Month: September 2020

A company’s provided service or product is important, but a company’s employer branding is even more important for long-time success. Read more below, including how this special aspect can grow your business.

 

Nearly everything has a metric. Even employer reputation, and how it affects a company’s chances of securing top talent. Data shows that most workers – up to 86 percent – would not apply for or continue to work for a company with a bad reputation, either among the public, or among former employees.

 

While the importance of a company’s reputation has never been higher than in the age of social media, where every product and service is at the mercy of the opinions and influence levels of the customers who have had experience with them, a company’s reputation among its employees is equally important, if not more so.

 

Your employer branding, which represents how your employees perceive your company and how they rate their experiences while working with and for you, can be key to gaining and retaining talent, building a productive company culture, and avoiding bank-breaking controversy.

 

Defining the Employer Brand

 

At its most basic, a brand as a concept is a way to distinguish one service provider or product from another. The more your brand can separate itself from the competition in a positive way – through better quality, a better experience, a better reputation – the more likely you are to take control of the local, regional, and even international market.

 

The same concept applies to hires and long-time employees. Your brand’s identity at work and to the people who work with you is important as both an incentive, and security. Positive employer branding means people want to work with and/or for you, to the point that they’d take a position at a company with better employer branding for lower pay.

 

When things do get rough, having a great employer brand can help you keep your talent around. They know that it’s worth wading through a crisis together to help the company survive, than simply take the opportunity to jump ship and find a better place to work. But building an employer brand is a different process from customer-facing branding.

 

Building a Better Brand in 2020

 

When top talent looks for a place to work, they want their value to be recognized. They want good incentives, including great pay and benefits. But they also want a work environment that they can be excited about.

 

And when they’ll ask around to learn more about what it’s like to work at your company, they won’t just be interested in your products and services, but they’ll want to hear about day-to-day management, workplace culture, work philosophies, and the company’s ambitions and values.

 

They want to get a sense of what it’s like to be part of the team. And if that experience doesn’t sound appealing or doesn’t make for a very good story, then your employer branding is lacking.

 

Creating a strong employer brand requires a multi-faceted approach. Some things you want to be aware of include:

 

• Understanding who you want to attract, and what it is that might attract them.
• Creating and supporting a compelling narrative on the company’s values and mission.
• Figuring out how your existing employees feel through tools like Glassdoor.
• Keeping tabs on how the competition builds their employer brand.
• Generating branding through shared employee experiences.
• Developing an effective onboarding process.
• Prioritizing personal and career growth and constant learning.

 

With the advent of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, a successful employer brand will also include a forward-thinking and adaptive approach toward the difficulties of the crisis. This means offering innovative flexible working conditions, a widescale adoption of cutting-edge communications tools and policies, and a speedy retrofitting of all existing office space to accommodate new workplace requirements and create a safe and secure workspace.

 

While a lot of employer branding relies on utilizing your own means to create a better employee experience, not every company has the means to invest heavily in creating safer workspaces. However, that’s where companies can turn to coworking spaces, and leverage their services to fortify their employer branding, with a focus on flexibility and safety.

 

Coworking places like The Collection help small to medium businesses opt for safe and flexible working conditions during and after the pandemic. They make for an excellent way to transition into a work-from-anywhere workplace policy.

 

Coworking spaces are also an excellent option for larger companies seeking to minimize costs as they transition into a hub-and-spoke model (based on hub-and-spoke distribution), without compromising workplace benefits or eating into their employee’s expectations of a convenient and welcoming workspace.

 

 

Live and Breathe Your Brand 

 

Customers spend time and money on your products and services. They expect quality on par with what they’ve invested. A successful business will go above and beyond those expectations and develop a relationship with a customer rooted in a product or service that is much better than the competition. And a customer experience that continues to outperform the rest.

 

But building a brand around that quality, and catering to a loyal customer base, is very different than building an employer brand.

 

Where your customers spend some time and money on your brand, your employees spend an inordinate amount of their time working to bring those results to the table.

 

Not only do they want to be appreciated and paid, but they want a company culture that reflects how they feel about their work – a sense of pride for quality, dedication to the end product or service, and a workplace they can be happy about. All of that requires a genuine relationship between the employer and the employee.

 

While marketing and a strong customer-facing reputation can mitigate the impact of a product’s weaknesses on a brand or minimize the drawbacks of an earlier-than-planned rollout, there’s no point obfuscating anything between a worker and their boss.

 

Employees know how a company operates better than anyone else, and any employer branding that doesn’t match the day-to-day reality and experiences in and out of the office will come off as disingenuous and condescending.

 

The worst thing you can do is try to sell your brand to your workers without the substance and culture to back up your material. It might work when it comes to attracting new hires – but if you plan on keeping them around, your employer branding should shed light on how great it really is to work at a company like yours.

 

Final Thought

 

Building your employer brand to attract and keep talent is a long-term process, one that requires identifying what your workers need, communicating often enough to ensure that they feel heard, and fostering a workplace culture and environment that makes your business the best place to work in town.

