Feature

Linking employees to organisational brand

Driven by their need to become global players, IT companies are today linking their employees to their brands. Chirasrota Jena explains how this has helped in recruiting and retaining the best talent.

The brand promise, the information and set of expectations behind a brand name, is often viewed as the single most valuable representation of corporate business. Linking employees to the brand name of the organisation is not just important but imperative as well. All companies today speak about employee engagement and use different engagement models to bring about individual importance in the overall organisational framework. The employer brand is a very vital component that can be a highly visible factor to bond the employee to the organisation. The visibility factor not only helps to get the employee aligned to the organisation, but it also sees his close family and friends looking at the company as an important entity in their everyday lives.

Employer brand is all about the employment experience factor of the employee and how he or she perceives that experience. In that sense, linking employees to the brand name and vice versa are extremely important in today’s world. Successfully transforming employees into ‘brand enthusiasts’ is a complex change management initiative that requires a step-by-step approach.

Through organisation-wide branding initiatives, companies are using a combination of training, communication and feedback process across functions to fulfill the brand promise. Explains, Shrikant Kulkarni, Senior VP, HR, KPIT Cummins Infosys-tems, “Given that we are operating in the knowledge domain, employees’ interactions with the outside world form our moments of truth. It is a given that our employees don’t just make our brand, but are our brand. For us, it is important that all our employees understand the corporate brand so they can deliver on the brand promise in a unified voice, consistently. We believe that only when they connect with the vision and strategy of the company will they be able to stand for what we represent.”

Communicating the brand promise

"Every organisational activity that we do, is publicised in our intranet, branded HR notice boards, etc. We also ensure that the internal policies and procedures are aligned to reinforce the overall organisational brand" - Kalpana Srinivasan HR Head Aspire Systems

Communicating about the brand to the employees is an effective via media to convey the business direction, goals and expectations, towards realising the same. Organisations are communicating their brand power to their employees and also prospective employees, either through internal or external programmes. G Gopinath, Vice-president-Corporate HR, i-flex Solutions, states, “Communicating the i-flex brand to our employees gives us an opportunity to reinforce the vision and mission of the company and ensure a common understanding. This gives a sense of purpose to our employees. Besides our policies, approach to compensation as well as various development initiatives also help communicate what the company stands for. Our key brand promises are reflected in our dealings with employees as well. We fulfill this promise in large measure through our ongoing engagement with employees and development initiatives.” He further adds that customer focus, domain expertise and a global business model have been the guiding principles in achieving the mission of i-flex. The company is communicating through the intranet, HR query line, quarterly open houses and through running of different internal programmes like Bank-on-Buddy and Strength-2-Stride.

It is not only important to engage in this communication but also imbibe it within the organisation’s culture. This leads to employees owning the company brand and evangelising the same. There are several programmes that organisations across the world are doing, both internally and externally, to enhance the brand awareness. Says Kalpana Srinivasan, HR Head, Aspire Systems, “Every organisational activity that we do, whether be it something like knowledge sharing sessions (known internally as Wisdom Curve), or our HR-based employee career meetings (HR Connect), is tied to the overall organisational goal and the universal organisational brand. This is heavily publicised in our intranet and on other communication modes like our HR newsletter and branded HR notice boards. We also ensure that the internal policies and procedures are aligned to reinforce the overall organisational brand.”

Getting and retaining the best

Organisations are using their brand name to recruit, retain and engage their employees in various activities. Externally, candidates perceive the employer brand as a promise for an expected employment experience. Internally, employees perceive the brand as how well you deliver on that promise and how well they fit within your organisational culture. Internal branding helps improve employee retention and productivity through programmes that build job satisfaction and motivation, while reinforcing brand messages traditionally targeted to external audiences. By using it, companies incorporate brand messages across all internal activities like training, orientation, team-building and more, through a mix of branding, organisational development and employee communications strategies.

KV Prasad, Senior VP, HR and Finance, Pramati Technologies, says, “As retention is a critical factor in a product company, employees’ association with the brand helps us a lot. We have a very high retention rate right now. Reinforcing your employer brand through relevant, targeted recruitment marketing will position your organisation to attract qualified and best-fit candidates. The alignment with the company’s vision and mission certainly helps in better achieving the same. The good thing here is that even after employees leave and move onto other jobs, they remain brand ambassadors for the company.”

