The Employer Brand E-Book

Simon Barrow

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 342

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Levels of 'employer brand awareness' are rising fast across Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific, as leading companies realise that skilled, motivated employees are as vital to their commercial success as profitable customers and apply the principles of branding to their own organization. Starting with a review of the pressures which have generated current interest in employer branding, this definitive book goes on to look at the historical roots of brand management and the practical steps necessary to achieve employer brand management success - including the business case, research, positioning, implementation, management and measurement. Case studies of big-name employer brand stories include Tesco, Wal-Mart, British Airways and Prêt a Manger.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Table of Figures

Acknowledgements

Preface

SO WHY NOW?

Part I - The Rationale for Change

Chapter 1 - Birth of an Idea

Chapter 2 - The Changing Needs and Aspirations of Employees

Chapter 3 - Investors Awaken

Chapter 4 - The People Management Challenge

Chapter 5 - The Role of Leadership

Part II - The ‘How To’ Guide

Chapter 6 - Brand Fundamentals

FUNCTIONAL BENEFITS

EMOTIONAL BENEFITS

HIGHER ORDER BENEFITS, BRAND VALUES AND DNA

BRAND PERSONALITY

BRAND POSITIONING AND DIFFERENTIATION

BRAND HIERARCHY

BRAND VISION AND BRAND REALITY

BRAND MANAGEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT

SUMMARY

Chapter 7 - The Business Case

THE MAJOR BENEFITS OF EMPLOYER BRANDING

LIFE CYCLE BENEFITS

WINNING SUPPORT FROM THE TOP

SUMMARY

Chapter 8 - Employer Brand Insights

EMPLOYEE INSIGHTS

LABOUR MARKET INSIGHTS

SUMMARY

Chapter 9 - Employer Brand Positioning

BRAND IDENTITY

BRAND INTEGRATION (CUSTOMER AND EMPLOYER BRANDS)

CORPORATE BRAND HIERARCHY (PARENT AND SUBSIDIARY)

THE KEY COMPONENTS OF THE POSITIONING MODEL

THE BRAND REALITY MODEL

THE BRAND VISION MODEL

EMPLOYEE VALUE PROPOSITIONS

SUMMARY

Chapter 10 - Employer Brand Communication

IDENTITY

INTERNAL LAUNCH

RATIONAL UNDERSTANDING

EMOTIONAL ENGAGEMENT

EMPLOYEE COMMITMENT AND BEHAVIOUR CHANGE

SUMMARY

Chapter 11 - Employer Brand Management

BIG PICTURE: POLICY

LOCAL PICTURE: PRACTICE

THE KEY RESPONSIBILITIES OF EMPLOYER BRAND MANAGEMENT

SUMMARY

Chapter 12 - The Durability of the Employer Brand Concept

Part III - Appendices

Appendix 1: Reuters Case Study

History

The Business Context

Taking the Lead

The Organisational Change Programme

Culture and Values

Barbarians at the Gates

Integrating the Internal and External Brand

‘Fast Forward’

Distilling the Values

The ‘Living FAST’ Framework

Mobilisation

The Dream Team

Preparing for ‘June 11’

‘This is One for the Books on How to Communicate’

Responding to Employee Input

The Main Effort Plan

MANAGING THE ‘LIVING FAST’ BRAND

KNOW. NOW

Appendix 2: Tesco Case Study

The Business Context

Transforming the Customer Experience

Customer Insight Unit

Terry Leahy and the First Values Programme

Re-addressing the Values

Embedding the Values

The Employer Brand Proposition

The Steering Wheel

Delivering on the Employer Brand Promises

My Manager Supports Me to Do a Good Job

Trust and Respect

Employee Segmentation and Flexible Offerings

Diversity

Measurement of Success

Appendix 3: Extract from Greggs’ Performance Development Review Guidance Notes (2004)

USING VALUES WITHIN THE REVIEW DISCUSSION

References

Index

Table of Figures

Figure 1.1 The employer brand ‘wheel’. Source: PiB

Figure 8.1 How commitment compares across business sectors. Source: TNS (2002)

