Employer Branding

Overview

Employer Branding is how intentionally organizations build a reputation as an EMPLOYER of CHOICE.  Becoming a talent magnet, attracting external talent who want to be associated with this brand. 

As companies focus to build this reputation in the given markets they operate in, Companies share their 'value proposition' bringing a closer picture of who they are?  What their sense of purpose is?  What the culture of the organization is? What they value the most.

In parallel, employer branding is an effective tool for organizations to build their employee engagement.  Employee engagement is the passion and excitement of being associated with a brand and accordingly an organization.  Employee engagement drives passion for the job, commitment to the organization and the desire to go the extra mile in the work being performed.  Employee engagement is the broader sense of belonging, different from employee satisfaction, which is driven on an individual basis by the job, manager, team… etc.

Employee engagement is directly linked to productivity, commitment to deliver discretionary effort, which is accordingly linked to the bottom line of organizations.  Organizations with engaged employees, outperform organizations with less engaged employees by 200%.

The most recent PwC CEO Survey has shown what keeps CEOs awake is their concern that they will not be able to find the people who will help them achieve their growth aspirations.  When organizations work intentionally to pro-actively build this reputation, this reduces the pain of having to search for the right talent, when needs arise.

Given the recent COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on global economies, businesses will need to be profoundly vested in their brand.  The impact of this is not only going to impact the way we work moving forward, it has already started to shift people’s acceptance of being remote and working on project basis, adding more opportunities for the GIG economy and increasing even more the war for talent.

Our Employer Branding Model

 A model built on multiple pillars with both an external and internal focus…  the main pillars being…

Tell your story!

 Re-think your Career site, in terms of content and location; build a social media plan

Show case your value proposition and make it audience relevant …. Are you addressing millennials?  Those with a rare skill set?  Are you focused on attracting a specific style of thinking?

Build engagement.

Share the special DNA of your company with candidates

Leverage your employees and Leaders as brand ambassadors.

Communicate your value proposition and how each and every role in your buisness plays a part in shaping it

Pro-active talent pipelining…

Be ready sooner rather than later with clear numbers and types of roles needed to achieve your business plans

Build simple and attractive job postings

Use the opportunity of posting the job profiles to explain your company work style, values and culture.

Empower your employees to help you tell the story.

Build simple, actionable onboarding plans that set new joiners up for success.

If you promote a value proposition such as ‘we enable your growth and career’ … make sure you live by it.  You can use your employee stories, who are living this brand, as a true testament!

Predictive People Analytics

Every year a number of leading organizations specialized in management and technology serving people and organizations run annual surveys to understand the challenges and opportunities that are top of mind for leaders and heads of organizations.  Over the last 10 years, the topic continues to be ‘people’.  Finding the right people, engaging the employees, adapting to the dynamics of change, middle management development, work force planning and most recently, skilling and preparing a workforce that is ready for the new world of work, that we are a part of.

Additionally, a word trending in every organization, irrespective of size or industry, is the topic of access to data.  How is it being used?  How can data be read and interpreted?  To what level is the interpretation of the data subjective (or objective)?  How does it help in improving performance (of the employee as well as the business)?  how aligned is the organization to the objectives it has drawn out, be they short or long term?  How does this reflect on the future decisions that need to be taken?

The talent market is becoming tighter by the day; with the dynamics of what we need to know, at a pace faster than we are all comfortable with, in addition to the new skills required by every job, be they the foundational skills needed to do any type of job, such as collaboration, problem solving, dealing with ambiguity; to the technical skills required, such as analytics, customer centricity and relationship management.  Learning needs to happen regularly, collaboratively and needs to be in tune with the dynamic changes of the work environment.     

A lot of questions, very few answers.   Technology has leaped in and managed to transform the way we think, do and how we make decisions in the different industries and domains, however very little has been done around the area of ‘people analytics’ and more specifically in the area of ‘predictive analytics’.  My view is that predictive people analytics is the ability to think in 3 main dimensions; the matrices we use to manage the people priorities, combined with the matrices used to measure business success, against the strategic priorities of the organization.  With the ability of machine learning, this is becoming a reality.  The immediate priority lies in embracing this as a priority, encouraging innovation in this critical area and more profoundly organizations who have access to sizeable data, need to jump in and be the transformers!

Can we help? ….  info@rightfoot.org

Organizational Agility: The Art of Re-Invention

The more I read about innovation and how it is influencing us day by day… influencing what we like, what we search for, how we form opinions and how we make decisions, the more I become super charged with the importance of how this is critical in how organizations are managed and how people are at the front line.

In my view, at the center of this is culture.  Whether you are part of a start-up, a home grown business or a corporate enterprise; culture plays a key role in not only influencing bottom line, but also business predictability, speed of response to market change, changing consumer needs, or customer sentiment; you name it.

The name of the game is agility.  How fast you’re able to think and innovate, succeed, fail, learn, change and innovate once more.  The meaning of innovation here is not only relevant to a specific industry, product or size of business.  It is innovation in how work is done, how processes and outputs are challenged to evolve and how the culture of any business transforms.

