BrandShift™ – Our Approach
Every organisation is looking for an element of ‘performance shift’ – improving engagement, systems, process, ways of working and how they satisfy the needs of their various stakeholders. Everyone is having to do more, with less, and to navigate their business through uncharted waters. So, if you’re looking for performance shift then that change inevitably relies on a large degree of ‘people shift’ and that means deploying your EVP and employer branding strategy to its best effect.
Our BrandShift™ approach will ensure you can align your people with your purpose and in so doing fully operationalise your EVP and employer brand at every touch point on the employee lifecycle – from establishing a reputation up stream in the talent market to attraction, onboarding, induction, wellbeing, engagement and more all the way to exit and alumni. We’ll obsess about every touch point and the engagement opportunity it represents and ensure that your leaders and managers are able to deliver the employment experience your business needs.
BrandShift™ will help ensure a consistent and cohesive employment experience for all colleagues right across the employee lifecycle.
And together we’ll unlock the potential inherent in your people and your business. BrandShift™ means performance shift and the commercial gains are too good to ignore.
We’ll help you define, launch and implement brilliantly whatever your size and type of business.
Find out moreThe foundation of your people strategy. Your statement of intent as to what you stand for as an employer and how you want to be known in the markets that matter to you.
Find out moreWe’ll define your Employer Brand and take it to every touch point on the employee lifecycle – with flair and authenticity - to ensure you achieve your people and business goals.
Find out moreYou can’t buy it. You have to earn it and we’ll help you build and maintain a profile that sets you apart from your competitors and, in so doing, helps you achieve your people and performance goals.
Find out moreYou have a great story to tell so tell it coherently, consistently, with purpose and with passion. Bring your brand to life.
Find out moreMore than just ‘Welcome’. Consolidate the candidate experience, turn offers into starters and lock in that critical early engagement.
Find out moreEmotional Engagement
The next 10% of your growth in performance is already in the building in the form of your current workforce. We’ll ensure you unlock the potential in a planned, measurable and sustainable way.
Find out moreOwn the dialogue, one version of the truth, one clear direction, limitless potential.
Find out moreIt’s crucial that you show the L&D investments you make and how to access it. A perceived lack of investment in the individual (and ensuing broken career paths) drives engagement down and attrition up, don’t let that be you.
Find out moreReward and benefits comms to provide clarity on your current offer. Incentive comms to drive the behaviours and outputs the business needs.
Find out moreMost organisations understand the importance of effective onboarding but fail to see the ROI on effective offboarding and alumni comms.
Find out moreYour journey starts here
Every touch point is an engagement opportunity
Purpose, Mission, Vision, Values
Now more than ever, talented staff have high expectations of their employers with regard to their purpose, mission, vision and values. They demand clarity and authenticity and if your respective value sets coincide great things can happen.
-
Purpose
People will always emotionally engage with the ‘why’ above the ‘what’ you do. What are you here for and why does it really matter? A strong purpose will unite and inspire your staff to achieve both pride and fulfilment in the great work you do together – and in particular the impact you have on the lives of your various stakeholders.
-
Vision
Your preferred state of the future. What do you want the organisation to be like in the future?
-
Mission
How you will achieve the vision? What do you do? Who for? And how is it characterised?
-
Values
What your staff bring to work every day to get the job done. The behavioural compass that underpins the culture and how you interact with each other, customers and the world beyond.
EVP
An organisations EVP is often described as ‘the deal’. i.e. What you expect from your staff in performance and discretionary effort and promise in return. In our view, this is too simplistic. The potential inherent in defining and delivering a distinct and compelling EVP is huge – a differentiated employment experience where staff are engaged, focused and unified and that will lead to a differentiated customer experience wherever the interaction happens.
Employer Brand
Employer Branding is the strategy that describes how an organisation markets its employment offer to existing and future talent.
'...a set of attributes and qualities, often intangible, that makes an organisation distinctive, promises a particular kind of employment experience, and appeals to those people who will thrive and perform best in its culture.'
We create compelling and memorable employer brands that help our clients achieve their personal and business goals. We will ensure that, through effective employer branding, we increase the quality and decrease the cost of your people agenda. That may be in reducing recruitment costs or over reliance on third party agencies; telling your story brilliantly wherever it needs to be told, cutting attrition, increasing engagement or build your reputation as an employer. An effective employer brand is both a powerful tool in its own right and a catalyst for future success.
Employer Reputation
A Harvard Business Review survey found nearly half of the individuals surveyed would entirely rule out taking a job with a company with a negative reputation. So how do you build a truly positive and authentic reputation as an employer? It needs careful planning but certain activity streams are key.
-
Candidate Experience
Firstly, you will always reject more people than you hire (and some will be existing or potential customers of course) so an exceptional candidate experience is critical. Most organisations can get the mechanical process and the ‘paper work’ right, but can they nail the essential ‘people work’? The essential human touch that makes your audience feel valued?
-
Employee Advocacy
Secondly, the most enthusiastic and articulate exponents of your brand and the employment experience you offer are the people who work for you. A recent survey said that less than 15% of candidates believe what the C suite of a company say, less than 25% believe what HR say but more than 66% believe what the employees say. And when this has been applied by companies it really works. One DNA client has had an employee advocacy platform in place for 2 years and have not placed a single recruitment ad in the last 18 months. They are seen as a ‘great company to work for’ and their hires are coming in via social media via employee advocacy. The DNA Way will help you maximise the potential of employee advocacy and as always it starts with having clear objectives in place and a proven process.
