In a competitive market for labour, how do you differentiate your business? Developing a strong Employer Brand that is aligned to your company values and brand ethos is how!

Most businesses spend resources on developing techniques to attract customers, ensuring that their brand communicates effectively with them, building and maintaining loyalty…and this is exactly the same approach that businesses should be employing with their one truly unique asset, their people.

A strong Employer Brand connects to an organisations values, people strategy, HR policies and ultimately links to the company brand.

The way a company engages with its people has also needed to evolve with the increasing presence of social media in all aspects of life – perception and knowledge of what it is like to work in a company is more likely to be based on what employees say rather than any of its advertising, whether that is adverts, websites or brand messages.

So employee engagement is key to building and sustaining a strong Employer Brand.

Employee value proposition isn’t necessarily something most businesses thought about before the challenging labour market, companies should consider why an employee would want to work for them, why working for them matters and how an individual will have a sense of purpose and truly feel valued.

Employer brand isn’t an HR or marketing task, it is about the collective leaders of a business ensuring that the values of their company run consistently through every approach of people management. That means from recruitment and on boarding, to communications, to corporate responsibility plans, actions must represent the values of the business otherwise trust and engagement won’t be won.

The size of the prize is worth the resource investment, examples include, 30% reduction in recruitment fees in a 6 month period, engagement of teams in continuous improvement ideas generating significant savings from little investment, just because they understand their role, know how to improve it and the important bit…are willing to share that information with the company to improve, because they feel valued.

It is no coincidence that well-performing businesses have higher levels of engagement; it is the people in those businesses that make the difference because they want to!

Discovering how your Employer Brand is perceived, agreeing your value proposition and implementing changes to ensure actions reflect the words is critical to attracting, retaining and engaging with the teams that make businesses better.

What sets thriving businesses apart from the rest is that they ask one simple question of their employee engagement initiatives: ‘What do we want our people to think, feel, or do that they don’t already, and what do we want our customers to think, feel, or do as a result?’