Figure 8.2 The ISR Employee Engagement Index, variations by country: Source: ISR (2005)

Figure 9.1 An integrated brand model. Source: People in Business

Figure 9.2 The brand platform. Source: PiB

Figure 10.1 The brand engagement model. Source: People in Business

Figure 11.1 The employer brand mix. Source: PiB

Figure A1.1 The ‘Living FAST’ framework. Source: Reuters (2004)

Figure A1.2 The Main Effort Plan. Source: Reuters (2004)

Figure A2.1 The ‘Steering Wheel’. Source: Tesco (2004)

Copyright © 2005

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barrow, Simon.

The employer brand : bringing the best of brand management to people at work / Simon Barrow and Richard Mosley.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 13 978-0-470-01273-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 10 0-470-01273-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Product management. I. Mosley, Richard. II. Title.

HF5415.15.B375 2006 658.3′14-dc22

2005020003

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset in 12/14 Garamond by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall, UK This book is printed on acid-free paper responsibly manufactured from sustainable forestry in which at least two trees are planted for each one used for paper production.

To Sheena Barrow and Fiona Mosley

Acknowledgements

Many people have played a part in shaping the thinking in this book, but it would have been impossible without the thought-inspiring contributions made by the following people.

Greg Dyke, previous Director General, and Russell Grossman of the BBC; Alain Wertheimer of Chanel; Tracy Robbins and Tim Small of Compass Group; Ian Edgeworth of Greggs; Robert Hiscox and Bronek Masojada of Hiscox; Dr Stephen Harding and Nick Tatchell of ISR; Ken Temple of the John Lewis Partnership; Michael Robinson of Man Investments; Claire Henry of Microsoft; Tom Harvey of Nationwide Building Society; David Roberts of Orange; Camille Burrows of PepsiCo; Anne Marie Bell, Ivan Newman and John Reid-Dodick of Reuters; David Fairhurst of Tesco; Nigel Brocklehurst and Darren Briggs of Vodafone; Fergus Balfour, Rhodora Palomar Fresnedi, Yuko Miyata and Stephane le Camus of Unilever; and Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP.

Many of the above have kindly allowed us to put their portraits on the cover, in addition to the following colleagues, clients, alumni, advisors, consultants and friends of People in Business.

John Ainley, Geoff Armstong, Becky Barrow, Trevor Beattie, Susana Berlevy, Kashmir Bilgan, Sir Christopher Bland, Richard Boggis-Rolfe, Omberline de Boissieu, Sir Thomas Boyd-Carpenter, Stephen Bubb, Doug Bugie, Christopher Carson, Tim Cole, Chris Darke, Colette Dorward, Rob Drewett, Jesper Edelmann, David Evans, Liam Fitzpatrick, Carmel Flatley, Keith Faulkner, Sir Malcolm Field, Fiona Fong, Richard Foster, Jane Francis, Rod Eddington, Julie George, Joanne Gilbert, Alison Grainger, Mike Haffenden, Colin Harris, Tom Harvey, Richard Haythorthwaite, Steve Holliday, Glyn House, Simon Howard, Hugh Jaques, Daniel Kasmir, Andrew Ketteringham, Brian Kingham, Andrew Lambert, Simon Lockett, Philip Marsden, Luke Mayhew, Jim McAuslan, Tim Melville-Ross, Trevor Merriden, Richard Needham, Stuart Newton, Linda Nielson, David Norman, Nia Parry, Harvey Pearson, Amy Pike, Fabiola Pizzigalo, Amin Rajan, Alison Rankin-Frost, Sir Robert Worceste, Nikki Rolfe, Lynn Shepherd, Antony Snow, Andy Street, John Taylor, David Verey, Jonny Wates, Lady Bridgett Walters, Laura Whyte and Paul Williams.

We would also like to thank Compass Group for allowing us to feature a number of the portraits of high performing employees featured in their recent global employer brand campaign.