While most companies have employee communications programmes, there are a few who fail to build brand loyalty. Additionally, internal programmes are often managed separately and lose the consistency afforded by internal branding. The results can be devastating to the bottom line. Says Srinivasan, “As an employer, we believe we have and are continuing to create a unique brand in the OPD space. Our employees as well as prospective employees are very willing to look at Aspire purely from that perspective. Our branding initiative is not just to enhance visibility but also to enhance visibility as an OPD leader and the best company to work for. And that is the promise we make to our employees. We believe we have been able to successfully create that brand so far and are making great inroads into people’s mind to further that position.” Externally Aspire Systems is taking part in job fairs, sponsor events, and regularly interact with the press to popularise its brand.

Opportunities for business

There is a very clear connection between brand performance and employee performance. The companies require techniques to spot the customer touch points most affected by employee behaviour and weave the brand into the fabric of the organisation systematically into human resources, operations, customer service, sales and more. Opines Kulkarni, “There is only to gain by aligning employees’ activities with what a brand promises. The obvious advantage is motivated evangelists, who believe in your organisation’s vision and strategy, who speak the same language right from the shop floor to the senior management. We are a company that is on an accelerated growth mode, we focus on key mission objectives in this process, which also form the fulcrum of our branding initiatives: to be a global partner of first choice with leadership in strategic focus areas. We offer all employees an opportunity to make a difference. There is scope for enormous learning and high growth. All our organisational and people processes are built around the value system and ensure that the brand promise is delivered.” An alignment with the company’s vision and mission certainly helps in achieving the same. The good thing here is that even after employees leave and move onto other jobs, they remain brand ambassadors for the company. The core values that KPIT Cummins is built on are customer focus, respect for the individual, integrity, community development, knowledge worship, entrepreneurship and teamwork. These values sum up the basic brand identity of the organisation.

The advantages of linking employees with the brand name of the organisation are manifold. Gopinath explains, “It creates a stronger sense of ‘connect’ and ownership among employees in communicating brand values through their dealings with various stakeholders, greater synergy between individual and company brand values, a consistent projection and demonstration of the company’s brand values and a higher level of employee engagement. On the downside, our employees become that much more attractive in the market, however, we believe the advantages far outweigh the disadvantage.” Employee communication is an ongoing process in most companies. There are many modes of organisational communication, some are real-time and others are periodic, such as quarterly open houses with employees.

The active role of HR

In most companies HR plays an important role in linking the employees to the brand name. The senior management along with the HR and corporate communications functions plays a key role in communicating the brand image to the employees. At i-flex, the top-level managers are regularly interacting and acting as facilitators with the employees, with the help of the HR department. While at KPIT, the employee branding initiatives are jointly owned by the marketing and the HR team. The leadership team walks and talks the brand. All brand initiatives are managed through the line managers. However, the corporate communications arm of Aspire is an active stakeholder in communicating the organisational brand image to not just the internal audience but also to the external world. The corporate communication team works in close coordination with other heads of department and key personnel to propagate the brand image and culture.

Branding decisions and its communication outside the organisation are obviously going to come from the top management in a company. But where HR can help is in getting the branding and company values messages out to employees. It is critical that HR understands the importance of these communications. And if it is able to seize the initiative in providing the vehicles for the communication of these messages, HR is going to be seen as a true strategic and marketing partner. Prasad points out, “We have a very flat organisation with easy access to any senior management—this opens up informal channels for communication. The group manager is in regular contact with their teams, regularly sharing business and other developments. At a formal level, three times in a year, we have company-wide meetings with the CEO sharing the business update and plans.”

It is an everyday process and not a one-time activity to communicate to the employees either on brand image or on any kind of business decisions. It is an inbuilt cultural aspect. Every activity undertaken will be thought about from all ends and there is a continuous engagement of key decision-makers from different organisational facets to ensure that the communication is consistent and in line with the overall organisational culture, image and brand.

Every key decision that impacts employees is made with their participation and inputs. In fact, several initiatives are actually undertaken and shaped by employees themselves. For areas that require intense thought process, taskforces are drawn from the workforces who in turn ensure that the overall employee inputs, concerns and recommendations are taken care of.

Organisations are now trying their level best to get the larger pie of the profits through the efficient utilisation of their human capital resources. To achieve this objective they are also extending every possible benefits to the latter. Giving the benefits of linking thorough their brand name is the most important factor on which most companies unanimously agree.