Great Place To Work® publishes each year its ranking of “Best Workplaces”, rewarding companies where it is good to live and determining the criteria that promote a quality employee experience.
What can we learn from this to strengthen companies’ employer brand and ensure that they have an attractive image both with future talent recruited and with all current employees in order to make them committed corporate ambassadors?
A few simple ideas from @SkillsCommunication to strengthen your employer branding.
Grow the federating projects of the organization
Aligning the company’s vision and its social commitments
According to the work done by Harvard US University, it is essential for “great places to work” to communicate well on a common project that goes beyond profit maximization, and even beyond the organization’s mission. In a few words, clear managerial communication is the key to keeping the collective spirit alive.
To engage employees beyond their daily mission and bring the collective together, it is important to share the company’s vision with them. How can we get each employee to identify with the organization’s global objective? It is necessary to help them go beyond the business mission to understand the meaning and the societal utility of the company, and thus engage the employees in a collective adventure.
In order for each member of the company to be the bearer of its vision, the role of managers is essential. By elaborating with them the intrinsic values of the company and their understanding of its societal role, we will be able to identify the corporate projects that best reflect the organization’s commitment. These projects may already be in place or will need to be created with the help of an agency specialized in employer branding strategies.
By ensuring that the company’s commitments are aligned with its concrete societal achievements through these projects, the organization will also offer employees opportunities to get involved and develop, beyond their purely professional activity.
This involvement will be even stronger if the projects are in line with the company’s convictions, the vision of its leaders and the values for which the employee has joined. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) decreed by the United Nations offer a very wide range of possible areas of action.
Thanks to this exchange with the company’s historical managers, we will be able to identify the most appropriate impact projects and build the paths proposed to employees to get involved.
Turn your seminars into « journeys to impact »
According to the Trust Barometer, a survey conducted by Edelman every year since 2000, based on responses from over 36,000 people in 28 countries, 86% of respondents expect business leaders to take a stand on today’s societal challenges.
heart of a network of international ESG and impact influencers and will be able to help identify impact projects in all categories of the SDGs adapted to the positioning chosen by its clients.
We will also support managers in engaging their teams, both in the design of the project and in its development and communication to other stakeholders.
An offer from @SkillsCommunication, the “Journeys to impact”: Take your employees on a journey in the heart of an impact project to show the reality of your societal commitment and get them out of their professional comfort zone. What if your integration seminars for new talents, or your annual team seminars were to move to the heart of impact projects that resemble your company?
Our DirCom’s can help you identify the right project, prepare the seminar, ensure the employee onsite experience, and prepare the next steps so that participants can share their experience and become engaged ambassadors for your brand.
A company’s ability to share its vision through its sustainable social commitment will thus ensure greater retention of its talents. If they are also drivers of these engagement initiatives, then the impetus will no longer be top-down, i.e. coming from the hierarchy, and two major benefits will appear: increased employee loyalty and better attractiveness of new talents.
But what other ways can you put in place to strengthen your brand ambassadors’ network?
Turn new talents into brand ambassadors
The actors of the company’s engagement
Beyond the common corporate projects that gather the employees around the company’s vision, it is essential to involve the employees, and in particular the new talents, to take advantage of their freshness, and to make the collective progress in line with the company’s vision.
A new talent is an employee who has recently joined the company. They are not yet absorbed by the corporate culture and can bring a critical eye on the company. They have ideas, different experience to share and enthusiasm to move the organization forward.
the corporate culture, the business organization, the strategy and the internal customs. While these programs are essential to the successful integration of new recruits, they should be complemented by a reverse program, whereby the company learns from the experience of the new talents in order to evolve.
Involving these new talents, after a few months of integration and general apprehension of the company’s vision and « raison d’être », will allow them to become actors of a change consistent with the corporate ambitions while benefiting from a fresh perspective. This will only be possible if they are given responsibility and recognition by their peers and management.
For example, let’s give them the opportunity to criticize and complete the group’s proposals, to propose new engagement projects, and to implement them… while allowing them time for this mission, recognized as a value creator by the hierarchy.
By giving them the means to succeed and innovate, by providing motivation and support, by encouraging societal intrapreneurship, new talents will satisfy their search for purpose, will grow thanks to the company and will naturally become passionate ambassadors of your brand.
A new approach to mentoring
The new talents welcomed in this way will become the best able to pass on their passion for their company and their pride of belonging. This transmission is all the more authentic when it is done for the company’s societal commitment, which is so essential for the new generations.
Have you ever offered a mentoring role to one of your new talents? Of course, he or she may not be able to pass on the entire history of the company, its strategy and its businesses. But they can show the options for personal enrichment and engagement offered to any motivated ambassador.
the means (even extra-financial) guaranteed to the new-talent mentor. Why not give the mentor, in exchange for his involvement, a real mission with a “new talents council” aimed at observing and measuring the level of corporate commitment of new recruits. This way, these new talents will bring a fresh perspective that will benefit the organization by suggesting ways to improve.
We could even go further and give these ambassadors the opportunity to become “board challengers”. The ultimate recognition is here to come and present a barometer of the young talents’ commitment and the projects proposed to develop it, before the Board at the highest strategic level of the company.
By showing new talent that their opinion matters, you force them to structure proposals and not just grievances.
The new talents will thus become the active vectors of the company’s positive transformation.
Trust is a sure source of business resilience. Through trust, they manage to create a “Behavior of Organizational Citizenship and Innovation”, according to the terminology used by Great Insights France, which, in case of company difficulties, will lead its employees to redouble their efforts and inventiveness to do more in terms of both quantity and quality to help.
New talents integrated into “impact journeys”, solicited as actors in the company’s engagement projects or mentors of young recruits, these are all possible avenues favored by @SkillsCommunication to develop your employer branding and grow your committed corporate ambassadors. These projects naturally require guidance and support to ensure the movement’s momentum and tangible results that will make everyone proud. The DirCom’s @SkillsCommunication are experienced in these missions.
