Can Staff Help Repair Your Damaged Employer Brand?

Employer brands have taken a bit of a battering over the past few years following the recession as employees have had to deal with the fallout of: redundancies, pay freezes and pay cuts, squeezed teams working long hours with insufficient resources, limited career opportunities due to stagnated growth, and so on. As a result, surveys such as this oft-cited Gallup survey tell us that 87 percent of employees are disengaged or actively disengaged at work, which suggests that most employer brands have taken a severe battering over the past few years.

It’s very likely that this weakened brand image and general distrust of bosses and employers is reducing many employers’ abilities to attract and retain talent. This catastrophic loss of trust in senior management has been highlighted in the 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer, which has shown that wearied, down trodden employees are a more trusted source of company information than high flying CEO and senior managers (50% compared to 43%).

This situation is both a problem and an opportunity. A lack of trust in senior managers and the overall employer brand will harm talent attraction, but with employees now becoming a trusted source of information, employers have the opportunity to use employees as employer brand evangelists to help repair your employer brand. Employees are especially well placed to be evangelists for the employer brand as the Edelman survey showed that employees were by far the most trusted authority on company’s culture, integrity, working conditions and related issues.

But, of course, employers have to be careful that they are not jumping the gun, because if you haven’t repaired and enhanced your employer brand enough, then you may find that you don’t have enough employees to go out and evangelize about your brand. So, it may be that employers need to do some ‘under the hood’ work in parallel with or even before they start building their army of brand evangelists. This could involve doing things like pay and benefits benchmarking to bring your conditions back up in line with the market; a greater focus on career development and training support; building a more attractive management culture; new, clear and exciting company vision; securing more investment; reducing long hours; etc. In short, minimize push factors and increase pull factors.

Having built momentum, goodwill and buzz around the recovering employer brand, you can now begin recruiting evangelists within your employee population to spread the good word about your brand, and start replacing some of the negative gossip that your brand disenfranchised employees may be spreading. There are many channels through which to propagate this new found and highly credible employee-originated brand message. You could start an employee referral scheme, start inviting co-workers to interview so they give their view of the employer brand to new candidates, or encourage your brand evangelists to blog about their jobs on your website (with pre-publication approval of course), and to participate in your talent communities. You may want to enable employees to start generating their own video content for your website about employer brand.

It doesn’t matter what channel is used, the point is that it must be seen to be employee generated brand evangelism(and not corporate speak), if it is to have the most powerful brand repairing and brand enhancing effect.