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What’s it like to work at your organisation? Do people feel welcome and included? Do you pay fairly?
These are the kinds of questions being asked by the people you are hoping to recruit.
And the answers they hear? That’s your employer brand.
“Employer branding is simply what an individual thinks it’s like to work at your company,” says Fiona Byarugaba, employer brand manager & DEI lead at Great Place to Work Certified™ tech consultancy Thoughtworks, ranked #4 in Australia’s Best Workplaces™ list (Medium) 2021
“Whether or not you have done anything to build an employer brand, you have one.”
“It’s written on the faces of your people, it’s in the gory or glorious detail of your Glassdoor reviews, it’s in the energy or malaise of your everyday working environment. Your brand is your reputation as an employer.”
We spoke to Byarugaba to discover more about the emerging field of employer branding, how it can benefit an organisation and what steps leaders can take to improve their own employer brands.
Byarugaba says the discipline of employer branding has emerged from recruitment marketing and is focused on engaging and nurturing potential talent before they apply for a role. It also seeks to ensure the actual employee experience lives up to that promise.
As a discipline, it sits between human resources, recruitment, capabilities, leadership and marketing and draws on all five to create a coherent picture of what it’s like to work somewhere.
It is also deeply connected with the diversity, equity and inclusion programs and policies that ensure individual employees have consistently positive work experiences.
“Lots of organisations say ‘DEI is in our DNA’, but if that was the case, we wouldn’t have to work as hard on it,” says Byarugaba.
“DEI strategies and the employee experience are intertwined.”
So, what are some steps leaders can take to improve their employer brand?
Byarugaba offers four tips:
And finally, how do you know if you are doing well with your employer brand?
Byarugaba says organisations should be clear that the value they offer employees is twofold: objectively, they offer elements like salary, health insurance and leave days, while subjectively, they offer values like autonomy, engaging work and interesting clients.
This means measurement can be tricky.
“We have metrics like external ratings and employee surveys, but we also have qualitative subjective measures.”
“Do employees say ‘I don’t want to leave, I feel I belong, I feel like I’m in a safe place’? When you establish that credibility is when the magic starts to happen.”
“An employee value proposition is like your company’s soundtrack. When you hear the James Bond theme song, you know what to expect.”
“So, when people think about your organisation, what comes to mind?”
Great Place to Work® recognises leading company culture – if you want to amplify your employees’ stories, join a community of people first, purpose driven organisations with access to industry insights and shared knowledge, contact us about the first step in our process – getting Certified™ today.
Samantha Huddle is the General Manager of Great Place to Work® in Australia and NZ. Sam has more than two decades of experience from the grassroots to the C-suite and helps businesses build high-trust, inclusive cultures that deliver tangible results. With experience across the government, philanthropic and corporate sectors, Sam brings a collaborative, values-driven approach and a passion for achieving social impact through business. Sam publishes a well-read monthly newsletter which can be read **here.**
© Great Place To Work® Institute. All Rights Reserved.
ABOUT OUR METHOLOGY
To be eligible for the World’s Best Workplaces list, a company must apply and be named to a minimum of 5 national Best Workplaces lists within our current 58 countries, have 5,000 employees or more worldwide, and at least 40% of the company’s workforce (or 5,000 employees) must be based outside of the home country. Extra points are given based on the number of countries where a company surveys employees with the Great Place to Work Trust Index©, and the percentage of a company’s workforce represented by all Great Place to Work surveys globally. Candidates for the 2017 Worlds Best Workplaces list will have appeared on national workplaces lists published in September 2016 through August 2017.
ABOUT OUR METHOLOGY
The Best Workplaces in Asia List
Great Place to Work® identifies the top organizations that create great workplaces in the Asian and Middle Eastern regions with the publication of the annual Best Workplaces in Asia list. The list recognizes companies in three size categories:
To be considered for inclusion, companies must appear on one or more of our national lists in the region, which includes Greater China (covering China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau), India, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka and UAE. For the 2021 Asia List, companies ranked on the national list in the Philippines will also be included. Multinational organizations must meet the following requirements:
Multinationals also receive additional credit for their efforts to successfully create an excellent workplace culture in multiple countries in the region. The data used in the calculation of the regional list comes from national lists published in 2019 and early 2020.
