Employee Engagement – Investing during a down turn
One of the biggest challenges senior executives face during the current recession is managing the need to balance costs with sliding revenues and profits during the market downturn. To find the balance between shedding unprofitable investments and not missing out on too many potentially profitable ones, it remains not a question whether cost cutting should be undertaken, but rather from where, how this is conducted and why it’s crucial to communicate information on such measures to your team.
During the recession, executives placed emphasis upon the financial risk of investing, often at the expense of assessing the competitive risk – i.e. of not investing. How you manage a downturn, including employee engagement and development will directly influence your talent position in an upturn.
Why Brand Alignment is so important
True brand alignment results from having the brand in line with the customer and employee perceptions of an organisation and the activities and level of commitment and intent demonstrated both internally and externally by that organisation.
Differentiated sustainable brands invariably are founded upon strong organisational values. True strategic branding, we believe, must be an ‘inside out’ approach. After all, employees are the primary brand audience, the ones who will deliver the brand to customers. Brand Alignment between the internal and external is the lifeblood of brand-based organisational culture. If your people accurately know and understand ‘what your brand stands for’, this begets appropriate customer expectation.
Leadership – Critical contributor to company value
On reading this blog, you will:
- Appreciate the strategic relevance of leadership
- Operational success
- Intangible value of the company
- Be more open to taking direct action to raise Leadership capability of the organisation
- Appreciate the importance of investing in leadership capability
- Be less risk averse to investing in leadership development.
Congruent Brand & Culture
With globalisation, Brands are so much more than just products and logos. They’re channels of self expression which transcend the label of ‘commodity’. Avenues through which most people express their personalities, attitudes, likes, dislikes and association to certain groups and communities. Brand is strategic, a long term imperative requiring Leadership to carefully consider and manage it across the entire organisation. This usually takes a collaborative effort involving both the HR, and Marketing Departments, which is best achieved through forming a Brand Steering Committee which can strategically understand the whole of business requirements.
Talent Management Imperatives
Talent management is strategically managing the flow of talent through your organisation and encouraging employees to continue to generate fresh perspectives, innovative ideas and constructive input. It’s about attracting and retaining key people, and allowing that talent to thrive – all of this combines to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage. Equally important is the need to introduce strategies which prevent loss of your key talent to competitors. The most effective people strategy is for companies to source the right people with the right skills and knowledge, in the right roles – overall this is Talent Management in its most pure, basic form. Real talent management though is about the few, not the many, meaning that companies focus on developing the potential of a few key people as future leaders and role models.
Influencing Organisational Culture
Naturally, having a strong culture is great competitive advantage; indeed the strength of corporate culture can significantly affect corporate policies such as employment, managerial and financial structures. Organisational culture directly influences the likelihood of success for a company’s change strategies. As evidence suggests, team members are more inclined to embrace change when the organisation’s culture is aligned with the mission and goals of that company. (Ref: Edgar Schein, The Corporate Culture Survival Guide, California: Jossey-Bass, 1999)
Employer Branding – taking advantage of a market recovery
Over the last five years, the concept of Employer Branding has gained traction as a necessary requirement for the attraction, engagement and retention of talented employees. With the current environment now demonstrating the reality of a market recovery, organisations must look to implement strategies that will work to improve the sustainability of their workforce in the future.
Your organisation has an Employer brand. The big question is… ‘is it the one your organisation wants and does it accurately reflect the reality of working for your organisation?’
Minimising Brand Risk
Brand equity moderates the impact of marketing initiatives upon consumer actions and represents one of many factors contributing to overall Brand Value. Most people relate to the benefits of a relatively strong brand (greater loyalty, premium pricing of products/services, ability to attract and retain the best talent, higher stock price etc) yet the reality is that this information hasn’t hit home to motivate and generate similar interest in the safeguarding of the Brand.
Brand equity represents what a Brand means to the consumer – loss of that brand equity makes organisations vulnerable. This can be brought on by activities such as focusing the brand into too many product areas; changing the name / face of a brand or its highly recognised visual brand elements; and especially through loss of consumer trust in services or products offered.
Retention and Talent Management following a downturn
Following fairly severe economic slowdown across global economies, cost reduction efforts naturally took centre stage as organisations sought to maintain profitability and remain competitive. A shift is underway, however, because organisational reactions to the downturn have had major unintended consequences for the relationship between organisations and their employees from both a brand and talent management perspective.
It’s important to recognise that the decisions you make in regards to talent management this year have far reaching consequences, often setting the tone for the relationship with potential employees for years to come. Basically, the only thing more worrisome than the prospect of too much change is too little change, especially in a downturn where many competitors are chasing too few customers and dollars.
Employee Engagement – Surveying and Practical Tips
There are very practical reasons behind the need to survey your employees about their level of engagement, not the least of which being that truly engaged employees deliver business value. A definitive correlation exists between employee engagement and desired business outcomes whether that be customer service, retention of talent, individual performance, team performance, business productivity, or even enterprise-level financial performance. Companies must actively seek to understand and act on behalf of their employees’ expectations and preferences. This can be achieved through the following: