Authenticity: When employer branding and feedback cultures become double-edged swords

The competition for candidates in today’s market is fierce. And make no mistake, the recruitment game is salesmanship at its best – it needs to be if organisations want to attract the right talent.

But like any good salesman, if businesses want to keep their new customers, aka candidates, the organisation needs to be ready to walk the talk and deliver on the promises made to attract that talent in the first place.

In a recent interview with HR Leader, Les Mills New Zealand’s head of people and performance, Lara Prentice, talked about the importance of different teams in a business being aligned, including marketing and HR, “…our marketing team has expertise in areas we don’t. While we can largely design and deliver the content in the people space, the marketing team is hugely supportive in making our people resources look and feel like the brand we want to reflect, so our ‘people experience’ is fit for purpose”.

This alignment is especially important when organisations are using employer branding to attract candidates to their business.

HR needs to be in sync with how marketing is positioning the organisation with potential clients and the conversations their sales team is having to win those clients, and then internal leadership and management needs to reflect the same values. If any areas are out of kilter, employees can quickly become disengaged with the rhetoric and disillusioned because the company they thought they were joining, with the image it presents to the world and clients, isn’t authentically represented in the business’ culture.

On employer branding, Ros Weadman wrote for HR Leader: “To establish consistency of intention, words and action, a business needs to align the four organisational dimensions of culture, communications, customer experience and corporate citizenship. When these four business dimensions are aligned, credibility and trust are fostered from the consistency of thoughts, words and actions.”

Authenticity isn’t always easy. An area that businesses can struggle with is in establishing a true “feedback culture”.

Smart organisations know that drawing on the expertise and ideas of all their employees – those people who know their business best – is the savvy way to stay competitive and to keep their workforce engaged. When employees are asked for feedback, and then see that feedback reflected in real change and innovation in their workplace, it can increase their investment in – and connection to – that organisation. They feel valued and heard.

Michelle Parry-Slater covered the recent London Learning Technologies Conference for HR Leader. Writing about a session she chaired with Stefaan van Hooydonk, she said: “In times of turbulence, argued Stefaan, we need to be more, not less, curious. We need to feel able to ask anything, seek new information, and look for innovation. Who knows where the next best idea will come from?”

Ms Parry-Slater added: “Stefaan described how culture plays into curiosity – asking questions in some hierarchical cultures is not acceptable, and this can stifle curiosity unless it is invited through collaboration. Knowing your culture, like the root of many things in business, is crucial to empowerment.”

But feedback can be a double-edged sword. Too many organisations are aware that asking for feedback is important, but don’t know how to deliver on it.

So, they put out pulse surveys, and management promotes “open door” policies, but then the feedback goes nowhere. An employee who has given feedback that’s not been responded to or acted on, may end up being more disengaged than if they hadn’t been asked for input in the first place because the organisation now appears disingenuous.

Jo-Anne Ruhl, Workday Australia and New Zealand’s vice president and managing director, recently noted for HR Leader: “Intelligent engagement tools can allow for continuous listening and real-time employee engagement. But the most powerful part is what happens next: taking steps to continuously improve culture and conditions and working through feedback and change.”

To be truly authentic, a business needs to have a strong sense of its culture and what it can offer both clients and candidates (its employer branding). Then, when leadership or HR asks for staff feedback, this needs to be done within a framework that understands the existing branding and purpose, and that’s ready to respond based on whether that feedback helps the business achieve its goals or not.

The crux of the issue is being willing to have difficult conversations. To be genuine in their response to feedback, leaders and HR need to ask then listen to feedback, analyse whether it can and should be acted on, and then go back to the workforce to explain how their feedback has been actioned, or not, as the case may be.

As Shanyn Payne, Finder’s chief people officer, recently articulated in HR Leader: “One of the key reasons why the ‘great regret’ is occurring is businesses are ‘over-promising and under-delivering’. Tools such as feedback surveys only work if that feedback is being actioned, so employees know their opinions are valued. It’s imperative that leaders feed back to employees the results of those surveys with any associated actions afterwards.”