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The Engine of Productivity: Wellness in the Workplace

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

How we define the workplace has changed radically over the last few years. Offices no longer represent the primary workplace, and remote and hybrid modes of working are becoming the norm rather than the exception. And this has greatly disrupted the way we work. The “office rhythm” is out the door when you’re zooming with people three time zones away one minute, taking a call from the car while you drive your kids to school the next, and collaborating with colleagues face-to-face once or twice a week. It’s hard to connect. Hard to disconnect. And it’s hard to orient yourself in a culture without the daily cues to keep you on track.

All of this leads to wellness issues. The stress of being connected all the time. Or the self-doubt that leads to quiet quitting behaviors. The physical toll of being rooted at your desk all day. The erosion of mentorship in the workplace, and the rise of coaching to fill the gap. HR professionals are on the front lines of a crisis, and they’re responding by paying more attention to wellness than ever before. Employee well-being has emerged as a major focus as organizations replace the free-lunch and foosball-driven ethos with programs aimed at helping people thrive personally so they can thrive professionally.

The data supports this trend: corporate wellness directly influences the emotional and physical health of employees and, by extension, the health of the entire organization. Companies that prioritize wellness not only see an uptick in morale but also in productivity and retention​​​. In fact, 83% of employees report that having a psychologically and emotionally healthy workplace correlates with a significant increase in productivity.​​

Crafting Cultures That Resonate with Employees’ Needs

Leaders in HR play a pivotal role in translating these programs into strategic elements of the company culture. The trend is clear: holistic wellness programs that address the full spectrum of well-being—mental, physical, emotional, and financial—help retain people and attract new talent. They make people more productive, as happier employees take fewer sick days, are more loyal, and bring a higher level of creativity and energy to their roles. And they add to your overall organizational resiliency, which is critical to navigating the ups and downs of today’s volatility.

How to make well-being a strategic element of your employer brand

1. Define a Wellness Philosophy: Have a candid conversation with leadership about why your organization values wellness, and how much you’re willing to invest in it. This is a crucial first step to getting your leadership team aligned on the value that wellness creates for the entire organization. You’ll need to address the holistic equation of well-being—physical, mental, emotional, and financial—and how each dimension drives employee performance and satisfaction.

2. Consistently communicate your POV on Wellness: Use every communication channel to consistently reinforce how wellness is woven into your corporate culture. Share stories that highlight the positive impacts of wellness initiatives on employees, strengthening the perception of your brand as caring and supportive.

3. Align Wellness with Strategic Goals: A key part of your wellness initiatives involves connecting the dots between employees’ well-being and the strategic objectives of the company. For example, link mental health programs like mindfulness sessions to innovation to demonstrate how they result in a more creative and productive workplace.

4. Showcase the Impact: Evidence that wellness works only deepens belief in it as a necessity. Share real-life examples of how wellness programs have improved workplace outcomes. Highlight case studies and testimonials from employees who have benefited from these programs. Create case studies that demonstrate improved productivity, reduced stress levels, and better teamwork.

5. Lead with Wellness: When leaders actively participate in and advocate for wellness programs, it sends a powerful message that no matter where you sit in an organization, you’re still a person with the same needs for support. The more leaders participate and evangelize your wellness programs, the more they become a core part of the company ethos.

6. Offer personalized Wellness Options: There is no one-size-fits all when it comes to well-being. By offering personalized wellness options that can be tailored to individual needs, you underscore your commitment to supporting each employee uniquely. This flexibility makes the programs more effective and highlights your company’s dedication to its workforce.

7. Measure Success and Adapt: As your employees engage with wellness programs, their needs will change. You need to continuously assess and adapt your wellness initiatives to keep the offerings relevant, the energy fresh, and the impact high. By actively managing the portfolio of wellness offerings, you show your workforce that rather than checking a box, the organization is committed to making wellness a foundational element of your employer brand.

Thinking Beyond Wellness Programs

Wellness programs alone can feel like Band-Aids if they’re not connected to the employer brand—the internal expression of your mission, purpose, and values—that drives your organization. As employee well-being emerges as a dynamic force that shapes every aspect of workplace engagement and productivity, employees need to feel that it is part of your organizational DNA.

