Employment16 Mar 2023
How Employer Branding can impact employee retention and satisfaction
Creating a positive employee experience is critical in human resources and recruitment. HR professionals and recruiters should be aware of their working environment's impact on their employees' satisfaction and retention. An authentic Employer Brand can be the deciding factor in attracting the right type and quality of talent but can also influence current employees as a reminder of what they value about working in any given organisation. An insight-led Employee Value Proposition can help build a committed group of employees to support the company's vision, values and goals.
It is essential to know how your employees feel about their employment experience, which is represented in your Employer Brand and to know whether it's good, bad or indifferent. If it's terrible, you must rethink how to shape your employee experience and help your employees feel good about working at your organisation. What you're trying to uncover is the gap between what you are offering in your Employer Brand and the actual experience that employees really value. Once these insights are revealed your Employer Brand can act as a cultural transformer and amplifier.
Belong Creative helps businesses create strategic-led Employer Brands that can help improve the employee experience by reinforcing the things they value.
Connection between Employer Branding and employee retention
As businesses become more competitive, investing in employee retention has become more of a necessity. Finding quality employees is costly and can be simplified by retaining the talent already in the company. Furthermore, having great employees in the workplace can be beneficial in creating a pleasant atmosphere, making it more likely for similar skills to be attracted to the organisation and increasing productivity.
Employers must ensure they provide an engaging and effective workplace environment to keep top talent. According to LinkedIn, a lack of work-life balance, fair compensation, and positive company culture are the main reasons employees leave their jobs.
Therefore, it's essential to provide a workplace and culture where talented individuals actually want to be a part of, rather than just offering a competitive salary and a few perks. Your Employer Brand can act as powerful communication tool to reinforce the benefits, both tangible and intangible about your company. So when employees start thinking about leaving, the Employer Brand can help embed their loyalty or even increase productivity. On the flip side, your Employer Brand can also be used to force natural attrition of employees who may not value where the organisation is headed or what your team values. And this can equally be of benefit to the organisation by organically removing underperforming headcount.
Impact of Employer Branding on employee satisfaction
Employer Branding is essential in helping employers create a positive and satisfying workplace for their employees. Through Employer Branding, companies can enhance their image and establish a robust employer-employee relationship, increasing job satisfaction. This can be achieved through authentic communication and engagement efforts, such as opening dialogue with employees, listening to their needs and creating a more positive and satisfying work experience.
Employer Branding captures all the positive (and uniquely challenging) aspects of your employee experience. It balances the ‘give’ and the ‘get’ from articulating tangible benefits like perks, discounts, flexibility, recognition and rewards through to intangible benefits such as a friendly, inclusive culture and approachable, accessible leaders.
Showcasing these Employer Branding benefits and operationalising them throughout your organisation can help create a workplace where employees are happy and motivated, resulting in greater job satisfaction.
Strategies for building a magnetic Employer Brand
If you want your employees to be more satisfied, creating an authentic Employer Brand that reflects what they value, can act as a magnetic to both attract new talent and retain your existing ones. Here are the basic steps involved in crafting a magnetic Employer Brand:
If you want to retain and satisfy the employees who will make a difference to your company, then your Employer Value Proposition (EVP) should be at the heart of your Employer Brand messaging. It's a two-way promise: what can you and your culture offer them in exchange for their talent, skills, and experience? Uncover this through employee research via focus groups and surveys. Then use your EVP to make a compelling case for why your employees value your company and give them the tools to become brand advocates.
You can’t brand in a bubble. That’s why knowing how your brand stands up in context to other employers is critical to building a magnetic Employer Brand. Promoting what sets you apart and compels candidates to choose you over other employers. Additionally, analyse the social media and review site trends surrounding your Employer Brand. Use this as both insights and as benchmarks for you to improve in the future. What’s also important is ensuring your Employer Branding strategy is developed around your business goals. It should support attracting and retaining the right talent to meet your organisational needs for the short to medium term.
To deploy your Employer Brand, it’s ideal that you do so consistently across all your employment channels, such as; intranet, careers website, social media platforms, review sites like Glassdoor, job boards like Indeed, Seek, etc. Candidates will then have a seamless experience that builds trust and credibility as they research your Employer Brand.
Employer Branding is a powerful tool that companies can use to stand out amongst their rivals. It also helps optimise the performance of Human Resources activities such as recruitment, retention and engagement.
When developed in a strategic way, led by insights from your employees, your Employer Brand activities can help attract the right candidates, keep existing employees and boost your reputation as an employer of choice.
The significant benefits of Employer Branding are :
It helps attract top talent
With Employer Branding becoming increasingly important for CEOs, HR, and marketing leaders, companies are looking to create a strategic-led Employer Brand that potential candidates and employees can access online, anytime.
According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), 84% of organisations use social media to bring in new talent and connect with passive candidates since 79% of candidates use social media during job searches (Source).
It reduces the attrition rate
Your Employer Brand and how it is communicated among employees can have a significant influence on the relationship between your organisation and your employees.
It gives you the ability to showcase what sets you apart as an employer, why you're the ideal place to work and how you show appreciation to your employees. Reminding employees of these important values can help reduce your attrition rate. However, the power of an authentic Employer Brand (i.e. warts and all) means when candidates sign-up to your promise they know what they are in for. Being real upfront in your Employer Brand can significantly turn the tide on poor attrition rates and mitigate employees leaving because the promise didn’t match reality.
It keeps the employees happy and satisfied
An authentic Employer Brand is essential for ensuring a clear dialogue between the company and potential employees.
This vital communication supports internal employees, helping them feel seen, cared for and valued. When employees feel recognised and rewarded for all their hard work, it boosts happiness, satisfaction.
It improves the organisation's performance and productivity
Maintaining an excellent talent pool has the potential to give the business a significant edge over the competition while simultaneously reducing the cost of recruitment, onboarding and training. With an impressive retention rate, the company can develop a team of knowledgeable and skilled employees, leading to better overall performance and improved financial outcomes.
Moreover, a successful Employer Brand can contribute to providing customers with an improved quality of service. By helping employees to be more content and engaged and have a greater sense of belonging, the Employer Brand supports discretionary effort from employees (going above and beyond) which leads to more satisfied customers and a healthier bottom line.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the components of an Employer Branding strategy?
The critical components of an Employer Branding strategy are:
1. Employee value proposition
2. Employee stories (aligned to value proposition)
3. Employee engagement
4. Employment marketing
5. Employee advocates
How do you measure retention with respect to Employer Branding?
To measure retention linked to your Employer Branding, you need to review your tenure and attrition rates before and after you deploy your communications. This needs to be done over time and consider societal and talent segment macro trends that may also have a positive or negative impact on these metrics.
How can Employer Branding help your company?
Employer Branding helps organisations attract, engage and retain the right employees to meet your organisational goals. It can assist in reducing attrition rates, minimising recruitment costs and boosting employee morale and even productivity, resulting in a better experience for your customers.
