Make Us Really Sexy!

September 17th, 2015

Marc Iannacone

This week; designing employer brand programmes for accuracy.

The last post encapsulated some of my personal dogma around accuracy. In a nutshell, I think every organisation challenge requires ‘some’ bespoke employment brand process to get the best results.

How to design that bespoke process?

Impossible to say in a five-hundred-word blog post (a blog post that also touches on some of our core intellectual property and eBrands divine reason for being). eBrands applies thinking that inherits traits from several disciplines including Human Resources, Organisation Psychology, Brand Management and Marketing.

We investigate the following:

Dimension – Organisation & Project, Internal & External

Context – Historical, Cultural, Anthropological, Behavioural

Evolution – Goals, Vision, Journey, Challenges

So, before the employment brand project is announced – before there is “engagement’ with the broad organisation, and regardless of if a brief is already floating around, we identify risks to accuracy and design our employment brand process accordingly. By learning about the organisation, we can hone an accuracy- focused process.

One example of something we do at the project design phase is a CEO interview; the vision and verification of business leadership is an invaluable tone setter. Another thing we do is avoid survey’s at initial phases if the organisation is survey fatigued while focusing on insight generation strategies that encourage energetic participation.

Can these ‘pre-cursor’ steps have the opposite effect and instigate bias?

The fact is that we do this as a tactic to ‘seek the bias’, so that we can be alert to where it potentially exists and how we can account for it. We want to challenge it. Remember we’re seeking truth – and we’ve found both instances where bias has distorted the truth, or where bias has been symptomatic of the truth.

So our checkpoints in process design provide some guidance as to what eBrands finds important:

Trust – stakeholders must believe that the project will do the task it is created for, that it has leadership endorsement, that it has backing and that it values truth

Sanctity – the process and it’s data are paramount, and where privacy is concerned there is visible and actual commitment, and where transparency is concerned it is published and available

Value – stakeholders are educated on and understand the impact of a well executed project and what it can mean for the health of the organisation

Empowerment – stakeholders own the opportunity. It’s provided; they’re actively encouraged to participate and the project provides visibility of stakeholder impact

We boil this down to – the employment brand is owned by the employees – therefore they also own the process.

Next post, some insights on engagement.