Why employer branding should be a top of mind priority for companies in 2024, and what can you do about it

Employees are disconnected, they don’t care anymore. They are just here for the pay. There’s no camaraderie. Mental health is in decline. No one wants to go back to the office. Work isn’t what it used to be… Do you feel familiar with any of these statements? So do we all.

The post pandemic era of remote work and back to the office experiments, financial crisis, inflation, massive layoffs and escalating military conflicts has had a toll on the spirit of our times, or zeitgeist as the germans call it, making it hard to put on a smile these days, and of course this affects the morale of employees, productivity, and company results. But let’s not linger on the doom and gloom and instead focus on how we can fight it. Everything is cyclical, we know it. We even make posters and coffee mugs about it. The calm after the storm, the light at the end of the tunnel, etc… So let’s put in the work to navigate these rough waters and be ready for when the good times come back. As Warren Buffet brilliantly put it, “bad news is an investor's best friend”. Anyone experienced knows that tough times are the best times to build and to double down on your investment.?

The scary numbers

As obvious as it sounds, if you are building a company, your most important investment is the people building your company. And according to a study by McKinsey, they aren’t too happy. In fact, employee disengagement costs a median-size S&P 500 company between $228 million and $355 million a year in lost productivity. To make the math easier, another study from Gallup estimates that 34% of the salary of a demotivated employee is wasted, that’s 3.000€ of every 8.900€ paid in salaries going to the bin. In that same study, only 13% of employees claimed to be engaged with their companies, with 67% being disengaged, and 24% being actively disengaged. Imagine how disengaged you have to be to claim to be actively disengaged. It’s like saying I don’t care, but in bold. If you are a CEO, COO, CFO or HR director, doing the math around this with your own company is just terrifying.

So what can we do?

I don’t work in HR, but I have been building brands around the world for the past 12 years, from Google to unicorns and startups that went public, and I’ve come to realise that the same principles apply when we build a brand outwards than when we do it inwards for our employees. In the end, you are still selling a product, in this case, your company, and you want your target audience, your employees, to fall in love with it, to buy it, to believe in it, to advocate for it, and to want it to succeed above everything else. So let’s talk about employer branding from a marketing perspective, and which things you can do to improve yours.?

Here are five thought provoking exercises based on my experience as an employee and my point of view as a marketer, that you can do to stress test your employer branding.

1. What’s in it for me?

We are selfish by definition. We do A because we get B in return. Cause and effect. We work for money. We buy products from brands because they fulfill our needs, whether it’s status, comfort, relief, or whatever we need at that moment.

A common frustration shared by HR teams is that employees don’t listen to them. That their initiatives are often ignored and their communication channels are not effective. This is frustrating but quite common, and it happens mostly when employees don’t see value in what they are receiving or being asked to do. Therefore, if you want something from employees, always start with the benefit, as if you were selling a product. What will the employees get from the initiative or project you are pushing? This is their driver, and after you hook them with that, they can do what you want.

Some could argue that this isn’t sustainable, that employees need to do what they’re told and that’s it, instead of being bribed. It’s the old duality of the carrot or the stick. The authoritarian father vs. the cool uncle. Will you take out the trash in fear of being grounded? Or will you do it because if you take the trash out five times in a row you’ll get pizza? I’d go for the latter, and so do most people according to behavioral science. Let’s use Google as an example here. The most successful company ever, who used one of the oldest tricks to get employees to stay longer at work: Beer.

On Google, there’s a tradition called TGIF that happens every Friday. At the end of the work day, people gather in the kitchens or auditoriums in each office and there is a party with drinks and food. Every Friday. While in most companies people can’t wait for Friday to get out of work and go home as soon as possible, thousands of Google employees decide to stay for a few more hours after work voluntarily, just to have some drinks and talk to each other. Of course not all those conversations are about business or projects (though many are), but they help build the Google culture and their sense of belonging. Employees network, get to know each other, become friends (or even more than that), and this makes the group stronger. When back at work, collaboration is smoother, mood is better and ties are more solid. If you put on a spreadsheet the cost of beer and pizza against the value of the extra hours where your employees are networking, you will see that it is one of the cheapest investments you can make.

The importance of marketing here and how to get the message across is that TGIF at Google was not announced as a mandatory networking session by the company, but a fun event promoted with posters, weekly themes, and an overall casual vibe that allows people to feel more comfortable at work. Once employees have something to gain, the word of mouth makes the rest come, and this applies to any initiative by HR.

2. The job offer test

In marketing we say that acquiring a customer is 5x more expensive than retaining an existing one, so above all, we try to keep our existing customers happy. The same applies for employees.???

