Best Company To Work For
We start our day with a morning jog in Reebok athletic shoes, we go to work dressed in a Blackberry suit in a new Volkswagen car, and stop along the way for having a cup of coffee at Cafe Coffee Day.
These aren't mere shoes, clothes, cars and coffee we are talking about. These are brands, and chances are you have to choose them not only because they meet your basic requirements of clothing, transportation and sustenance, but also because the brands promise a certain quality and style that you've come to rely upon. Great brands provide a source of identification and assurance of quality. These brands simplify decision-making and communicate the value they create for their customers. And great brands make and keep their promises. These characteristics differentiate great brands and cement their leadership credentials.
Branding in HR has traditionally been limited to the employment function. The HR branding has become a topic of great interest. The success of an organization relies upon excellence in execution. Historically, corporate leaders have looked to other functions, such as product development, marketing and sales, to drive corporate success, today more and more eyes are looking towards HR as the call for need. Success of the brand depends upon of awareness and relevance. If target audiences are not aware of the brand, if their internal and external customers don't notice your effort in the cacophony of messages they receive each day, then we will never have a chance to be relevant. And if they become aware of you, if you capture their attention and fail to deliver relevance, then they will learn to ignore you.
Customers differentiate firms by their products. Marketers have traditionally used "The 4 Ps" (product, price, position and promotion) to set the products of their firm apart from those of the competitor in the market place. Employees now differentiate their jobs by HR branding . The 4 Ps of HR are People, Pay, Position and Prospects. As the functions of HR started spreading across the organization, the services rendered by the HR department to the employees can be treated as the same thing as selling services to the external customer. Hence, the HR department should care about its brand identity.
For a company to be successful, it has to attract, motivate and retain the best and brightest, making it competitive in the race. As organizations are complex, open systems, single interventions are not enough. The best organizations have compelling people strategies that are perfectly aligned with the organization's business strategy. Once the people strategy is aligned with the business strategy, you can begin creating a great place to work. The HR brand has to be aligned congruently with what the company delivers to the employee, customer, public and shareholder.
In today's knowledge driven economy, HR plays a strategic role in bringing in the right kind of people into the organization. In a sense, HR is the first face of an organization for a new prospective employee. Market research has revealed that strong brands contribute to strong competitive presence. In this way, the HR in its new avatar, the importance of branding HR follows quite as a corollary.
The challenge faced while structuring the brand is to establish new deliverables to sustain strong partnerships with both internal and external customers. The ability to see the big picture and to deploy the resources to address to this big picture will be more important than ever, based on the interactions of HR department with both internal and external customers.
Brand as a System
We can consider brand as a system. The brand system has four components which are inextricably tied and interdependent.
Offer: It is the service or a group of services that the brand renders to its customers, and if the offer is complex or it is difficult to explain, then it would be very difficult to communicate the offer to the target segment. Hence, the offer should be clearly described for a brand to be successful. Example: Compensation packages, Training programs, Employee assistance programs, a good working environment, etc.
Identity: Identity is defined as every thing that assists in attracting attention, setting expectations and making an impression. Names, logos, slogans, advertising, packaging, vision and mission statement of the HR department make up the brand identity. This provides information to employees to determine an impression on the HR department.
Experience: Brand experience is the aggregate of all the perceptions that result from the interactions with a brand. But all the experiences are not equal. Employees assign different levels of importance to different facets of their experience.
Image: Brand Image is what people think of the brand. This is primarily based on the interactions with the HR department.
In today's knowledge driven economy, HR plays a strategic role in bringing in the right kind of people into the organization. In a sense, HR is the first face of an organization for a new prospective employee. Market research has revealed that strong brands contribute to strong competitive presence. In this way, the HR in its new avatar, the importance of branding HR follows quite as a corollary.
The challenge faced while structuring the brand is to establish new deliverables to sustain strong partnerships with both internal and external customers. The ability to see the big picture and to deploy the resources to address to this big picture will be more important than ever, based on the interactions of HR department with both internal and external customers.
Brand as a System
We can consider brand as a system. The brand system has four components which are inextricably tied and interdependent.
Offer: It is the service or a group of services that the brand renders to its customers, and if the offer is complex or it is difficult to explain, then it would be very difficult to communicate the offer to the target segment. Hence, the offer should be clearly described for a brand to be successful. Example: Compensation packages, Training programs, Employee assistance programs, a good working environment, etc.
Identity: Identity is defined as every thing that assists in attracting attention, setting expectations and making an impression. Names, logos, slogans, advertising, packaging, vision and mission statement of the HR department make up the brand identity. This provides information to employees to determine an impression on the HR department.
Experience: Brand experience is the aggregate of all the perceptions that result from the interactions with a brand. But all the experiences are not equal. Employees assign different levels of importance to different facets of their experience.
Image: Brand Image is what people think of the brand. This is primarily based on the interactions with the HR department.
Why do we go for brands? The answer is simple -.reliability. It’s the popular brands which provide this reliability. Attracting knowledge workers has become a Herculean task for the HR department. Only the best practices and the best environment can assure their interest in working for your organization. The practices and policies of the HR department and its outlook create a certain brand for the HR. The better the brand, better are the chances that you attract the best talent. The focus in our paper outlines all that are required to make HR the best brand.
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