Building an Employer Brand

Building an Employer Brand

In the present job markets, where companies compete for attracting the best of the talent, employer brand, sometimes, becomes more relevant when compared to various critical factors like job profile and the compensation package.

Employer brand is the image of an organization as a great place to work in the minds of its current employees and key stakeholders. It is the development of such an organizational culture which fosters a sense of belongingness with the company and encourages the employees to share organization's goals for success. In short, it is the value of the company in external marketplace. The goal of employer branding is to create loyal customers; the customers here being the employees.

An employer brand represents the core values of an organization. Companies that are considered good employers have a strong identity and an image in the marketplace. Building such a brand requires a lot of introspection by the company, and answering the questions, "what kind of company we are, and want to become?" and "how do we live up to the expectations of our stakeholders?".

What makes an employer a brand?
Simon Barrow, who is president of a successful consulting firm in London that specializes in employer branding services describes four elements that work together to make an employer brand. The first element is the Employment Package which is the offer that an employee gets including job responsibilities, financial compensation, work/life balance, the employee's role in organization and professional development. Next comes the Culture and Environment which includes the physical working environment, the size of the organization, and the organization's approach to work. Then there is Integrity. Delivering what has been initially committed always counts. The consequence of a lack of integrity is seen in the form of high attrition rates. And finally Management Performance that plays as a vital role in the Employer Branding process.

Building a brand is typically a twofold process. One is for prospective employees and the other for the current set of employees. While building brand for prospective employees, initiatives are targeted at building a repute in potential recruits about the company as a preferred place to work. On the other hand, while building brand internally, the company has to live up to its standards and incorporate a culture of respect and trust for employees.

Growing Significance
It is said that an unsatisfied customer tells ten people about his experience while an unsatisfied employee tells a hundred. Employer branding reflects the work culture in an organization. It has become more critical in today's times, as most professionals are looking at a stable career and establishing a long-term relationship with the company. Research shows that employees of industrial brands feel a much greater sense of pride, attachment and trust towards their employer. They are also significantly more likely to recommend their company to others and claim it treats employees well. Through right branding, the company can recruit the best talent and reinforce its positioning amongst its employees. It helps build trust and reliability. A good employer brand makes it easy to attract good talent and curb attrition. The strength of an organization's brand has a significant impact on the performance of its employees. Working with one of the largest or most innovative companies in a specific industry acts as a motivator too.

But as one moves higher in his career, brand name becomes of little significance as job role takes over. Brand name is the most important factor but at entry level only. When one is a fresher and embarks on one's career, the brand of a company matters. It helps in reflecting a stronger resume. With career growth, one places importance on things that are more meaningful to one's sense of purpose. According to Gautam Sinha, CEO, TVA Infotech, for employees who have spent three-four years in the industry, brand is high on the list. It is easier to sell the company if it is a reputed brand. For those who have spent five years in any industry, it's the job role that's important and for those with 10 year behind them, the job role becomes the most critical factor.

It is also being argued that in most cases, companies treat employer branding as a mere short-cut for attracting the talent. Instead of self-analysis, the HR departments tie up with ad agencies to conjure up an image that may be attractive to their target market, even if not their own. While some argue that organizations like Google with strong employer brand hardly spend money in building the brand; instead they focus on living the brand. Sasken, for example, has a stated 'People First' policy to emphasize that employees are the focus. Fedex has a core philosophy of 'people - service - profit' to indicate what comes first. Bill Marriott of Marriott Hotels does not tire of repeating the founder's belief "Take care of the associates, and they'll take good care of the guests, and the guests will come back." These organizations reveal a high degree of trust in the management of the organization. Managements must understand that the core value offering of the organization is to engage employees towards being productive and responsive to customers. In the end, it is believed that if the company takes care of people, people will take care of the company.

Ref: http://www.naukrihub.com/hr-today/employer-brand-building.html

A True Story About an Employee Who Was Too Good

A True Story About an Employee Who Was Too Good

by Steve Bruce

I met him at least 8 years ago at the Atlanta Hartsfield International Airport. He wore black pants and a white shirt with a black tie and bib apron. "Let me carry that for you, young man," he said, noticing the balancing act I was performing with my luggage and the tray of food from Paschal's Restaurant.

The old fellow grabbed my tray with a smile and was off, limping heavily on one leg that was obviously shorter than the other. I followed him around the escalator to an empty table I would never have found, and it was only then when I realized that he had also brought napkins, a straw, and packages of salt and pepper ... items I usually forget.

With a flourish, he wiped the table, removed my plate from the tray and arranged it carefully with the napkins and the iced tea. Pulling back my chair as I hurriedly retrieved three, one-dollar bills from my pocket, he smiled and said, "God bless you." His nametag read: FOSTER.

