By Christopher Van Mossevelde
The inside out approach
It’s important to reiterate the obvious: unhappy employees spread bad news about you as an employer; unhappy employees make for unhappy customers and spread bad PR about your company’s products and services; unhappy employees perform poorly and badmouth you as an employer scaring off potential hires or top talents. If you hear something bad about a person – would you choose to be their acquaintance? Probably not! You would most likely avoid that person altogether. The same applies to employers that have bad reputations – who enjoys being around something that smells fishy? Nobody!
All communication professional understand the principles of the ripple effect, the huge potential and huge detriment that a simple message can do: to become either a company’s dream scenario of brand idolization or a devastating earthquake of brand deterioration. Thus, it couldn’t be simpler – start with your primary asset: your employees. Adopt the inside out approach to your branding activities; ensure that you have happy employees – it will result in positive and proactive brand ambassadors; ones that believe in your company’s products and service; people who feel excited about going to work and performing their best; employees that will try to encourage their friends to join them; your top performs will know people on par to their level of expertise and professionalism, i.e. brilliant people know other brilliant people.
So what can be done? How can you be better with your internal employer brand?
1) Be honest – don’t pretend to be something you’re not! Everyone hates liars or pretentious performers.
2) Focus on your strengths instead of your weaknesses – nobody is perfect, so nobody expects you to be. But don’t be shy to talk about what’s positive about working for your company instead of another.
3) Be inspirational and aspirational – aim to set an example, be a good role model and continue to try making your company self improve. Again, nobody is perfect, but nobody likes slackers and a “I don’t care” attitude.
4) Show compassion and you’ll get loyalty. If you’re a friend who doesn’t care, you’re not a friend at all. The same applies to you as an employer – neglect your staff, treat them like machines and only think about the bottom line, and you’ll get very few people who care about you in return and who will be willing to fight for you when times get tough.
5) Communicate, interact and get feedback from your people on a daily basis via multiple channels: face-to-face, email, video, conferences, notice-boards, events, newsletters, magazines, phone calls, etc. It’s better to over communicate than say nothing. You have to work on your friendship with your employees – if you don’t talk and listen to them, they’ll become distant and reserved and will decide to befriend somebody else.
Anna Mindelöf, Universum´s Talent Strategy Director, continues to blog about her work with Universum’s employer brand. The days before Christmas were hectic and Anna reports, among other things, about how to engage students.
Our internal engagement survey among Universum employees has finally been sent out and closed! We’re now waiting excitedly for the result.
Right now, we’re reorganizing the marketing department, which takes a lot of my time and because of this my colleague Wuendy, instead of me, went to the Shanghai office.
We’re in the final phase of recruiting for a position in the management team. This means plenty of interviews and personality tests to give feedback on. Our sister company NovaAgentum has helped us with the recruitment and I’ve added a few of my own candidates who I found (or they found me) through LinkedIn – an invaluable working tool! Read the rest of this entry »
Anna Mindelöf, Universum's Talent Strategy Director
Anna Mindelöf, Universum´s Talent Strategy Director, continues to blog about her work with Universum’s employer brand. This time Anna has visited the US office and shares her reflections on change leadership and being visible as a HR Director.
A few weeks ago I visited for the first time our US office in Philadelphia. It was really nice and cool to sit on the 18th floor in downtown Philly. While I was there, we still hadn’t signed for our new office in Manhattan, New York. There were many questions around this: “Are we going to close the Philadelphia office?”; “When do we move?” etc. I couldn’t answer the questions then, but that’s not the point, instead we created an environment in which the questions could be asked and somebody listened.
A visible HR Director
One of my objectives as an HR Director is to be visible. It works quite well with Skype, e-mail and phone, but it’s not at all the same thing as meeting the employees in real life. Before the trip, I had sent out an e-mail inviting everyone, who wanted to have a meeting with me, to fix a time. I also booked a “come and have lunch with me” meeting for all employees who could attend. At that meeting, we talked about our culture, our values and how we could step out of our silos and become a better US team. It’s always nice to meet employees who are full of ideas on how we can improve things –what an engagement in our business! Read the rest of this entry »
Anna Mindelöf, Universum´s Talent Strategy Director, reports on the progress of her work on the company´s internal employer brand. Among many things, it´s about making a revision in the company´s Talent Management process, changes that simultaneously enrich HR.
Since my last blog post, I’ve launched a new Talent Management process. Earlier we’ve measured performance and attitude on a six-degree scale. Now I’ve added a dimension I call “potential”. I think we need to work on identifying our super talents at Universum and help them to maximize their potential. It´s at Universum we should find our future management team and middle managers. Read the rest of this entry »
• “It doesn´t matter what we say we are, if we don´t embody our ideals”.
• “Make sure you give your employees a good first time”
Read our follow-up article by Anna Mindelöf, Universum’s Talent Strategy Director, on her plans and actions at Universum since she started working for the company this summer. It’s an excellent case study for all HR professionals embarking on the journey to create a unified spirit.
What have I done since I started at Universum this summer?
The company values
One of the most important pillars for a successful company culture is that we live our values. It doesn´t matter what we say we are, if we don´t embody our ideals.
At Universum, we have a few core values that I have started to investigate if people are aware of. By changing desks during a couple of weeks, I realized that the IT guys, for example, didn´t really know our core principles. But after some days next to me and Liza at HR, they came to the office in the morning and talked about being “Driven, Dedicated and Solution focused” in a completely new way. Read the rest of this entry »
by Anna Mindelöf, Universum’s Talent Strategy Director
I would like to take the opportunity to start this series by clarifying: To me everything HR and everything the management is doing and working with is employer branding. What do I mean by this? Well; What we do, how we do it, what we don’t do and why we don’t do it – this all makes up how the employees sees the organization.
Therefore: If you decide to make a difference within your company, choose a few things to work on every year, make them thoroughly and measure before and after to see if there has been any changes. There are a few quick fixes to get started, but there are no shortcuts to success other than hard, systematic work by passionate HR people.
Read the rest of this entry »
Christopher Van Mossevelde
cvm@universum.se
Joao Araujo