 

How can you grow a stronger team while working remote? By always improving the digital communication between each other. Read for some tips below.

 

With no clear end to the current crisis in sight, it’s likely that remote work will continue to play an important role in keeping non-essential workers healthy while they continue to do their jobs from home, or from safe and sanitized satellite offices. An important part of enabling continued remote work is strong digital communication.

 

Digital communication will remain the backbone for businesses seeking to thrive and grow during this pandemic, as well as after it. As we continue to look toward the near future with increased workplace flexibility in mind, finding ways to leverage current and upcoming communications technologies to make it easier and more convenient to cooperate remotely will be key.

 

Managers and leaders need to pick platforms that are easy to use and avoid overwhelming their employees with too many tools, systems, and messages, while current employees will need to learn how to best communicate with the platforms they’ve chosen, while onboarding new hires and integrating them seamlessly into the company communications network.

 

But navigating the new normal can be challenging, particularly when it feels like the sudden shift towards remote work has been especially hard due to cluttered, overwhelming, and disorganized communication. Making the most of digital communication tools is about more than just picking the right platform.

 

Here are some important tips.

 

1. Pick a Consistent and Effective Communications Platform 

 

Stick to the fewest possible number of communications platforms to enable you to do two things well: group communication and individual communication. To that end, pick a platform everyone is at least partially familiar with, or one people know for its shallow learning curve.

 

Make sure you can host clean one-on-one video calls, and effective group meetings. Pick a platform that lets you organize group chats, and effectively integrate collaborate tools such as Google Docs.

 

And finally, accept that email still isn’t going away for some time, so don’t try to replace it – and find a platform that exclusively fills the gaps where email fails, particularly in regards to instant messaging, group communication, voice, and video. Having too many platforms and avenues for communication can make it difficult to keep track of conversations, find files and topics, and get in touch with the person you’re trying to reach.

 

2. Always Schedule One-on-One Calls for Important Matters

 

Avoid hiding critical messages or important meetings in emails. Develop a clear and simple system for prioritizing messages, so when a message comes through on the appropriate channels, its importance is clear.

 

Something that needs to be addressed via a direct message might be much more urgent than an email, while something mentioned offhandedly or with a direct tag/mention in the group chat is probably more casual, or even off-topic.

 

But when something requires immediate attention or a prepared and nuanced conversation, schedule a call. Too much information is lost in chat or voice calls – make it face-to-face.

 

3. Consolidate Messages and Cut Cluttered Conversations

 

There’s little use in sending a dozen emails a day when there is so much else to do during the day.

 

It’s better to consolidate important or relevant topics for the day or week in a single long email at the beginning or end of the day or week, unless it’s an urgent message – in which case a direct message would be more appropriate, to convey urgency.

 

Learning to cut through the clutter and make it immediately clear when something should be responded to immediately and when it can wait (via something as intuitive as the delivery of the message) can help you avoid miscommunication and wasted time.

 

4. Make It Clear When a Response is (and isn’t) Needed

 

Emails can be notorious examples of miscommunication, particularly in cases where it isn’t immediately clear when a response is needed or not needed. This goes for any other messages, as well.

 

Consider making it clear in the body of an email or message if you need a response or not, so the recipient can be clear on whether they should respond immediately, respond later, or get to work and let you know when something relevant has changed or occurred.

 

5. Set Schedules for Communication 

 

Living in a mostly remote world has its advantages, but it also has significant drawbacks, especially with regards to hours spent at work, and work life balance.

 

Set clear schedules for when it’s okay to check into work and communicate on work matters and make it clear that there’s a cut off period for receiving, sending, and/or responding to communication.

 

There may be exceptions from time to time – serious emergencies – but there should be boundaries nonetheless, and any exceptions to those boundaries should be rare or nonexistent.

 

6. Create Clear Lines of Communication Between Management and the Workforce

 

One of the great benefits of effective digital communication is that it’s easier than ever to communicate with the people we need to communicate with, regardless of their physical location. Not only does this let a manager speak directly to any employee they need to address, but it also lets employees speak directly (and immediately) with their managers.

 

Utilize this as a strength, and establish clear and simple methods of reporting to and communicating with coworkers up and down the chain of command, making it easier to bring up grievances or suggest changes, vote on certain matters, or just ensure that management hears when employees have some sort of issue.

 

A culture of promoting openness and making it safe for employees to bring up any matters regarding management can promote trust between employers and employees, as employers know their employees can be more upfront with them, while employees understand that their individual opinions (and opinions as a group) matter, and can have an impact on the company.

 

7. Utilize Group Chats and Group Communication to Make Company Goals Clearer

 

At their worst, group chats can serve as a behemoth of information to wade through to get back to an old conversation, or a source of constant distractions.

 

But when organized, moderated, and used properly, group chats can enable companies and departments to communicate effectively, create a greater sense of cohesion and unity, and make it clearer to everyone what a company’s immediate and long-term goals might be. Every employee should be on the same page, and feel that they’re working towards something together.

 

 

Conclusion

 

There are many benefits to properly leveraged digital communication, and it’s more important than ever to take full advantage of these benefits.