I was curious to see if this was a new service the airport had put in place. Certainly, I had never been "helped" before. I saw several other men and women dressed like my new friend, loosely assembled, and talking with each other, waiting without enthusiasm for tables to come empty. At that point, one of them would disengage from the group, clear any trash left on the table wipe it down, and return to their co-workers.

Glancing around the huge area, I quickly spotted Foster. Smiling, laughing, and moving fast, he helped one person after another. He never waited to be summoned. He went where he was needed.

I was back through the airport the next day and couldn't wait to visit the food court again. Sure enough, there he was, the old man with the big smile. He helped me to a table as he had the day before (with napkins, salt and pepper, and a straw) and said, "God bless you, young man," as he held out my chair.

I had a twenty folded and ready to place in his hand that day. I was impressed and inspired by this old man who struggled to walk, yet moved like a dervish as he cleaned empty tables and looked for people to serve. From that day forward, he was Mr. Foster to me.

As the years rolled by, I developed a great admiration for Mr. Foster. I saw him several times each month and introduced him to anyone with whom I was traveling. "Watch this guy," I would always instruct as he left our table. "And watch that bunch of other people over there dressed just like him." The contrast was clear.

I never once suspected Mr. Foster was making a play for tips. In fact, though I rarely slipped him less than twenty dollars, he often made me wait while he helped someone in obvious need of assistance. And whether they offered money or not, he always smiled, held their chairs and said, "God bless you."

And then he was gone. Unable to find my friend, I asked the ladies at Paschal's, "Where is Mr. Foster today?"

"Fired," they told me. "They fired him. Humiliated him. Sent the man home!"

The Atlanta Airport Authority, I was told, had determined that Mr. Foster had become "a distraction." They ordered him to stop helping people. "Stand with everyone else," he was told, "and wait for the tables to empty. You are a busboy; act like one."

A few months later, he was back (happy as ever) on a trial basis. But I never again let him carry my tray. I did, however, continue with the tips. He took the money because I made him take it. I was mad for him and he knew it. His "God bless you's" often came to me with a tear. His spirit was gone.

Today, I went by Paschal's. Before I could even ask, one of the ladies on the serving line spotted me. "I been expecting you," she said. "Mr. Foster's gone. He quit. Told 'em he was old and sick and couldn't do the work no more." Then she cocked her head and added with a whisper, "He ain't sick. There ain't nothing broken about that old man."

Nope, I thought as I turned away, there ain't nothing broken about that old man. Nothing but his heart.

What happens to the Mr. Fosters in your organization? What can you do to encourage employees to go above and beyond for customers? Or should you? What do you think?

Andy Andrews can be reached at www.Andyandrews.com.

Strategic Human Resource Management

In today’s intensely competitive and global marketplace, maintaining a competitive advantage by becoming a low cost leader or a differentiator puts a heavy premium on having a highly committed or competent workforce. Competitive advantage lies not just in differentiating a product or service or in becoming the low cost leader but in also being able to tap the company’s special skills or core competencies and rapidly respond to customer’s needs and competitor’s moves. In other words competitive advantage lies in management’s ability to consolidate corporate-wide technologies and production skills into competencies that empower individual businesses to adapt quickly to changing opportunities.

In a growing number of organizations human resources are now viewed as a source of competitive advantage. There is greater recognition that distinctive competencies are obtained through highly developed employee skills, distinctive organizational cultures, management processes and systems. This is in contrast to the traditional emphasis on transferable resources such as equipment. Increasingly it is being recognized that competitive advantage can be obtained with a high quality workforce that enables organizations to compete on the basis of market responsiveness, product and service quality, differentiated products and technological innovation.

Strategic human resource management has been defined as ‘ the linking of human resources with strategic goals and objectives in order to improve business performance and develop organizational culture that foster innovation and flexibility ‘. Strategic HR means accepting the HR function as a strategic partner in the formulation of the company’s strategies as well as in the implementation of those strategies through HR activities such as recruiting, selecting, training and rewarding personnel. Whereas strategic HR recognizes HR’s partnership role in the strategizing process, the term HR Strategies refers to specific HR courses of action the company plans to pursue to achieve it’s aims.

HR management can play a role in environmental scanning i.e. identifying and analyzing external opportunities and threats that may be crucial to the company’s success. Similarly HR management is in a unique position to supply competitive intelligence that may be useful in the strategic planning process. HR also participates in the strategy formulation process by supplying information regarding the company’s internal strengths and weaknesses. The strengths and weaknesses of a company’s human resources can have a determining effect on the viability of the firm’s strategic options.