Preface

Books like this tend to get written for two main reasons. One is when the approach is new and the creators believe they have a missionary role to introduce a new point of view that will change the way everyone thinks. The second is when the area is well established but the writer wants to add a new dimension to a subject. This book combines aspects of both. For many this will be the first time they have come across this way of thinking. For others, the concept will be familiar, but its scope of application will be uncertain. Whichever camp you inhabit, we hope that this first book on the employer brand leaves you clear about its meaning and motivated to put the thinking into practice.

Given that I spent years in the advertising business before my work in human resources, here is a story about two books that have acted as models for this one. The first is Rosser Reeves’ classic Reality in Advertising , a book that changed the way in which advertising is assessed and measured.1a Years ago at the Players Club in New York I met Charles Roman the copywriter who created Charles Atlas who gave hope to ‘97-lb weaklings who had sand kicked in their faces’ on the basis that ‘you too can have a body like mine’. Roman showed me a battered copy of Reeves’ book in which the master had written: ‘to Charles Roman who has been practising reality in advertising all of his life.’

David Ogilvy, the founder of Ogilvy and Mather, wrote a different kind of book about the same subject but it was more a celebration of what he thought was great about the business when it is done well. It was called Confessions of an Advertising Man and, with wit and grace, described his experiences and the philosophy that had built his agency.2 It contained gems like ‘the consumer isn’t a moron she is your wife’, ‘salesmen don’t sing’, and the power of long copy, ‘the more you tell the more you sell’ accompanied by a brilliant description of the benefits of the Aga cooker written when he was a salesman for this new product in the 1930s.

Where does this book on the Employer Brand fit into such a format? The employer brand concept has already achieved substantial awareness among the HR community worldwide. In 2003 an employer brand survey conducted by The Economist among a global panel of readers revealed a 61% level of awareness among HR professionals and 41% among non-HR professionals.3 Total awareness in the UK was 36%, with the highest awareness levels recorded in the USA (42%) and Asia-Pacific (45%). Of the 138 leading companies surveyed by the Conference Board in 2001, 40% claimed to be actively engaged in some form of employer branding. 4 Conference companies have been running events featuring the employer brand since 1996. I wrote this on the way back from running the first employer brand workshop in China and in recent years have spoken in most major markets.

SO WHY NOW?

The number one reason is that this approach lacks the definition and established rigour it needs. ‘Employer branding’ is too often limited to the look and feel of recruitment advertising or internal communication campaigns to sell the benefits of the employer as ‘a great place to work’. These perspectives lack the depth that any recognition of the reality of the employment experience must have if it is to carry weight with employees actual or potential. Here is the definition that Tim Ambler of the London Business School and I wrote in 1996:

We define the Employer Brand as the package of functional, economic and psychological benefits provided by employment and identified with the employing company.

The main role of the employer brand is to provide a coherent framework for management to simplify and focus priorities, increase productivity and improve recruitment, retention and commitment.5

Secondly, we believe that, like good marketing, this is a fundamental approach to the way people are managed, listened to and involved. It isn’t a fad. It is a way of working that will last indefinitely. Procter & Gamble created the brand management concept in 1931 and it has remained the basis for running effective customer-facing businesses ever since.

Thirdly, we believe that the Human Resource community needs this approach to provide the clarity, the focus and the internal platform that they need to pull together the plethora of activities that make up their responsibilities. We have seen the emerging strength of HR people when they have grasped the concept of employer brand management and it has provided them with the coherence and the zeal that marketing people have long demonstrated. This book is primarily for them and we hope that it will provide a touchstone and perhaps some inspiration. The employer brand approach is a powerful one but only when the sponsors are powerful and HR must be able to match the pitch of this ball. If they do not, then others will step into the vacuum. We are starting to see this happen with titles like ‘Talent Manager’, ‘Resourcing Manager’ and other initiatives from Organisational Development, Internal Communications and Marketing.

However, the message of this book is also needed by senior management. We will argue that the employer brand, and their personal commitment to it, can make a valuable contribution to overall corporate success. When management was about the command and control of hourly paid muscle workers in an environment that favoured capital rather than labour, then perhaps these thoughts were less relevant but those days ended years ago.