At Emotive Brand, we specialize in connecting business strategy to culture strategy to develop employer brands that are not just smart—they resonate emotionally. Making sure that employees experience wellness programs as part of a larger narrative around how you value people is essential to delivering the experiences that contribute to an organization being a great place to work.

If you have thoughts about the role wellness programs play in culture strategy, please add to the conversation below. And if you’re thinking about ways to get your culture better aligned to your business strategy, we are always happy to help you think through how to approach the challenge.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and creative agency that unlocks the power of emotion to propel a brand, culture, or business forward. We are a remote-first agency with a footprint in the San Francisco Bay Area.

HR and Marketing: Building Your Employer Brand Together

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Finding the Right Fit: HR’s Number One Challenge

HR and Marketing? The role of HR has evolved significantly in recent years. Attracting, engaging, and retaining top talent is a high priority for executives, and most companies place this responsibility on HR. According to PwC 18th Annual CEO survey, a full 73% of respondents are concerned about the availability of talent – a 10% increase from 2014. Executives worry that it’s getting harder to recruit and keep the people who are both skilled high-performers and ‘fit’ within their organization’s culture. And without top talent, maintaining a competitive advantage, adapting to industry change, and growing business is nearly impossible.

Fierce marketplace competition makes it difficult for candidates to know if they are a good fit for the brand without some guidance. Ensuring employee ‘fit’ means your brand needs to know why it matters. That’s where an employer brand comes in. Your employer brand must do the hard work of being clear and consistent about its promise (EVP), communicating an authentic, meaningful brand experience across all touchpoints. When done well, an employer brand helps attract the right talent, allows prospects to self-select for fit with your organization, and increases the likelihood that they will develop into long-term, low-churn, high-producing members of your team.

The Heat is On

Today, HR is tasked with creating an employee experience that markets the business to recruits and employees. Crafting a relevant and resonant employer brand involves aligning your organization’s aspirations, values, needs, and wants with the people you are looking to recruit and retain—no easy feat.

The pressure to create a unified, engaging experience for employees and prospects is real. And, launching an employer brand often involves obtaining budget from a CEO who may not see its value. What’s more, building an employer brand can become nearly impossible if the corporate brand is outdated, or worse, non-existent. When HR operates in a silo, getting budget and approval can be an uphill battle.

We’ve worked with a number of clients with varying global challenges around recruitment and employee engagement and there’s one thing they all agree on: successfully building an employer brand can’t be done in isolation. Engaging and partnering with marketing from the very beginning is essential.

Five Ways to Create a Successful Partnership Between HR and Marketing

  1. Designate an owner. Clarifying ownership is key. There is no better steward of an employer brand than the CEO, but gaining alignment from the rest of your leadership team, including key stakeholders, securing budget, and taking the project to the finish line won’t happen without a designated decision maker from either the HR or marketing team. 
  1. Map the employer brand to the corporate brand. Even if the corporate brand looks outdated or lacks relevance, the employer brand needs to build off of the brand’s foundation, otherwise it is confusing to your employees and the marketplace. Use what assets the brand has and build from there. If your corporate brand has a brand promise, find a way to use that as your North Star. The authenticity of the employer brand depends on HR and marketing working together to create an employee experience that is true to the brand.
  1. Get a commitment from key stakeholders. Getting the leadership team invested in the employer brand is more than just establishing a committee where people can voice opinions. It’s also important for each leader to understand the reach of the employer brand as a key influencer of your brand’s image and reputation. Leadership needs to have skin in the game from the start. This up-front work will help you and your marketing team move quickly with alignment and see the project all the way through.
  1. Build a coalition. Once you’ve got your employer brand strategy in place and support from the key stakeholders, you’ll need advocates from both marketing and HR to roll-out the employer brand. Unfortunately, there’s no “launch” button for your employer brand. To make the biggest impact, you’ll need a team dedicated to the project who have always been part of the journey. Marketers know how to drive and measure audience engagement, create engaging experiences, nurture audiences, and tell a story that keeps people interested and engaged over a long period of time. And you don’t just need the marketing execs on board, you need the whole marketing team.
  1. Don’t forget purpose. Your employer brand needs to be rooted in purpose and meaning in order to emotionally connect to and successfully recruit and retain the type of talent best suited for your business. HR understands what matters to employees, but marketing knows how to capture their attention, authentically win them over with purpose-driven messages, and create valuable brand experiences at every touch point. When HR and marketing collaborate on an employer brand strategy together, they ensure that the company lives up to its promise and executes it every day.

