More and more is written about employer brands and the CIPD has just this week published a big report on how these are aligned with total reward.
It’s an important evolution in how businesses communicate with and show respect for one of their most important audiences – employees.
However, I think the most successful businesses are the ones that recognise that there is only one brand – and that the employee story is also important to the customer.
My best known example for this is John Lewis. The employee brand values and rewards are part of how the brand is positioned to the customer. Everyone knows that John Lewis is an employee benefit trust and that all employees are partners as well as they know the catch phrase "never knowingly undersold".
A less well-known example is Enterprise Rent-A-Car. The business has a unique approach to graduate recruitment, career progression and people management which is communicated alongside its strong customer service ethic as part of what the business is all about. In fact, the management training story is intrinsically linked in to customer service, because it is part of how the company builds service values and beliefs across a huge regional work force distributed across hundreds of branches.
We live in an era where people are part of the customer experience – and where companies who are known for treating employees well have strong customer relationships.
So I would say there’s no such thing as an employee brand – only a business story that needs to be brought to life and made relevant to different groups who have different relationships with the business, and are ever more demanding of what a company stands for and is prepared to do.