Returning to the themes with which I started this preface, this book has two authors, and in some respects represents two books in one. I will describe the origination of the Employer Brand concept and the circumstances that are demanding its acceptance by senior management. My colleague, Richard Mosley, will describe some of the practical steps involved in applying employer brand thinking to your organisation. We hope that this combination of context, motivation, and ‘how to’ will prove an effective formula.

This book could not have been written without the experience we have gained from the clients of People in Business, in particular Hiscox, Premier Oil, Unilever, Manpower, John Lewis, The Crown Prosecution Service and Man Investments, among others. We also want to thank those who have given us their time, including Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Reuters, Microsoft, the BBC, Compass Group, Nationwide Building Society, Orange, Vodafone and Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP, who is responsible for managing one of the most complex employer brands on earth.

Richard and I hope that this book will be useful, inspiring and relevant and that it will provide a helpful basis for all those who are endeavouring to make the employment experience in their organisations both attractive and mutually profitable.

Simon Barrow March 2005

Part I

The Rationale for Change

Simon Barrow

1

Birth of an Idea

When I first thought of the idea of the Employer Brand it struck me as utterly obvious. There I was in a new HR-facing job and searching for the templates that had helped me to be a consumer goods brand manager and then CEO of an advertising agency in London. Good ideas often strike their creators as obvious probably because there is an urgent need to go about doing something in a better way.

In this case it was my arrival as CEO of a personnel business. In those days it was known as Charles Barker Human Resources, and it was part of the same group as the advertising agency I’d been running, which had recently been sold to our US partners NWAyer. I found myself in charge of an efficient factory producing 100,000 job ads a year, working for over 2000 clients and producing 5 million copies of house newspapers, dozens of graduate recruitment brochures and internal communications artefacts. Demand was driven by HR people within client organisations who themselves were under pressure from line managers seeking to fill jobs fast. Where, I wondered, was the agency planning and the research necessary to create a strategy that could pull together the organisation’s efforts and guide not only the creative work but also the overall approach to the employment experience? If this was a consumer brand you wouldn’t run it this way, but of course it isn’t one, it’s something else: it’s an Employer Brand. That was the moment I saw things differently and have been trying to apply this perspective ever since in the 18 years that I have been involved in helping organisations to succeed by bringing out the best in their people.

I was lucky to have had the consumer goods experience that Colgate – Palmolive and Best Foods (now part of Unilever) had given me. The Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once said that it helped just once in a life to be associated with something that was absolutely first class, and that’s how I felt about the eight years I spent in brand management. I was given responsibility and influence, though not power, on everything that was likely to have an effect on the health and strength of a brand. This included being expected to know the facts and have an opinion on the formula, packaging, identity, distribution, pricing, promotion, costs, margin improvement, advertising creative work, media selection, consumer and trade research. I was also expected to have the same information for each competitive brand. Brand management was created by Procter & Gamble in 1931 and has been taken up as a fundamental discipline ever since. It seemed reasonable to see what could be done to apply this thinking to the employer brand experience.

One of the factors that attracted me to Colgate as an employer was the location. Back in the 1970s it was just about the only top-ranking consumer goods business still based in Central London. Most were elsewhere: General Foods to Banbury, Mars to Slough and P&G to Newcastle. When I arrived there I found a remarkable group of fellow brand managers who found London life good for them both corporately and personally. They have all achieved something special since - Barrie Spelling, David Enfield, Tim Chappell, John Plackett, Patrick Bowden, and Martin Forde among others. I have sometimes wondered if the company ever considered the location aspect and whether the culture has changed markedly since moving to Guildford. They also paid better. When I moved there from Best Foods my basic salary rose 40%. There was no apparent career planning and I don’t recall contact with anyone with an HR title. You were expected to make your own luck and, if you were any good, were to be ready and able to move to another Colgate location anywhere. That happened to me when I was 33 with an offer to move to Benelux as Marketing Director. The offer was made on a Thursday with a decision expected the following Monday. It was time to find a more independent life and after a few months I moved to the embryo consumer advertising business of the Charles Barker Group.