Collaboration Wins

HR and marketing are not used to collaborating on strategic initiatives, especially those driven by HR. But not engaging marketing in the project can be a fatal mistake. Marketing owns the brand and they need to be brought along on the journey. Marketing will appreciate being asked to participate and HR will save time and angst by getting them involved from the start.

Top talent have their choice of companies to work for. Access to information and opportunity has accelerated a new employer brand rule book where companies are continually learning to adapt the hiring, retention, engagement strategy, and practices for success. By coordinating these efforts with HR and marketing, your business will reap the benefits in terms of the talent you attract and how well they ‘fit’ into the company.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

When Your Values Aren’t Really Values

Posted on by Chris Ames

Beware of Generic Values

In the inboxes and Slack channels at Emotive Brand, there is a video that often gets shared before we embark on a brand video. It’s called “This Is a Generic Brand Video, by Dissolve,” and it’s a hilarious satire of when you try to make your brand stand for everything, it ends up standing for nothing. “Equality, innovation, honesty, and advancement,” the narrator says, in a salt-of-the-earth grumble, “are all words we chose from a list.”

Company values not only shape the external identity of your organization, they act as an internal compass for your current and prospective employees. When done properly, values can be the engine of a thriving work culture, attracting and retaining top talent. On the other hand, when a list of generic, vaguely positive words are selected from a hat, your culture greatly suffers.

If Everyone Is Innovating, No One Is

A research group at MIT conducted a survey of more than 1,000 firms in the Great Places to Work database. Eighty-five percent of the S&P 500 companies have a section—sometimes even two—dedicated to what they call “corporate culture.” Above all else, the most common value is innovation (mentioned by 80% of them), followed by integrity and respect (70%).

“When we try to correlate the frequency and prominence of these values to measures of short and long-term performance,” the study says, “we fail to find any significant correlation. Thus, advertised values do not seem to be very important, possibly because it is easy to claim them, so everybody does.”

So, what does this all add up to? In short, there are two types of values for a company: universal and particular. Both are important in building a thriving company culture, but in terms of what you advertise and how you use these tools, the approaches differ widely.

The Universal and the Particular

Universal values are the table stakes to get a prospective employee in the door. Is there really anyone that doesn’t want to work at a place that values equality, respect, honesty, teamwork, or innovation? How you deliver and bring these values to life is incredibly important, but it’s something that can be elaborated on in an employee handbook, workshop, or leadership training.

At the end of the day, the only place that universal values really need to live is in the actions of your people. Your website is some of the most valuable real estate for your brand. Writing the word “INNOVATION” in all caps is not going to persuade a senior engineer to apply for a job. Do you know what will? Your technology portfolio.

In contrast, particular values are the principles that could only be held by your company. They should be written in a tone and manner that feels authentic to who you are. Here’s how Brian Chesky, Founder and CEO of Airbnb, explained it in a lecture at Stanford.

“Integrity, honesty — those aren’t core values. Those are values that everyone should have. But there has to be like three, five, six things that are unique to you. And you can probably think about this in your own life. What is different about you, that every single other person, if you could only tell them three or four things, that you would want them to know about you?”

So, let’s look at Airbnb and see if it passes the test. Here is the first value from their career page:

Be a Host. Care for others and make them feel like they belong. Encourage others to participate to their fullest. Listen, communicate openly, and set clear expectations.