If you research the term ‘organizational agility’ you will come to the conclusion that it is all about adaptability to change.  How resilient an organization will withstand generational change, autonomy of lifestyle, how information is accessed, analyzed and consumed; these form some of the pieces of the puzzle.

When you think about this in the context of organizations, building successful businesses that are able to come up with strategies that will yield the biggest return on investment while maintaining stability is hard.  Agility requires stability.  As organizations identify the why and start venturing on the how, this is where the core skills of being nimble, communicative and adaptive kick-in.   

Among my favorite readings around this subject is a study prepared by the World Economic Forum1 that highlights the core skillet principles for Leaders as they venture into transformative, un-treaded grounds, anxious from what they might be faced with.  Among some of the highlights of this study are the following fundamentals ….

1. Awareness: how strategically aware and prepared is your organization?  How relevant is this to the core of what you do?

2. Organizational Agility:  adopting organizational structures that are lean and adaptive and augmenting your workforce with the technological tools that will help them manage information and data and make changes as they go.  Does the organization allow for human innovation and creativity?

3. Continuous Learning:  does the culture of your organization value and promote a culture of risk taking, learning as you go and course correcting, as need be?  The best learning environments are created when we try new things, learn from others and adapt as we go.  I will carefully use the word ‘blended learning’ in my description, but it does hold true; learning with every encounter, out of every situation and creating work environments that encourage and reward learning from others.

4. Leadership Adaptability:  leaders who are open and adaptive to changing their leadership style and approach to leading as the world of work changes.  Being more inclusive of diverse ideas and ways of thinking, gender and generational inclusion, as well as driving a culture of coaching.

5. Empowered Employees:  empowerment shaped in the internal policies and procedures of how decisions are made.  Being able to offer technologies that free up employees from routine tasks and puts information in their hands to be able to make quick and information based decisions.   

Organizations with the mindset of creating and enabling the culture of agility generate a competitive advantage that forms their brand and is reflected in how effective, efficient and rewarding it will be for their business.

Building an Effective Organizational Culture in the New World of Work

With the ongoing greater access to technology breaking down barriers, consumer behavior becoming highly influenced by on-line reviews and ratings, social media offering a stronger voice and the ongoing challenges of economies, whether in mature markets or in emerging markets, applying this to the global talent market, and its challenges, hold true. Knowledge workers are now part of a global talent workforce, borders have been removed, talent is more inclined to work anywhere and is selectively making choices.

Talent is now sitting in the driver’s seat; making the choices based on personal motivators, priorities and alignment to a personal sense of purpose. With that said, employers have the added advantage of the GIG economy coming into play, allowing for a new talent force to present itself in the new world of work.

With that said, companies have started to prioritize strategies that enable them to leverage their size, reach and distribution. Companies scaling across geographies, have started to look at ways to incentivize and reward collaboration and team work that are tied to measurable objectives and outcomes. Others have focused on institutionalizing cultures of learning, rewarding those who enable it, those who consume it and welcoming the culture of self-reflection. 

On the organization level, the introduction of different assessments, more often, sometimes channeled towards specific populations. On the people level, the usage of psychometric assessments for people to better understand their drivers and motivators, as well as usage of these tools in building team dynamics.

With the changes in the world of work, organizations have been pushing the envelope trying to learn more about concepts of leaner, more productive workforce, while also building a workplace that offers flexibility and is best suited for the drivers of the behaviors and values that companies prioritize for themselves; while being highly influenced by what the global workforce needs and wants.

In addition, global trends are showing more and more businesses moving towards smarter, more communicative tools driven by chat bots, smarter search engines enabled by artificial intelligence, easier and faster recognition and reward that is immediate and relevant. Companies are pursuing opportunities to leverage solutions that can answer these needs faster and cheaper, while continuing to follow the dynamic introduction of new tools and solutions that keep their workforce more engaged, productive and agile. Tools that enable organizational alignment thru effective sharing of the goals and results.  Creating circles of influence in the organization that help drive the ‘right’ behaviors and enable success.  

Other tools like automated career pathing, puts the employee in the center of this process, providing them the tools and transparency to make forward looking decisions that are realistic and relevant.

Taking the above into account, companies start questioning how they can continuously evolve their culture to not only reflect on bottom line success, but would drive more competitiveness, do away with the ‘sense of entitlement’ mindset, encourage people to go the extra mile. 

Thru years of work, psychologists have been able to uncover that the driver for motivation and achievement is highly influenced by a person’s ‘mindset’. Being fixated on the way things are done, how a person learns and how they deal with others based on a fixed point of view created limitations for learning, growing and subsequently outperforming their own achievements.

Accordingly, influencing the mindset of how people perceive their abilities, how they move from being fixated on how things are done to becoming more open to learn, grow and welcome feedback are some of the key opportunities of self-learning, learning from others and being more open to doing things differently. Focusing on the process that leads to learning (collaborating with others, doing things differently), increases the changes of more success guided by the philosophy of a ‘growth mindset’