In terms of Employer Brand thinking, Colgate gave me the theory and practice in managing all the elements that make up a brand. Charles Barker provided the people management aspects, which ultimately are the key success factors, as Charles Barker was later to find out to their cost. After four years as an account director I became Managing Director and later Chief Executive of the consumer advertising business under the Ayer Barker name, reflecting a partnership with the long-established US agency NWAyer in New York. Ayer were famous for creating ads like ‘Diamonds are forever’ for De Beers, ‘Reach out and touch somebody’ for AT&T and the highly influential employer brand campaign for the US Army ‘Be all that you can be’.

While people think that running an agency is solely about creativity and salesmanship, the reality is that your ultimate success is determined by recruiting, engaging and retaining good people. When Anita Roddick said, in her moving biography Body and Soul, ‘My people are my first line of customers’, that was entirely what I felt.1 The great value of winning Sharp Electronics, Chanel, Mercedes-Benz, Barclaycard and Save the Children Fund among others was not just the income and the opportunity it provided to demonstrate our creative skills but the fact that it made the agency easier to sell to good people. The argument for joining was that this was an agency on the move. It wasn’t staked out and therefore had plenty of opportunity and yet it had the backing of what was then the most prosperous communications group in the UK whose Chairman, Kyrle Simond, was by far the best paid boss of any agency group.

Some remarkable people came on board: Charles Channon as Head of Planning from J. Walter Thompson, Keith Ravenscroft from Ogilvy & Mather as a copywriter, shortly to be followed by Salman Rushdie who stayed five years and could be relied upon to understand the strategy and produce saleable if not brilliant work. When Midnight’s Children2 was accepted by Jonathon Cape, Salman told me that he wanted to leave the ad business. It was 1981 and we had been paying him £15,000 for a threeday week. Cape had told him that the minimum he could expect from the book in the first year was £22,000 and he felt confident enough to quit the business. When the book came out he sent me a copy with the somewhat double-edged inscription ‘to Simon, who helped me write Midnight’s Children three days a week’.

Looking back on those years in the consumer advertising business, there was one client for whom every step was the enhancement of the employment experience. That client was Avon for whom we were working, thanks to NWAyer in the US. I recall the UK MD Alan Daniels saying that the real purpose of the apparently customer-facing advertising ‘Avon you make me smile’ campaign of the time, was to get 40,000 representatives out of their homes and round to their neighbours selling Avon’s products. They did not call it the Employer Brand back in the 1980s but Avon remain past masters in understanding and enthusing thousands of people round the world to spend time with their friends looking at what Avon have to offer.

After 10 years of running the agency it was time for a change. The Charles Barker Group was starting to build its already substantial HR stance and as part of the flotation had bought the executive recruiter Norman Broadbent, then approaching the height of its powers. My job as CEO was to develop Barker’s HR business. If the Employer Brand concept was going to be taken seriously it had to impact senior management. I started to see the Human Resource Directors and, if possible, the CEO/MDs of the most significant clients. I would establish what they had spent with us in the last year and then explain that, in the UK in general, they were spending perhaps over £1m across numerous sites and from different budgets. Given that kind of money did they not deserve better research, and better coordination and discipline? It got us noticed and it established bridgeheads with senior clients through which the head of any agency can help, in the words of Martin Boase, founder of BMP, ‘to prevent unfairness’. It also helped to get the cause of better planning noticed, though it would take many years even for the best to really take this on board.

The employer brand perspective made for a strong point of view and impressed many clients. Even if the reality did not change much, it led to a string of high-profile wins that gave us confidence and attracted a new Managing Director for the recruitment advertising business - Simon Howard, then 32, who in time would become a serial recruitment entrepreneur. We won a competitive repitch for Tesco, then under the leadership of Ian McLaurin, his commercial director John Gildersleeve and a courageous HR Director, Leslie James, who together realised that Tesco’s reputation needed to be built on the basis of its employees. That would not be done if, as a consultant’s report had told them, the dominant culture was that of fear. Tesco’s radical and positive change to its people management strategy started about 1987 and has been consistently followed ever since (see Tesco case study, Appendix 2).