First of all, notice the language. Being a host, of course, is integral to Airbnb’s platform. It embodies a sense of empathy while, most importantly, being particular to the company. It’s not that no other company in the world could value these things—caring, belonging, encouraging others—it’s that no other company in the world could have written it exactly this way. Think of how easy it would have been for them to just write the word integrity. Instead, they drilled down into the emotive core of their service and discovered something real.

Core Values Act as a Lighthouse

That’s the beautiful thing about well-written, emotive values. Once they are set, they act as a lighthouse for recruiting like-minded people. As Jim Collins writes, “you cannot ‘set’ organizational values, you can only discover them. Executives often ask me, ‘How do we get people to share our core values?’ You don’t. Instead, the task is to find people who are already predisposed to sharing your core values. You must attract and then retain these people and let those who aren’t predisposed to sharing your core values go elsewhere.”

So, next time you sit down to write or refresh your company’s values, please resist the urge to paint with broad strokes. Ask yourself, what do we truly believe in? What do we do better than anyone else? What are the real, grounded ways that we are impacting the world? What changes are we looking to make and how do we want to get there? Paradoxically, the more specific you get, the wider net you’ll cast. Or as James Joyce put it, “In the particular is contained the universal.”

If you’re looking to make your brand values act as a guiding light for recruiting and retaining top talent, contact Founding Partner Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm in San Francisco.

Five Ways a Meaningful “Why” Creates a Compelling Workplace Experience

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Our experience shows that many brands have been crafted with only the customer in mind and that the resulting “customer experience” does not in any way parallel the “workplace experience.” As a result, the brand – as it is now articulated – is relatively meaningless internally.

We believe every brand has a meaningful “Why” hidden within.

This hidden “why” is powerful because it can do as much internally as it can externally. Our job is to dig that out and shed new light on it, all with the ambition of delivering these five benefits.

1. Increase Motivation

When your employees believe in your brand, there’s a natural increase in morale and productivity. If employees feel good about the company they work for, the brand their efforts support, and the work they do, those positive feelings translate directly to a positive impact on your company overall.

What makes people “feel good” about their employer and the work they do? We think it’s when they see what they do as meaningful. What makes work meaningful to an employee? When there’s a personally relevant reason why it’s being done (i.e. the company has a compelling reason for being).

2. Increase Personal Accountability

If employees understand the brand promise that they work to support and how their efforts directly affect the brand’s success and fulfill consumer wants and needs, they’ll develop a stronger sense of personal accountability. In other words, they’ll take greater pride in their work and they’ll want to deliver better results. In a nutshell, they’ll care.

People care when they feel cared for. And this is not just about holding hands. It’s about caring about what people care about. People care when there’s a direct link between what they’re asked to do and their personal needs, values, interests, and aspirations.

3. Increase Word-of-Mouth Marketing

If your employees believe in your brand, they’ll be more likely to talk about it to friends, family, and anyone who will listen. They’ll advocate the brand online and offline to anyone who will listen, and they’ll guard it against naysayers. You can’t buy that kind of dedication, support, and positive publicity.

A solid “why” becomes a “social object,” or something that can be shared, talked about, and celebrated. It becomes “what” people talk and tweet about. At its best, the mere act of sharing and talking about a meaningful “why” reinforces its personal relevance and emotional importance to all parties.

4. Increase Communication

When employees feel like they have an important place in the brand’s success and they’re truly part of something greater than themselves (i.e. meeting consumer wants and needs), they’re more confident in sharing their thoughts and ideas. This increased level of open communication can lead to fantastic new innovations and opportunities for your company. It can also help to raise potential red flags before they turn into disasters.

We like to think of a brand’s “why” as the launchpad for all sorts of conversations and collaborative actions. It not only focuses thinking on what to do but also helps people vet ideas that go against the brand’s meaningful ambition.

5. Increase Talent Recruitment and Retention

Who doesn’t want to work for a company where the employees are motivated and happy? When your employees speak highly and openly about your brand, your company has a better chance of increasing retention rates and attracting new talent.

