Feb 21, 2020

Employer Branding 3/4 #️⃣ Employee Experience

By Kerry from Try Catch • Issue #21 • View online

Morning, Friday.

It’s Kerry from Try Catch, rounding out the third week of February again with our co-author, Marian Jarzak, Employer Branding Enthusiast from Berlin and author of the Talent Crush blog.

We have some new subscribers, so a quick run-down: each month we curate must-reads concerning an important topic.

The February topic of Try Catch Essentials is Employer Branding.

Try Catch Essentials are:

For HR leaders, recruiters, founders and hiring managers
Handpicked essential reading on important topics in HR and Tech
Sent to you in 4 easily-digestible issues per month

Last week, we covered the basics of understanding what Employer Brand Touchpoints (EBTs) are: the points of interaction and observation as experienced in the employee’s relationship to the employer.*

*For the sake of brevity - we won’t be distinguishing between phases of prospective, current and former; rather, we will refer to all tenses by the term: employee.

This week, we’re breaking down Employee Experience as Employer Branding: how, as an employer, being committed to the employee experience will make an authentic impact on how the Employer Brand is consumed and accepted by employees.

The Employee Experience (EX) topic has made the rounds through blogs and articles last year, LinkedIn’s 2020 Global Talent Trends report even regarded EX as the #1 trend of 2020.

In a way, Marian and I agree that EX has a better ring to it than the professional (see: sterile) department title of ‘Human Resources,’ which, seemingly, isn’t willing to regard employees (see: people) outside of their biological taxonomy of simply ‘human.’

One article we found expressed an overlap of EX and CxHR: The experience of (internal) customers of HR (employees, managers, contingent workers) across HR-owned journeys.

So if employees are the the target market, promoting their success and knowing their needs is paramount to the success of the business and the reputation of an employer.

Customer Experience (or in Amazon’s case, Customer Obsession) has been covered extensively by mainstream media as a business strategy over the past decade, but if internal customers (employees) are being neglected they will take to other outlets to express their frustrations, such as services as Glassdoor or the press.

This goes to show that what’s important about understanding employer branding efforts is validating the results found during the employer branding research with the people that work(ed) there.

We can draw a relevant parallel from ignoring EX while focussing resources to employer branding efforts to how Fyre Festival crashed-and-burned - presentation was obsessed over at the absolute expense of execution.

The ultimate goal is to make your company a great place to work and share the authentic stories of success from the employees.

Read on to discover the potential missteps of misplaced focus, false advertising, the future of employer experience, and how HR fits into it all.

💌 Give us a read and give us a share, 📥 you reply, we reply.

Employee Experience as Employer Branding

In the scheme of things, ‘perks’ or ‘engagement initiatives’ are often just cosmetic - we talked about perks in the first issue of this series - things like: free beer on Fridays, open work space, competitive salary.

When an employee is talking about the job/employer are these selling points or concessions?

Is either party actually proud of these ‘perks’ if the organization is overcompensating or employees don’t feel valued or they feel lied to based on the experience they were sold from their initial employer brand touchpoints?

Deception should be avoided.

The employer brand should be an accurate, optimistic presentation of what the experience of the employer is to the employees.

From the Essential Read, let’s look at Netflix as an example:

Netflix released their corporate culture deck and they’re very blatant and upfront in telling people, “You are going to work hard. This is not an easy job. We’ll pay you well, but make no mistake, if you take this job, this is going to be a very, very challenging job for you. But we’ll take care of you if you decide to accept it.“

This description touches on some of the aspects of the core workplace concerns from the Essential Read:

What does it actually mean to work there?
What is the function of HR?
What technologies do we use for our employees?
What should the physical space be like?

These things are what is important at the end of the day for employee experience, things that will stick in their heads while reminiscing over the employee lifecycle - these will be the experiences they will share and they will be alarmed if their experience do not align with the employer brand presentation.

Employer branding managers can apply design thinking to approach EX similar to how designers approach User Experience Design (UXD) to understand, design and evaluate how the branding reflects the experience.

While some may consider EX is separate from EB, however, given the logic that sales and marketing are different departments, however when they compliment each other they can achieve what’s best for business.

Let’s draw this comparison again to the ill-fated Fyre Festival: investing in the Employee Experience as Employer Branding is of monumental importance.

What Fyre Festival promised was nothing that it could have ever delivered, yet it went full steam ahead - employer branding efforts should be authentic and validated.

No organization wants to get close to such a criminal understatement that came from the mouth of Ja Rule: ”It’s not fraud, it’s false advertising.“

Again, deception should be avoided.

Tell it like it is, make life easier, offer support and people will happily show up to work.

Read or listen to the interview from Link Humans’s Karim Ansari with Jacob Morgan as he details ‘The Employee Experience Advantage.’ 👇

The Essential Reads

The Futurist's Guide to Employee Experience | Link Humans

Jacob Morgan speaks with Karim Ansari about Employee Engagement initiatives, Using analytics and data to improve making the work and workplace a better experience, and to keep an eye our for how quickly disruption is happening in every industry.

We love his comparison of employer branding to online dating: because of how websites and profiles can be built and the freedom of speech allowed on the internet, anyone can portray themselves however they like and this unlocks the threat of catfishing. Or, in a more pertinent example, a company can portrays themself in ways designed to attract many new applicants but after a short time after being hired, the truth comes out that they have no invested in employee experiences and thus turnover is peaked by dismayed employees.

The article is a bit long, but they have included an audio file of the interview where you can Listen to the interview - podcast style. Relatable comparisons.

linkhumans.com • Share

The Additional Reads

Employee Experience: Who Should be in Charge? | Duperrin

We featured Bertrand’s Employee Experience pt. 2 last week, they each can stand on their own, but in this article, he outlines the fundamentals of who should lead EX and what those roles entail. Deeper knowledge.

www.duperrin.com • Share

User Experience Design Process | UX Planet

Understanding UXD can apply almost directly to understanding EX, and perhaps in the near future we’ll see designers specializing in EXD. Get on top of the ball by reading up on design thinking here, actually there probably are already a few firms doing this - 2020 is the future after all. Design thinking.

uxplanet.org • Share

Next Up

We’ll be in your inbox again next Friday morning at 9:10 for our last topic of Employer Branding .

We’ll explore the key elements of Employer Branding Measurements, how to measure your impact and useful frameworks of thinking to apply the findings.

Stay Connected

We’d love to hear your feedback or if you want to compare the nuances between Netflix‘s and Hulu’s Fyre Festival documentaries, hit reply or email kerry@trycatch.tech.

See you Friday!

~ Marian & Kerry

PS, if you want to stay up-to-date on Try Catch’s Amsterdam tech community and events, sign-up for more Try Catch in your inbox with our every-other-week Try Catch Thursdays newsletter!

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By Kerry from Try Catch

Try Catch Essentials:

- For HR leaders, recruiters, founders and hiring managers
- Handpicked essential reading on important topics in HR and Tech
- Sent to you in 4 easily-digestible issues per month

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