What could I do to develop the vision? The problem was that the mass of clients we served were not at a level to buy anything more than immediate recruitment solutions, so the small consulting business in the division had to fend for itself. However, here was an area that should be able to lead the change to an upgraded, better researched and planned employment experience in place of a system that simply drummed up new cannon fodder to replace those who had left. As a result I recruited Bill Quirke, who after a 1st in English at Oxford and later business experience had joined the PR Company Burson Marstellar where he had been building an internal communications consulting practice. His problem there was that of being an add-on to the big PR fee earners who didn’t then understand the importance of people at work. Our second need was to change the name of the consultancy to distinguish it from the mass recruitment and communications business and be better able to win its own work.

The name People in Business (PiB) was launched in January 1989. Despite some early successes, including a global assignment for Price Waterhouse and Project 2000 for the NHS, the new venture came under increasing pressure from a new group chairman, David Norman. David was a brisk, self-confident, warrior type leader focused on results rather than vision, and uncomfortable with the creative businesses he had taken on. He regarded my commitment to a soft issue business like PiB as an incorrect use of time and argued that we would make more money if I concentrated on the recruitment businesses. In May 1992 he suggested that we close PiB to achieve this, and we started a brief conversation that would set the course of my life from then on. I said that if he didn’t believe in PiB why didn’t I take it on, and we quickly agreed a deal in the next few days.

I had spoken on the subject of employer branding publicly for the first time at the UK’s Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development conference at Harrogate in 1990 and again in 1991 at another CIPD event entitled Building your Employer Brand. In 1995 we decided to do some initial research on awareness and understanding and Tim Ambler, Research Fellow at London Business School, took on the project working with MBA students Christian Ingerslev and Andrew Wiseman. They talked to 27 leading employers and their HR, Marketing and communications people and the results were published in the Journal of Brand Management in 1996.3 The results highlighted the following.

Language was an issue. The concept of the employer brand had not yet entered the lexicon of most HR and communications professionals, and there was some resistance to introducing marketing language to the HR discipline. Many of the respondents felt that the concept risked having some negative overtones, given their perception of marketing as artificial and manipulative. These comments demonstrated the gap that too often exists in the mutual understanding between HR and the marketing function.

While many of the respondents recognised the implicit existence of the concept, there was some resistance to recognising the employer brand as a separate and distinct approach. There was certainly some resistance to adding a further thought process to an already quite big schedule.

• ‘We are doing very little to promote an employer brand within the firm. It is something we need to work on but I have more pressing issues.’

• ‘Frankly we have so much to do at the moment that we just want to get the basics right. The employer brand concept is not essential.’

The above thought reminds me of the old line: ‘I’ll get on to marketing when sales pick up.’

Corporate performance was identified by several respondents as a key prerequisite for a strong employer brand:

• ‘Reputation is important but you must be successful as a business in order to have a good employer brand. You have to perform.’

• ‘It is difficult for us to build our employer brand because we have not had good performance during the past two years.’

There was a theme in this research that the employer brand was part of communications, something you could talk about when you were in good shape. At that time respondents did not necessarily extend the concept to recognise that they were talking about the employment experience as a whole. This defining feature of employer brand thinking would only emerge later.

There was widespread support for the idea that an effective employer brand approach required senior management commitment and close cooperation between top management, marketing and HR.

• ‘The biggest obstacle for a successful employer brand is the lack of funding and buy-in from top management.’

Finally, many people recognised the value of bringing some of the disciplines of marketing into the HR functions. This included an emphasis on getting the product right (i.e. the whole employment experience), making use of segmentation and umbrella branding, using compensation within the context of other functional or psychological benefits, realising the importance of professional communications and developing the techniques of relationship marketing. The above represented advanced thinking for 1996 and nine years later there is still much to be done to make this a reality.