What could be more powerful than employees who believe in, and express, the why of your brand to the colleagues, family, and friends? When the endorsement of a workplace is heartfelt and genuine, it communicates far more to people seeking work. It not only helps draw the right people to the workplace, but it also means they’ll more readily become welcomed and productive members of the team.

For further reading on creating a more compelling workplace experience, download our Meaningful Workplace White Paper.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

How to Attract and Assemble Top Talent

Posted on by Chris Ames

What Makes a Real Business?

You write for years before you call yourself a writer. You play music for thousands of hours before you call yourself a musician. So, what does it take for a startup to be called a “real business?” Is about funding? Awareness?

One definition from Inc. – and one that speaks to just how many moving parts it takes to reach sustained success – is when a company’s founder no longer relies exclusively on his or her own skills to manage the business. It’s the point when a CEO can truly delegate a task without worry. (Or, at least not too much worry.)

Faster Alone, Farther Together

In the beginning, it’s natural for founders to want to drive everything themselves. After all, they hold all the knowledge, and it’s the most cost-effective way to get something done right now. The problem is that all those right now’s add up quickly, with the founder’s time getting stretched thinner and thinner. With even less time to train, they take on even more work. It’s a harsh cycle. And though this phrase is most likely hanging on a poster in an HR office, it’s true: you go faster alone, but farther together.

How Do You Build the Perfect Team?

CEOs can set a perfect strategy, but if they don’t hire the right team, it will languish on the whiteboard. These days, there are endless tools for searching for talent. Some of them are human-led, some of them are not.

Social media call-outs, job aggregators, and head hunters are all fine, they just tend to either cast the widest net possible or go off of LinkedIn presence alone. As we all know, who we are online is not always the truest representation of who we are at work. Mass-market ads tend to attract exactly that – the mass market. It’s people who are viewing your brand with a view-master instead of a microscope. Instead of endlessly searching, investing in your brand can do the work for you, magnetically drawing in people who are already predisposed to be a good culture fit.

Use Your Brand to Draw the Right People In

Your brand is the best foundation for assembling the perfect team. There are the obvious touchpoints, like crafting a strong employer brand, utilizing eye-catching design, and producing copy that cuts through the clutter. But then there are those other essentials, like cementing your big picture mission and vision for the company.

David Finkel, co-author of “Scale: Seven Proven Principles to Grow Your Business and Get Your Life Back” says, “You need to regularly reinforce your vision with your team. Take every opportunity to bring it up in meetings, in conversation, and in the normal course of your business. When you see an opportunity to highlight how a recent event or action at the company is in direct alignment with that vision, don’t miss a chance to point it out.”

Doing this not only creates alignment and purpose for the employees you have already assembled, it also acts as a beacon for the people you are trying to recruit. When you get down to what really motivates people to perform well, it isn’t money – it’s purpose. Turn your vision and mission into a North Star to attract and retain top talent.

Start Asking the Right Questions

Marco Zappacosta is the CEO and Founder of Thumbtack, a company which helps you find local professionals for pretty much anything. So it goes without saying that he’s thought deeply about the process of finding the perfect fit.

In an interview with First Round, he talks about how he’s built a track for interviews with top talent. There are loads of great tips, like constraining your job description to the two or three key attributes you’re looking for instead of a giant laundry skill of skills. Most importantly, he discusses the difference between skill and fit. “A misevaluation of fit, much more than talent, is usually the reason hires don’t work out,” he says.

To assess fit, Zappacosta splits what is typically one interview with the CEO into two or three sessions, which grants more time and perspective to align on values, ambition, leadership, and team building. Here are some of the open questions he asks, each driving toward a different cultural touchpoint.

  • What would you want to have happen to the business?
  • What accomplishment are you most proud of in your career?
  • What failure are you most proud of?

Use Design Thinking to Build and Coalesce Your Team

Once you have two or three members, how do you go about ensuring they work together well? For those unfamiliar, design thinking is an ideology that asserts a hands-on, user-centric approach to problem-solving leads to innovation, and innovation leads to differentiation and a competitive advantage. Most of the time, this thinking is used as a system for creating a product or piece of creative, but the same process can be used to assemble strong, well-balanced teams.

