Episode #419: Employer Branding About To Relaunch

Covid is raging again, but we can see the end, be it this year or next year. It will finally stop being our total focus. So many lives, livelihoods and businesses have been destroyed by this pandemic. Ali Bab is a nice little French Restaurant near my office in Akasaka that has been closed since January. Will they be able to reopen? Hopefully they and many other businesses will do so and we can all get back to some semblance of normality.

That means we will see an uptick in business activity as consumer demand is reignited. In that mix we will see the re-booting of the “war for talent”. Many bosses have been weighing the cost of losing staff against the gain in cash flow, through lowering one of the biggest expenses in business – people. Some businesses may have to re-hire staff they laid off, if they can, or find replacements. All of this activity is likely to happen roughly around the same time, so there could be a hiring frenzy. Recruiters will start calling your best people to offer them new employment opportunities somewhere else. The two big questions are why would new people join you and why would your people stay?

There is a lot more information available about businesses today than ever before and prospective employees will likely search out news, gossip and background on your company. Japanese people are serious about their work and they have not absorbed the Western ways of job hopping, that are so prevalent in our societies. They don’t move around much, so if they are going to join you, they are likely to be thinking they will stay with you forever or at least for many, many years. Coming on board is a major decision. Now as employers, what messages are we giving out to the world via our website, social media and word of mouth about our firm and what it is like to work there?

One of the key reasons we can keep our people is the internal culture we leaders have built. They can get more money and better working conditions somewhere else perhaps, but not the culture. Culture build is about authenticity, maintaining and living stated values and boss communication skills. This is expensive. Why? Because to build the culture and to be consistent in maintaining it, takes up the most expensive and valuable resource in any company – boss time. This is why most companies don’t make the necessary investment. Leaders imagine that culture build is someone else’s responsibility, say in the HR department or over there in marketing and PR. Big mistake.

The leader gets the culture they deserve. If the time is not invested, then nothing magical is going to happen and there won’t be much going on in the way of differentiation. As bosses, we think we have given the message clearly and it has been received. The thing that is always amazing is how little of the message actually sinks in. You tell the team something and then in short order, you find they don’t get it. Here is the time factor again. “Efficient” bosses will message once and just move on to their next meeting.

Culture building bosses know they have to bang that drum continuously for it to sink in. I read somewhere that ad creatives get sick of their own ads a lot faster than those who are consuming them. It can be the same with our messaging – we get sick of it before the troops do. We have to get the key messages out again and again and in different formats, because people are wired differently in how they absorb information.

This communication discussion is not limited to just internal recipients. How much effort and time is the leader allocating to getting the key messages out to the world, to prospective employees. We often make the mistake of putting some colourless message on the website on the “President Greeting” page. It reads like pap, sounds like pap and is pap. Are we talking about the culture, the values, how we think about our people and are we doing it in an authentic voice? The PR department may be thinking only about shareholders when writing the content, but with the talent war looming, it might be a good idea to compose some fresh messaging to appeal to new employees.

The internal culture has to be real and we have to be congruent. It can’t be a corporate Potemkin village of sublime wonder, when the workplace reality is actually more reminiscent of a Gulag. Internal and external realities have to match up. This takes time – that word again! Most leaders have been scrabbling around since February 2020 trying to fathom how to survive. Now is the time to attract great new staff, who through no fault of their own have been tossed into the street. It is also the time to build or refine an unassailable culture which no unprincipled, eagle eyed, silver tongued, dreamy looking recruiter can easily pry your best people from. If you already have a great culture, then get to work letting everyone know about it. Get out there and shout it from the rooftops of social media, so all can hear your siren call of “this is a great place to work, because you will love the culture here”.