How did the employer brand concept, and the work Andrew Lambert, Sue Clemenson and others had put into it, impact on our new venture, People in Business? Buyers of consulting are generally focused on the solution of an immediate problem. In most cases we used the concept to provide a robust framework for tackling a wide range of more immediate issues to do with communications and relationships at work. One of the earliest tools we used in this context was the employer brand ‘wheel’, an early prototype of our employer brand mix tool (see Chapter 11), which lays out the key factors influencing employees’ experience of the employer brand (Figure 1.1). This provided an excellent framework for facilitating workshops, prompting debate about the sort of organisation people currently experienced and, in turn, the kind of organisation they wanted to be. I recall a British Airways/British Airline Pilots Association session in 1999 at BALPA’s office at Heathrow where the longstanding suspicion that can characterise management, union and flight crew relationships the world over, was put aside to debate what really matters if the flight crew employment experience is to be effective. The discussion brought out the reality of flying for BA and has always given me confidence flying behind a BA crew. The key elements were: trust in colleagues, the quality of training and training captains, the conduct of simulator testing and the quality of engineering and safety procedures. Of course rewards were an important dimension but nowhere near the profile that the press make out. High standards and mutual trust in colleagues was what flying for BA was really about from the pilot’s perspective.

Figure 1.1 The employer brand ‘wheel’. Source: PiB

About the same time there was an event that demonstrated the size of gap that often exists between the customer and the employee-facing dimensions of most brands. That event was the short-lived appearance of a TV commercial for Sainsbury’s. In the late 1990s Sainsbury’s were concerned that shoppers believed that, for all Sainsbury’s middle-class strengths in quality and service, their prices were higher than their leading competitors. This was galling because many of their prices were in fact highly competitive.

Sainsbury’s marketing people therefore embarked on advertising which aimed to put this misconception right. They called it ‘Something to shout about’. Perfectly reasonable you might think. However, the problem came, as it so often does, in the execution. They wanted a high-profile presenter to talk in store with a member of staff about the real value they offered. I heard from someone on the agency team at the time that Ruby Wax was the favoured presenter, but for some reason she could not do it and John Cleese was hired. The script might have worked with Wax but with Cleese, at his Fawlty Towers best, the result was disastrous. The helpful and well meaning member of staff involved appeared to be totally belittled by Cleese’s lecture on Sainsbury’s pricing, and whatever the customer out-take, it caused uproar among Sainsbury’s 140,000 people. This story was covered in the advertising press but dwelt on the future of their agency and marketing people. From our employer brand perspective, the real questions were:

• Did the Sainsbury’s marketing people show the original treatment to anyone in HR, in internal communications or to store management?

• They obviously won approval for it from senior management, in which case did the latter even consider the potential effect on employees?

• During production did they test an animatic or later show the final film to any members of staff?

I do not know the answers to these questions, and the personnel of the time and their suppliers have all left the stage – some earlier than others.

This avoidable commercial tragedy made me think how, in organisational development terms, it could have been avoided. I suspect those questions were not asked, indeed not even thought of being asked, and the silo mentality had gained another scalp.

In October 2000 I introduced the role and job description of the Employer Brand Manager in a talk I gave to the Association of Graduate Recruiters. We will return to this subject in Chapter 11. However, given the above horror story, it is worth mentioning one of the first companies to appoint an Employer Brand Manager – it was Sainsbury’s.

2

The Changing Needs and Aspirations of Employees

On the face of it you might believe that employer brand thinking had only become relevant for major employers since McKinsey’s ‘War for Talent’ and many similar papers that have highlighted the difficulty of recruiting and retaining capable people.1

There are many current pressures today which encourage employers to treat their people with the same care and coherence as they would value customers. However, the demands for good employer brand management have always been with us when expectations of a workforce have been extreme. In seeking examples of those conditions one has only to look at military history. Biographers of Wellington have always highlighted his support for his troops and his determination to move forward only when the necessary logistics were in place. His famous words in the aftermath of Waterloo: ‘The next greatest misfortune to losing a battle is to gain such a victory as this’, reflects his humanity.2 Montgomery in 1943 told his 220,000 men in the desert: ‘When all this is over and they ask you what you did in the war you need only say I was in the Eighth Army.’3 Like Wellington he was trusted not to risk his forces unnecessarily and, on his deathbed, wondered what the 13,000 killed at Alamein were going to think of him. That concern plus his surefooted strategic ability and independence, earned him extraordinary loyalty. This year is the 200th anniversary of Trafalgar and the same values, as well as brilliance, created the loyalty of sailors to Lord Nelson. Many of the great employer brands of the past were military ones.