As outlined by the Nielsen Norman Group, world leaders in research-based user experience, design thinking develops three significant components of common ground in teams:

Building a shared vocabulary. As they say, teams can only move as quickly as they can successfully communicate. The collaborative nature of design thinking alleviates this friction by involving all team members from the very beginning in a workshop-based approach. When teams have a shared vocabulary, the focus can move from what? to how?

Having tangible artifacts. Like good writing, a key principle of design thinking is “show, don’t tell.” Tangible artifacts like empathy maps, journey maps, storyboards, and wireframes do more than get good ideas following. They help visualize complex ideas, build group cohesion, and provide a physical dictionary for the team’s shared vocabulary. Not only are you speaking the same language, but you can also point to something physical.

Establishing a trust-based team culture. The nice thing about design thinking is that by relying on cross-disciplinary and cross-hierarchical participation, it’s inherently democratic. It balances each participant’s contribution so that all ideas are weighed equally, supporting divergent, idiosyncratic thinking.

Save Your Top Brains for Big Idea Thinking

So, you’ve found your team and established a system for getting them to work well together. What’s the worst thing you can possibly do? Bog them down with low-level tasks that don’t take advantage of their strengths.

According to McKinsey & Company, only 38% of the people surveyed said their teams focused on work that truly benefited from a top-team perspective. Only 35% said their top teams allocated the right amounts of time among the various topics they considered important, such as strategy and people.

You built a super team to do super things. If your ultimate goal is to build an organization that changes markets, changes people’s lives, and stands the test of time, your team needs the time to make that dream a reality.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

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Will the Future of HR Still Be Human?

Posted on by Chris Ames

Ironically, the biggest forces shaking up the HR industry these days aren’t human at all. Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) are all drastically transforming the world of recruiting and hiring.

Just look at the Artificial Intelligence Index 2018 Annual Report by Stanford University, which shows that the number of active U.S. startups developing AI systems has increased 14-fold since 2000. There is clearly a hunger for this type of technology, but we’re only just starting to grasp what’s possible with these shiny new toys. While we’ve all had our own successes and failures with chatbots, there are some applications of AI and ML that are truly game-changing. Let’s dive in.

Will the Future of Hr Still Be Human? AI, ML, DL

Killing Repetitive, Low Value-Add Tasks

Kate Guarino, Director of Human Resources Operations for Pega, says AI presents the opportunity for HR to automate those boring, mindless tasks that end up stealing all your time. This is a fairly well-trodden space – perhaps your organization is already using AI to automate the steps of onboarding a new employee (i.e. allocating space, provisioning a laptop). Saving time in those areas helps HR teams pivot to make sure they focus on “value-add work like mentoring and continuous feedback.”

And therein lies the paradox of AI technology. At first blush, it seems like these advances are designed to replace human involvement. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. When AI operates like it’s supposed to, it facilitates more human interaction. The goal of technology is not to eliminate people – it’s to eliminate meaningless repetition.

Most HR professionals understand that AI will never replace the emotive, human element in hiring. Instead, it can alleviate tiresome tasks like sourcing, screening, and conducting preliminary interviews. John Feldmann, Communications Specialist for Insperity, says, “This will allow more time for hiring managers to build meaningful relationships with candidates, leading to a shorter time-to-fill and improved employee retention.”

Working Toward an Unbiased Hiring Process

Here’s a human question: how do you create a truly equal and diverse hiring process for all? Perhaps technology can answer that. AI-backed talent discovery businesses like HiringSolved and Plum promise to hire, grow, and retain top talent by ditching the traditional resume format. Instead, potential candidates take discovery surveys that collect information on background, culture fit, and cognitive ability. These results are graded by AI instead of people, in an effort to eliminate screener bias.

Another landmine in the process of hiring is that of language itself. A psychological tool called the Implicit Association Test (IAT) shows that people’s subconscious word associations indicate bias. “These biases find their way into job descriptions, as well as resume selections. Now, thanks to AI, algorithms can be designed to help employers identify and remove these bias patterns in language they use to improve their hiring communications and welcome diverse applicants,” researchers from the Human Resources Professionals Association noted.