By design the perspective demands that HR managers become strategic partners in business operations playing prospective roles rather than being passive administrators reacting to the requirements of other business functions. Strategic HR managers need a change in their mindset from seeing themselves as relationship managers to resource managers knowing how to utilize the full potential of their human resources.

The new breed of HR managers need to understand and know how to measure the monetary impact of their actions, so as to be able to demonstrate the value added contributions of their functions. HR professionals become strategic partners when they participate in the process of defining business strategy, when they ask questions that move strategy to action and when they design HR practices that align with the business strategy. By fulfilling this role, HR professionals increase the capacity of a business to execute its strategies.

The primary actions of the strategic human resource manager translate business strategies into HR priorities. In any business setting, whether corporate, functional, business unit or product line a strategy exists either explicitly in the formal process or document or implicitly through a shared agenda on priorities. As strategic partners, HR professionals should be to identify the HR practices that make the strategy happen. The process of identifying these HR priorities is called organizational diagnosis, a process through which an organization is audited to determine its strengths and weaknesses.

Translating business strategies into HR practices helps a business in three ways. First, the business can adapt to change because the time from the conception to the execution of a strategy is shortened. Second, the business can better meet customer demands because its customer service strategies have been translated into specific policies and practices. Third, the business can achieve financial performance through its more effective execution of strategy.

In brief, a strategic perspective of HRM that requires simultaneous consideration of both external (business strategy) and internal (consistency) requirement leads to superior performance of the firm. This performance advantage is achieved by:

. Marshalling resources that support the business strategy and implementing the chosen strategy, efficiently and effectively.

. Utilizing the full potential of the human resources to the firm’s advantage.

. Leveraging other resources such as physical assets and capital to complement and augment the human resources based advantage.

HR to become a Strategic Partner

Challenges for HR to become a Strategic Partner

1. Avoid Strategic Plans On Top Shelf (SPOTS).
More strategies are written than acted upon. More visions are created than realized. More missions are espoused than executed. More goals are stated than accomplished. Becoming a strategic partner means turning strategic statements into a set of organizational actions. Overcoming the challenge of SPOTS requires that HR professionals force organizational issues into the strategic discussion before strategies are decided. HR needs to facilitate organizational diagnosis that highlights how aligned business strategies are to organization culture.

2. Create a Balanced Scorecard
The concept of Balanced Scorecard is not new but its application has become increasingly popular. A balanced scorecard focuses on serving multiple stakeholders (investors, customers, and employees) and can be a total performance index assessing executive performance. HR executives, for example, are judged on the extent to which they add value for each stakeholder. The categories apply to any large or complex business.

• Economic Value Added (EVA): Meeting the financial numbers expected of the executive.
• Customer Value Added (CVA): Meeting Customer-service goals.
• People Value Added (PVA): Meeting employee expectations.

These three indicators form an overall, balanced scorecard measure for tracking executive performance. If HR executives are to be strategic partners, they need to absorb and apply the concept of the balanced scorecard in two ways.

First, they need to be equally accountable for all segments of the balanced scorecard, not just for the employee dimension. As the balanced scorecard indicates, employee commitment is only one criterion for effective HR performance, and HR professionals in strategic partnership will be held accountable for the same dimensions as other managers.
The HR professional’s performance is no longer judged by his PVA score alone, but by all three scores. This approach requires that HR professionals master their business’s financial and customer issues and recognize their contribution to attaining these goals.

Second, although accountable for all three dimensions of the balanced scorecard, HR professionals should provide intellectual leadership on the employee dimension. This means that we as HR professionals should not restrict ourselves in measuring employee commitment and satisfaction index alone. Rather, we need to define the employee dimension of the balanced scorecard not only in terms of employee attitude, but also in terms of organizational processes. The processes represent those activities that affect employee attitude, such as leadership, teamwork, communication. Empowerment, shared values, mechanisms for treating individuals with dignity and so on. By measuring these processes and employee attitudes, HR professional fully define the employee stakeholder dimension of the balanced scorecard.

3. Benchmarking, or learning about best practices, has become increasingly important when it comes to evaluating Human Resource management. With great fervor, teams of employees identify and visit other companies recognized as world class. These field visits provide businesses with information on how to gauge their work relative to the best in class.
Traditionally, benchmarking was done on the harder, more objective aspects of a business, for example, technologies, systems, financial ratios, or quality. Increasingly, firms also benchmark softer management practices.

Firms like General Electric and Digital Equipment Corporation deploy a senior management team to examine management practices in some of the best managed firms in the world to identify key processes for improving productivity. It was concluded that best practice in human resources should focus less on a particular practice than on a set of general principles. This involves leveraging a system of HR practices by focusing on two or three key strategic initiatives that promote the integrative theme. This way the HR function adds value that is credible and understood by both line and HR management.