Part 2: Is your employer brand costing you?

And it’s not just what you state on your website. It’s how your employees experience and perceive, day-to-day, what your leadership and company cares about. How do you reflect that throughout your workplace environment, digitally, in the office, within processes and colleague interactions.

Remember, the average cost of filling a vacancy is £6,1250, or over £19,000 for a managerial position. An employer brand that aligns policy, practice and perception helps avoid mismatched expectations and support employee satisfaction. Think about how your internal and external content communicates the next 3 elements of your employer brand.

Career progression

Not every employee sees increased seniority or pay as their marker for career progression. How do you reflect the desirable progression opportunities your company provides in your employer brand?

For some, the prospect of extra responsibility is a living nightmare, whereas others dream of greater independence and decision-making influence over the company’s future.

Not everybody enjoys being publicly praised, while some thrive off it. Some prefer a constant challenge while others enjoy a narrower remit and increased specialisation.

The point is – know your team, understand what makes each individual tick, how they like to be managed and what success looks like for them and them alone. There is no hack around this: give space for employees to share – and listen. From here, developing a team structure and dynamic that jointly serves individual career aspirations and business needs alike will set you up for success.

In Bupa Dental Care’s award-winning employee magazine, we feature stories of career progression across the business and training opportunities, designed from insight gathered around what employees care about. Understanding that everyone has their own definition of “career progression” can ensure a framework of both stability and agility to keep employees happy and maintain consistent service standards for customers.

Communication

Whether it’s pulse surveys or regular townhalls, open discussion around things like revenue forecasts, client wins and market challenges, communication is pivotal to ensuring an engaged workforce.

Communication can not be a one-way street. Nobody likes a disconnected ivory tower, so genuine “top-down” conversations can have huge benefits when it comes to trust, common cause and understanding a company’s goals and ambitions.

For Bupa Dental Care, we considered a lack of email access for clinic employees when scrapping their newsletter and developing a quarterly magazine instead.

At Rationale, staff get randomised, anonymous email pulse surveys that ask 5 easy questions related to workload, culture, expectations and safety. This gives staff a quick 5-minute break from their work, and a chance to feel heard. To follow through on this feedback, it’s directly addressed in the next all staff meeting and discussed at senior management meetings, so that anything actionable can be promptly resolved or explained.

We’ve found tangible benefits in attracting the right people for things we care about as a business – sustainability, community engagement, positive workplaces and high quality work – through the incorporation of our B Corp certification into our employer brand. With shared values, the chemistry of our team’s collaboration, and the way they’re keen to support each other to create excellent work, is some of the best I’ve ever seen – having worked with hundreds of job-seekers and dozens of organisations.

This earned us our Great Place to Work certification, where 100% of staff reported that “people care about each other here”, “you can count on people to cooperate” and “people here are willing to give extra to get the job done”.

Rather than seeing feedback surveys as a platform for people to complain, a strong employer brand relies on quite the opposite, a platform for people to be heard. Only then can you fix what’s wrong or clarify what’s perceived, especially in a world of remote working.

Benefits

Don’t panic, not every organisation can shower their team with endless financial incentives or enhanced packages. The “benefits” of working for any organisation come in many forms.

Sure, benefits can be tangible like additional pension contributions and guaranteed salary reviews, though they can also be less defined “feel good” factors like community engagement or connection through a common goal. Your employees will likely have a sense of what is/isn’t financially possible, especially if we remember the importance of honest communication.

With that in mind, businesses who can include extended maternity leave, lunch clubs or extra holiday allowance enable staff to feel part of a broader collective, benefitting from the brand’s commercial success. If not, then benefits like strong company culture, autonomy, engaging leadership and respect at work can be just as valuable.

The point is, there’s no one size fits all, so you have the freedom to tailor your offer around your sector, team size, and each employee’s personal motives or drivers. Analysing trends within sectors, conducting interviews with stakeholders and running discovery workshops with recruitment teams, the first step we take to develop employer brands for clients is to answer the central question – what matters most to our employees?

Think about the customer experience

People buy from people. Few would jump at the chance to do business and build relationships with a brand known for disenfranchising or undercutting their employees. The reverse is therefore true, a strong employer brand is an attractive proposition for prospects and clients. Interacting with engaged and committed employees who are proud of their organisation helps cement positive long-term relationships, and loyalty.

Above all, your employer brand and how your organisation embodies it is a choice. It can either drive business success, or cost your organisation time, money and growth potential.

Talk to us about analysing the effectiveness of your employer brand, and what we can do to help.