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December 15, 2005
In Search of Voluntary Effort
Clients often ask "so why should we spend money developing an employment brand?" I'm not surprised. The cost can be daunting, the time commitment substantial, and the payoff can appear insubstantial, at least conceptually.
There are, however, some good answers.
--Compared to the cost of the creative development and media purchases, the cost of brand research is small, but it provides the only reasonable assurance that the creative will resonate with target audiences.
--Doing primary research that involves and includes the whole global team also pays huge dividends when it's time to roll the new creative out.
--Research also provides the creative side of the house a much richer set of insights to generate concepts from than the typical brief provided by account service would allow.
But in my view, the most important offering brand research provides--one that this kind of research is uniquely able offer--is insight into the sources of voluntary effort among the organization's top talent.
Voluntary Effort
What's "voluntary effort?" Simply put, it's effort you can't buy. Danielle King, Vice President and General Manager of TMP's San Francisco office (and a good friend) describes it as "a gift the workforce gives to the organization."
Though the percentages change with the storyteller, every organization I've had the opportunity to work with tells the same story. "Our success depends on the work of 10% (or 5% or 30%, but never 50%) of the workforce. They come in early. They leave late. And they're not done until the work is perfect."
Each of those elements is a demonstration of voluntary effort. Think of your own organization. How many people have been fired for turning in work that's not absolutely perfect, no matter what? How many have been let go because they didn't decide to come in at seven and leave at nine? But that's the standard some folks hold themselves to. And most employers recognize that these dedicated folks are one of the key reasons--and in some industries, the only reason--the organization is successful.
Your Brand: Your Promise
If this is true for your organization (and if you're reading this blog it probably is), it's not hard to grasp the value of understanding what motivates these employees to give that gift. And perhaps more important still, you'd want to know the extent to which that gift is ownable by the organization, as opposed to being the expression of deeply held convictions that lead to an astonishing work ethic. Simply put, you need to understand not just why these folks work so hard for you, but why they work at all.
Because the focus is on attraction, many employment brand efforts don't look for these motivations. They look for ways to create an effective ad that will get talent in the front door. If they measure success, they measure it on the basis of open reqs, time to fill, and so on.
This is not just shortsighted: it's fundamentally wrong.
Your brand position more than a marketing campaign. It's a promise, made on behalf of your organization, by you. It's a promise to the very people upon whom your organization's continued success will depend. Seems pretty clear to me that when the stakes are that high, you have no choice but to tell the truth, because you're not just selling a job, you're outlining a covenant. (See this posting for more on the covenant between employer and employee.)
Now, if research can bring you this kind of crucial insight into what drives your top performers; if it can help you understand the distinction between why they work at all, why they work for you, and what they get from working for you that they just can't get anywhere else; if it can help you articulate this in messaging that's relevant, resonant, clear, compelling and differentiating--and it can--the payoff suddenly seems quite substantial, doesn't it?
It's also pretty clear that there's only one right way to do it. Want to build a great employment brand position? Don't tell your agency you want a great ad campaign. Tell them to deliver you the source of voluntary effort among your most dedicated, talented employees. With that in hand, everything else is a downhilll ride.
Posted by davidkippen at December 15, 2005 11:21 AM
Comments
Depending on the size of the office, you're basically pitching the Pareto principle as a destination instead of a symptom of our organizational structures.
If a few overtime employees are doing the majority of the work, your company is placed in a precarious position - what happens if your superstar leaves?
A lot of managers live and die by this rule because they don't truly understand it as a symptom of their management style and the structure of their reward and hiring systems. The key to the hard-working employee is self-motivation, which means the manager is more or less not important to the success of the office. This is why good managers usually have one hard and fast rule - get the right people in place and get out of the way.
From the staffing side, I'd have to ask...How do you determine if someone is self-motivated to work for a corporation without appropriate rewards? Aren't we basically asking our recruiting staffs to find the hard-working employee that doesn't know their own worth and lacks the ambition to work for themselves? That's a tall order, but convenient for masking the inefficiencies of our management/reward system.
Posted by: Jim Durbin at January 3, 2006 09:19 AM
Well, not exactly the point I was trying to make, but an excellent reading of what I actually said.
What I was trying to get at is that these highly-motivated employees have a relationship to their work that their colleagues lack. Some elements of this relationship are clearly not "ownable" by the employer, others are, and still others are enabled by the employer.
Using nursing as an example, while the individual nurse's calling to care is something they bring to their work and is therefore not ownable, a clinical environment of evidence-based medicine clearly is, and while allowing nurses to practice care the way they believe they should leverages their beliefs, this "allowance" is enabled by the employer and is therefore ownable (though not necessarily differentiating).
Now, I certainly didn't intend to suggest the voluntary disconnect between performance and rewards you commented on, Jim. My point was that the organization's ability to articulate what motivates top performers is not only linked to, but drives, the number (or percentage, if you prefer) of top performers the organization will enjoy.
Posted by: David Kippen at January 3, 2006 09:45 PM