Most employees over the centuries have been agricultural labourers, and, for most of the industrial revolution, unskilled workers, with the pressure to perform being the pressure to eat. Capital, in the form of employers, needed labour of the most basic kind, whether hard manual work or repetitive machine minding. While there were much publicised exceptions, like the early Quaker entrepreneurs, human resources were plentiful, expendable and cheap. An extreme example of this was the debate among British plantation owners in the Caribbean in the late eighteenth century on the optimum way of managing sugar production. Which was more profitable: To look after slaves well in the belief that their productivity and longevity would show a greater return, or to work them intensively and then simply replace them with new ‘saltwater’ slaves? It was against inhuman calculations like these that Wilberforce and Buxton had to fight for so long to end the British slave trade in 1807 and the actual ownership of slaves across the British Empire in 1834. The interests of slave owners were powerfully represented at Westminster and the status quo has proved a formidable rampart for employment reformers to this day. Just consider what was said in opposition to the idea of a UK minimum wage in 1999. The CBI thought then that £4.40 was too high a level and would have ‘a very serious impact on jobs and inflation’.4

One only has to read of the slow grudging pace of change in some of the UK’s major employers to see how recently a very different balance between capital and labour existed. It isn’t just Orwell’s description of coal mining in The Road to Wigan Pier in the 1930s.5 The American writer Clancy Sigal, writing about mining in the 1960s in Weekend in Dinlock, told the same story 30 years later,6 as did D.H. Lawrence in his description of a local mining village in Lady Chatterley’s Lover: ‘The people were as haggard, shapeless and dreary as the countryside, and as unfriendly ... Gulf impassable ... breach indescribable.’7 It is not surprising that, in the early 1990s, William Woodruff’s Road to Nab End – about his upbringing in the cotton town of Blackburn in the 1920s – became such a recent bestseller.8 It struck a nerve for anyone with a childhood in the North (including mine). The unrelenting pressures of mill work and life in damp rented houses remain in the DNA for millions. T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, describing city workers crossing London Bridge (‘I had not thought death had undone so many’), expressed a similar blankness among white-collar workers.9 Consider Arthur Miller’s line in Death of a Salesman when Willie Loman, the long-serving salesman of the title, is dismissed: ‘You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away. A man is not a piece of fruit.’10 John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis and Clifford Odets all captured the same sentiments about the oppression and drudgery of work.

What have been the forces for change? Let us start with the Unions. While for much of my lifetime UK Unions have been seen as some of the major forces of conservatism, their ability to represent working people and drive change to achieve collective bargaining, health and safety improvements, paid holidays and improved consultation achieved extraordinary reforms in the period 1890 – 1960. Organised labour made sure that employers had at least to address the basics, and that has now largely been achieved. The future role of Unions remains uncertain, as the declining membership over many years demonstrates, but they can still pack a punch within some of our more traditional public sector services. Organised labour, representing a precious and hard to achieve skill, remains a powerful force. Just think of the Law Society, the British Medical Association (representing 193,000 British doctors) and the British Airline Pilots Association (representing 9000 flight crew members). These are heavyweight bodies and, at their best, they can do much more than simply protect the historic status quo. They can play their part in changing it for the better as well as helping to set standards and offer personal guidance to members. If they do this they should still have a significant role to play in shaping the employment experience.

While I would like to think that many employers have now recognised the benefit of valuing their employees as much as they value their customers, I fear that that is not necessarily accepted standard practice. Most managers may nod to it, but what has made Employer Brand management important is a host of other forces that have little to do with the accepted management rhetoric on the subject. Beware the CEO who uses pat phrases like ‘People are our greatest asset’, before moving on to the numbers.