What is the secret recipe in building an excellent employer brand? If this question is put forward before the top management of an SME, most of them will not be in a position to give a convincing reply. The reason for this is most of the organisations simply don’t know that what it takes to achieve the feat
Not many of the SME organisations focus on building their brand as an employer. Though most of them spend lavishly on marketing activities centred around their products and services and sometimes on operational aspects, most of the times they hardly care to project themselves as a brand which genuinely cares about their business workforce. This causes discontent among the employees and results in increasing attrition levels.
So let’s discuss about the secret recipe in building a great employer brand
Employee recognition and branding:
Employees expect recognition of their work, apart from salary and perks, the recognition factor is the most important aspect that keeps them motivated and binds their emotions with the company. Every employee has a unique story to tell and the collective contribution of the employees keeps the growth engine of the organisation running.
How an employee dispense his / her daily job functions? What motivates him / her to put 100% of his / her effort? What is the impact that the employees contribution had made to the company, the fellow employees and the society? How his / her work has impacted the growth of the organisation? All these are interesting information can be woven in to quite an engaging story and shared with the world.
These stories can be shared in the website or under corporate blogs or in social networks to highlight the employees contribution and it can also be construed as mark of gratitude on the part of the employer. These stories in due course of time get shared, liked and commented by users thereby augmenting the employer brand visibility.
An experienced Human Resource consultant can ideate practices and policies that can aid in greater bonding among company and its employees.
Treat your employees well:
Employees want respect from the employers. The behaviour of an organisation should boost the morale of the employees. They should be given the freedom to do innovative thinking. Their ideas and thought process should not be stifled, rather they should be encouraged to think out of the box and put forward their suggestions in front of the organisation. Appropriate Employee grievance and redressal forums should be there in the organisation aided by websites or intranet applications that can swiftly solve their problems. If there is any grievance that has been aired on the social media or review portals by a disgruntled employee, it’s the duty of the management of the organisation to investigate the root causes of discontent and provide a suitable explanation with facts and figures.
Also keeping a strong social media presence in platforms such as Facebook, Linkedin with information regarding the organisation and its people projects the organisations open and also shows that the organisation welcomes constructive criticism.
Give your employees a great workspace:
Employees love cosy workspace. The organisation how small it may be should not compromise on the office infrastructure. An employee spends most part of the day in office and hence they expect to work in an workspace which is vibrant, clean, hosted with necessary infrastructure such as workstations, climate control and little bit of privacy. The employees should feel proud of their place of work so that they can share stories of their working conditions with their known circle of friends near and dear ones`
Proper salary and incentive structure:
An organisation should see to it that their employees are paid well and salaries revised taking in mind the inflationary figures. In many review sites disgruntled employees complain about their organisations practice of providing low salaries. This only brings disrepute to the company and buyers lose their confidence in dealing with these organisations. Also its utmost important that salaries are disbursed in time so that employees don’t have to worry about their financial commitments.
Again, not many of the organisations SME organisations are qualified to draft appraisal policies that can balance the expectations of employers and the employees and hence it would be prudent to consult a seasoned Human Resource Consulting company to aid them in this process
Invest in their training:
In this ever changing business world skill sets become obsolete within a short time span and hence it’s pertinent to arm your employees with the most sought after skills in their area of expertise. This boosts up employee morale and employee gets a sense of satisfaction that the organisation thinks about their personal growth and invests in making them more agile.
The organisations should motivate their employees to share their acquired knowledge in non-sensitive matters in the public domain such as blogs, or authoring books and online content, training videos, publish papers and participating and speaking in technical events. Motivating employees to participate in these types of activities by organisations not only enhances the profile of the employees but also the employer brand.
These are some of the factors that an SME should keep in mind in designing practices and policies that can make them unique among the vast number of organisations. Reputations are hard to build and any wrong move can break years of hard work in building a great employer brand. Organisations might sometimes falter in their endeavour of effective employer brand building due to lack of necessary expertise and hence a helping hand of a reputed HR consulting company is needed to tide over the problems and obstacles.
We will discuss more about how to implement practices that makes a great employer brand in our upcoming editions.
