Happy Branding

The truth about employer branding

Robin Schooling Employee experience Leave a Comment

We can talk all day about employer branding – and we often do. My friend Lars Schmidt has a definition that I like (and shamelessly use): “Your employer brand, at its core, is the shared values and employee experiences of your organization.” The important part of that definition, in my estimation, is “employee experiences”: the most critical and often overlooked part of the equation. Branding is often the sparkly part of HR. There are keynote speakers talking about it, talent acquisition experts in charge of Employer Branding departments, and loyal devotees acting like evangelical preachers while rolling out EB initiatives …

No-one comes to work to do a bad job

Michael Carden Employee experience 1 Comment

I’d been trying to flesh out a collab story on employee experience (EX) with Laurie Ruettimann for weeks. This is as far as we got: “I’m not sure if I buy into the whole concept of EX. Now, I’m an idiot. But if we keep asking employers to solve problems, we perpetuate a system that always lets employees down. When do we say that it’s up to employees to own their EX, and that the best companies will listen?” For those who don’t know Laurie, she’s the original HR disruptor. When I first met her, I think she just wanted …

Meaningful work

The meaning of meaningful work

Tim Sackett Employee experience, Engagement 3 Comments

There is this widely held belief by a great number of HR pros that to have true employee engagement, your employees must feel like they have meaningful work. I don’t necessarily disagree with that thought process. The problem is, well-meaning HR pros have taken this concept and started to cram social platforms down their employees’ throats. They misinterpret ‘meaningful’ as meaning ‘as an employer we must support social causes so our employees see we are giving back’. What about those companies that put big money and volunteer hours towards things like Habitat for Humanity?  Great cause, right?  I worked for …

Shared values for millennials

The truth about millennials: shared values

Jamie Finnegan Employee experience 2 Comments

A strong set of shared company and personal values is important to millennials. Company values are often confused with company culture, but the idea that they’re the same thing is a common misconception. While a company’s culture is fluid and shifts over time, its values do not. Company values are often renamed and tweaked over the years but they tend to define the principles and beliefs outlined by the founders and early crew. This is also true of a person’s values: the beliefs and ideals may change form but the substance remains the same. As a millennial I value technology, …