Plan A ("because there is no Plan B"), is also providing "a very powerful form of employee engagement on many levels going forward" as well as generating customer initiatives that would have been "unthinkable even a year ago."

Bottom-line impact

The next two case-studies focused on the bottom-line impact of employee engagement and employer branding.  Greig Aitken, head of employee engagement at the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, described himself as "a banker by trade doing ‘missionary work' in HR" - hence his keen interest measuring the business impact of employee engagement in the greatest possible detail.

With RBS' multi-brand strategy and global (53 countries) range only adding to the complexity, top-down commitment to the topic was both essential and, happily, forthcoming.  And with just a 1% reduction in employee turnover representing a total saving of some £30m, it's not hard to see the importance to RBS of delivering on its brand promise.  Furthermore, the company has also highlighted strong linkages between levels of employee engagement, customer satisfaction and business performance.

Both the group's new, impressively-appointed Gogarburn HQ and the total proposition (including non-financial rewards) had been designed with the flexibility to meet employees' wants and needs at different stages of their careers, resulting in a 62% uplift in employee engagement at the new HQ.  Apart from delivering on the brand promise, Greig stressed the importance of understanding why people leave (linking this back into recruitment strategy) and linking data on customer service, employee engagement and business outcomes.

Deborah O'Dea, president of the Healthcare People Management Association, looked at the issue of employee engagement from the very different perspective of the NHS, having facilitated significant change programmes at two West London hospitals.  The first of these, at Ealing Hospital in the late 1990s, succeeded in reducing the vacancy rate to just 4%, while more recently the change agenda for St Mary's Paddington incorporated a total focus on staff engagement.

Here the results were even more spectacular, with the hospital itself achieving top national performance ratings in addition to huge improvements in staff turnover, vacancy rates and sickness absence.  In Deborah's view, great organisations need to focus on strategies and systems that underpin staff engagement - and continue to measure it.

Further tips on employee engagement were provided through a panel debate consisting of Peter Collinson (deputy HR director at the Department for Schools, Children and Families), Ivan Newman (global property programme manager at Reuters) and Kelly Field (head of comms and continuous improvement at Cross Keys Homes).

Long-term engagement

The afternoon focus shifted to ‘maintaining long-term brand engagement', with two further case-studies to illustrate the point.  Marc Silverside, recently promoted to head of comms at Macmillan Cancer Support, outlined the two-year process that culminated in the organisation's rebranding, with the new brand "now driving everything we do."  Prior to this, Macmillan's brand awareness was low, as was the level of understanding about what it actually did among both employees and supporters.

A new image was developed with the help of Wolff Olins, who initially encouraged Macmillan not to bother with ‘values' (although, inevitably, a set of five has subsequently been introduced).  Key results have included enabling people to view the organisation differently by differentiating it effectively, and creating a larger body of people to help it achieve its aims.  It had also been very important to translate ‘dense' material into snappy messages.  The whole programme has proved successful so far, with some 87% of staff able to support the brand strategy.  With the benefit of hindsight, Marc's only regret was following Wolff Olin's advice to keep the brand development process ‘secret', given MCS's open culture.

For Jenny Burns, who leads the British Gas internal comms team at Centrica, the challenge was very different - to lift levels of employee engagement for a largely demotivated workforce at a low point in the company's fortunes.  The action plan involved actively engaging senior management, developing a new employer brand (which went live last week), and ensuring that both vision and values continue to live up to the brand promise.  An intensive programme of road-shows helped to boost employee commitment, along with practical improvements in areas such as individual recognition and reward plus basic ‘hygiene factors'.

Of course, this is "just the start of a long journey", and Jenny stressed the key importance of team managers in maintaining the momentum and "flying the flag".

Joined-up thinking

Orange's employer brand manager David Roberts spoke next on joining up the internal and external employer brand.  He began by noting that "nothing puts the fear of God into marketing like the fact that HR want to create an employer brand," and defined the employer brand as "merely the employment promise for both new recruits and existing staff."

When France Telecom decided to rebrand all its businesses as ‘Orange' some eighteen months ago, this provided the opportunity to develop a new brand showing how Orange had moved on (from a mobile phone company to a major player in the converged market space) and appealing to both head and heart ("a brand I love and a company I can grow with").  This involved breaking the employment offer down into emotional and rational components, and ensuring the presentation of a consistent identity across all HR communication channels.  In other words, similar imagery is used on both internal intranet and external careers sites as well as other recruitment communications.

David stressed that brand development was a collaborative process (involving not just marketing and HR but also diversity, PR and other stakeholder inputs), and also emphasised the importance of research in delivering key insights.  The employer brand should be seen a long-term project - which means the focus should be 1% on strategy and 99% on alignment!

Driving cultural change

Finally, Nathan Clements of B&Q (whose job-title of organisation development director also takes in responsibility for everything from HR and internal comms to local customer care) looked at the use of employer branding and employee engagement in driving cultural change.  Much of this work centred around B&Q's move away from a ‘blokey', testosterone-fuelled retail environment ("You can do it") to a softer, more inclusive style ("Let's do it) with a whole new range of products and services to match.  And this shift in brand focus has been directly reflected in the employment world, with not so much as "a fag-paper" between the brand and employment messages put out into the marketplace.

Among Nathan's recommendations were the need to have a clear story, a warning not to expect instant results, and a reminder that increased employee engagement isn't an end in itself - it needs to be translated into results!

Closing the event, Helen Rosethorn said she'd recently read a book about the three signs of a miserable job, one of which was ‘anonymity.'  And if the conference had produced a single idea to take away, it was to ensure that employees know they're doing something that really counts.