Good talent is scarce, so when a company is hiring they do their best to seduce top applicants. Job offers are like tinder profiles where companies condense all their good traits in a few bullet points. “Let’s sound successful with our milestones and growth metrics, but also fun and casual with our ping-pong table and team offsites. Let’s be inspiring with our mission, but also show potential for career improvement with all the internal mobility and diversity of our team. Yay!”

Now let’s do a reality check. Does your product live up to the expectations set by the ad? Go back and read the job offer template of your company, and see if it really is that fun, inspiring and amazing for people who work there as you claim it to be. You can survey your existing employees about it to get their feedback and spot the areas for improvement. If it passes the test, congratulations, you are doing a great job, but if it isn’t and you realise that most of the words in there are just keywords that “sound good”, and then the ping pong table hasn’t been used in months because it is frowned upon by upper management, it’s time to live up to your promises and deliver, or your matches will get bored and leave after a few dates.

3. The custom package

Browsing through competitors' job offers is also a good exercise to compare what else they offer beyond a salary. Benefits not only increase a company’s appeal and retention but also greatly improve the wellbeing of employees, which makes them perform better.

The benefits market has never been as competitive as it is today, and new solutions appear every other day. To put it in marketing terms, if the job was a car, the benefits are the extras. At some point in history, seatbelts or airbags were considered extras, but now they are a must. Has your benefits package evolved with the new developments, or are you still stuck with the seatbelts?

When you have to cater for a large group, the hard thing is to find what everyone will like. Reality is that people are different, and thus they want different things, so the new trend is to offer the customer a full customisation of the extras. Do you want a solar roof? Or do you prefer autonomous driving? More horsepower instead? You got it!

That is what we do at Vitaance with our product, allowing employees to choose whatever they want from an allowance their company sets up for them, so that they get access to unlimited benefits. This would be unthinkable a few years ago due to all the paperwork, but now it can be done seamlessly through an app that also allows them to improve their wellbeing. The best thing? Every euro they spend on benefits is spent on something they truly need, so the perceived value they get from their company is higher.

4. Being your way

Even though people are different, there are also certain things they must agree on. Same way we all live under a set of rules and a social contract that keeps society moving forward, a company needs their own code of conduct and set of values.

Just like with the job offer test, a company culture manual is not just a bunch of keywords. The looser it is, the less applicable and weaker the culture. Many founders give this some thought when creating a company, but as it scales, it gets often forgotten.

Strong companies, however, live by these values and enforce them every day, and this only makes them stronger. Think of Netflix with their “superstar team” mindset, where underperformers are let go immediately, or Amazon with their “customer obsession” that makes them even send or return products at a loss.

Your company needs a personality too, and just like any good brand, it shouldn’t be for everyone. This is a good exercise to not only look at your company values and see if they are correct, but also look at your employees, and see if they live by them. There is nothing more discouraging than being in a group meeting and seeing that someone is clearly hating it there. Not only that person’s contribution is close to zero, but it also drains out the energy from everyone else. Do you really need that person in your company? Parting ways will probably be the best both for you and them, because we all fit somewhere.

A great example of a strong company culture is Alan. They are very unique in their way of working and very transparent about it, they’ll tell you the pros and the cons and always state it clearly, this culture might not be for you, and guess what? That’s totally fine.

5. Having fun

Leaving the best for last. Work should be fun. It’s where we spend most of our adult lives, and any job can be enjoyable, it’s not about the task, it’s about the mindset. Think of Michael Scott at Dunder Mifflin.

We like to feel good, and we like to enjoy. Employees who like what they do won’t leave you, not even for a higher pay in many cases. It’s the same with brands. If it makes me feel good, why would I change? I don’t even want to hear about competitors.

For example, at Getaround, we would do a company wide gathering every quarter to announce the company results and news from every team. It was a 2 hour long presentation with hundreds of slides, figures and bullet points. Imagine putting this on a Monday morning, with everyone connecting through a video call. Depressing. Instead, we turned those presentations into thematic parties. One quarter I would present my team’s figures dressed as a rapper, and the next one, wearing a purple onesie. Seeing the company’s leaders in disguise didn’t make the presentations less serious, but definitely more memorable, and these events were the most looked forward to every quarter.

Now think about the opportunities you have in your company to make things fun. Whether it's meetings, processes or routine tasks, how could you make this more enjoyable for employees? When they talk to their partner or at a party about their job, what do you think they say? Do they love it or do they hate it? It’s up to you and your employer branding to change that.

I hope you found this article insightful and thought provoking, and it sparks some conversations around what you can do in 2024 to improve your company culture. Work is changing, life can be tough, and we are all in this together.

If you want to know more about how Vitaance can help you on that process, please reach out.