-
Social Media Management
Whether you like it or not, your employer reputation already exists in the market. So, beyond employee advocacy, effective and proactive social media management is key to understanding and positively responding to the profile that exists and the issues arising from that. Finally, third party awards and endorsements can help you paint a more compelling picture – whether that’s Sunday Times Top 100, Great Places to Work, IIP or one of the myriad of other options.
As always, we plan carefully, execute with flair and measure everything. And deliver for you.
Attraction
Here at DNA we use a ‘mixing desk’ approach. We’ll find the perfect blend that meets the targets we’ve set together in terms of candidate quality, quantity and cut through in hard to reach markets. For some clients that means effective attraction toolkits and managing their job boards and social media activity. For others it means making the most of video, employee referral and programmatic advertising. And for every client we’ll design, build and manage a best in class careers site that will become the beating heart of your attraction strategy – and the key to driving down cost and time to hire whilst increasing quality and measurability.
Onboarding and Induction
Having worked so hard in creating your brand and investing the time and money to take it to the target external talent audience, not to mention the interview and selection process, it’s astonishing that too few organisations fail to maximise the potential inherent in preboarding and onboarding strategies to make sure they turn up on day one fit and firing and ready to go (and even make them a fan before they become an employee). They are likely to have other applications pending and could also be counter offered – so you need a plan and a process to compete. To ease the transition from candidate to valuable and engaged employee we’ll translate your strategy into creative and effective collateral including onboarding sites, the planning and delivery of induction programmes, new starter packs and more.
Transactional Employment to
Emotional Engagement
Employee engagement is changing. Pre COVID-19 it was all about how organisations could get their employees to understand and respond to the leader’s agenda. Not anymore. Now, in a world with more uncertainty, more remote working and a rebalancing of the employer/employee axis, it is now incumbent on leaders to create the holistic environment in which employees can connect and engage. That means clarity on purpose, culture and values. More than ever people seek meaning in their work so it also means clarity on what you want and need them to be and why. It means higher levels of trust, inclusion and authenticity. And more than ever being seen to listen and to act is crucial.
The gap between a leader’s expectation of what the business can deliver and its actual ability to do so is often found in the extent to which it’s employees are engaged. You can close that gap and build a sustainable model - acting like the company you want to become in the future now – and reap the many business benefits of a more engaged, cohesive and performing workforce.
We’ll design and run annual and pulse engagement surveys and, critically help you deliver effective and measurable engagement action plans off of the back of them. Our platform enables comparison between locations, departments, job roles, length of service and more – both now and over time to highlight trends (negative to address, positive to learn from).
We’ll also bring your brand to life though effective Brand Activation. Whether that’s in creating the right working environment or in all company events. Engagement is all about how your people feel. We can ensure they feel proud, they feel they belong, they feel valued and connected and that they want to bring their best selves to work every day.
And when they do we’ll help you develop the mindset, tools and deliverables to recognise the contribution they make – building a true culture of recognition.
Aligning Leaders and Managers
We’ll help you align, coach and motivate your leaders and managers to deliver the employment experience you need. It’s a fast changing world out there and managers, more than ever, need to step up – something that can be difficult without the right skills, focus and contextualisation. They may be change averse, good at the functional or technical stuff but not the people element or simply out of their depth. Either way, intervention and support are crucial. We can provide both through leaders events and ongoing leaders coaching, managers workshops, managers toolkits and even coaching for HR practitioners. Driving and evangelising positive change can be hard so having DNA in the engine car with you can be invaluable.
Comms to Embed the EVP & Drive the Change
How many times have you seen culture and business change strategies falter as, to put it bluntly, the communication failed? Don’t let that be you. Whether it is leader's comms to initiate and drive change or multichannel approaches (internal social media platforms, events, print and direct mail, intranet) to ensure ongoing clarity of purpose and momentum (and celebrate success), we can make sure your change comms have impact, authenticity and reach. Whoever and wherever you are, however you’re structured and whatever your goals.
Health and Wellbeing
The world of work is changing and, as part of that, the world of Health and Wellbeing at work is changing faster. More than that employers now recognise that health and wellbeing and employee engagement are inextricably linked. This creates real opportunity to do the right thing and deliver measurable ROI in terms of both people and business results.
L&D Comms
It’s always surprising how often we see the organisational disconnect related to the L&D investment. Top down, huge amounts of time and effort are put into providing the perfect platforms and programmes for people to succeed. Bottom up, from the employees’ perspective, it can be hard to know what’s available, why and how to access it. This is borne out in engagement surveys, exit interviews and on sites like Glassdoor. The missing link is in communication – selling in your overall L&D approach, selling in the development options and deliverables and, of course, showing the career paths available.
That communication is even more important if you are to develop and promote under-represented groups.
Performance and Reward
For most organisations the pay and benefits they provide are competitive, however for far too many they aren’t communicated effectively to the staff. This means that key parts of your offer are diluted or even unknown – this is borne out time and time again in engagement surveys and lack of staff engagement on discount sites or benefits portals. A wasted opportunity that needs to be addressed. And it’s not just about the here and now, getting real traction and excitement about incentives can be the key to success or failure in key business drives.
Exit & Alumni
How people leave your organisation is critical for your employer reputation. A cohesive offboarding process will ensure they become brand ambassadors for years to come, referring their network and building your profile. Who knows they may even want to return more experienced and more committed in the future. Furthermore an online, branded and honest exit survey is a powerful tool in your engagement armoury. For the departing employee it provides the chance to offer constructive feedback and a sense of closure. For the business it provides a great deal more; valuable information to improve the current employment experience; an understanding of what you do well/not well; disconnects around values or culture; whistleblowing, safety or wellbeing issues; market intelligence on competitors; and much more. The resignation could just be a cry for help and experience tells us that many are reversible. Everything in the exit survey is designed to improve the employment experience of your current employees.