It’s hard to imagine an objectively unbiased hiring process, but perhaps these technological safeguards could help shed light on blind spots in a company’s onboarding process. Think of them as additional lenses of perspective in an HR rep’s toolbox.

Putting Scheduling Nightmares to Bed

You might think the most difficult thing about an HR professional’s day is dealing with conflict. The fact is, that’s the easy stuff. The hard part is playing calendar tag – endlessly searching for available time slots for meetings, training sessions, or orientations. Enter companies like x.ai, which develop autonomous AI-assistants to manage scheduling. The tool can suggest where you should put your next meeting and even notify candidates when you are waiting for them.

Everything from sales demos to phone screens to happy hour with the marketing team can be seamlessly automated. If you just got goosebumps, chances are you’re a project manager or HR specialist.

Boosting Employee Engagement

Whenever we talk about company culture or morale, it tends to be discussed as the ephemeral, unmeasurable vibe of a workplace. But companies like IBM are working to create AI tools that can provide quantifiable insights and actions around nebulous things like engagement.

KangoGift is a tool for giving authentic feedback and praise in a timely manner. The all-digital platform solves the problem of employees not getting the recognition they deserve. Powered by the IBM Cloud and IBM Watson technology, KangoGift makes it easy to set up and manage both structured and on-the-spot recognition programs.

During performance reviews, managers can analyze keywords to view an employee’s recognition history, drilling down into the context and content of each recognition. Applying the same analysis enterprise-wide can pinpoint the buzz around influential people, key projects, and corporate values. And Watson Tone Analyzer and Personality Insights can reveal insights into the communications style of a manager, workgroup, or department.

The Future of HR

All of these tools are exciting, but they will only ever be as intelligent, predictive, and unbiased as the people making them. Make no mistake: AI is not a quick fix for solving systemic prejudice and misogyny in the hiring process. But when used properly, these technologies can act as checks and balances for brands. The human element of HR will never be replaced – but it can be aided.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm in San Francisco.

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How to Deal with the Looming Talent Shortage

Posted on by Chris Ames

Who’s Got Talent?

How many times have we heard that robots are coming for our jobs? Whether it’s from science fiction or straight from the mouth of Elon Musk, it’s a dystopia we’ve been anticipating for quite some time. However, based on a recent study from Korn Ferry, a global organizational consulting firm, we may have been misplacing our fears on the wrong targets.

In a sweeping country-by-country analysis, the biggest issue isn’t that robots are stealing all the jobs – it’s that there simply aren’t enough human beings to take them. According to the study, by 2030 there will be a global human talent shortage of more than 85 million people. For scale, that’s roughly equivalent to the population of Germany. Left unchecked, in 2030 that talent shortage could result in $8.5 trillion in unrealized annual revenues.

Talent Crunch

So, how did we get here and what can we do about it? For starters, many of these problems stem from simple demography. Japan and many European nations, for instance, are continuing a decade long decline in birth rates. For countries with the deadly combination of low unemployment and a booming manufacturing sector – the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and many others – labor shortages are accelerating automation and increased use of robotics “not to replace people, but because there aren’t enough of them to fill the factories,” the report says.

In the United States, the graying population is a major contributor to the talent shortage, with some 10,000 baby boomers reaching retirement age every day for the next 19 years. Even last year, U.S. job vacancies hit a record 6 million per month. The fact is, younger generations will not have had the time or training required to take many of the high-skilled jobs left behind.

“As with many economies, the onus falls on companies to train workers, and also to encourage governments to rethink education programs to generate the talent pipelines the industry will require,” says Werner Penk, President of Korn Ferry’s Global Technology Market practice.

Follow the Leader

The impact of the talent crunch is so significant that the continued predominance of sector powerhouses is in question. For instance, the United States is the undisputed leader in tech, but the talent shortage could erode that lead fast. In tech alone, the US could lose out on $162 billion worth of revenues annually unless it finds more high-tech workers. When you look at India, which is projected to have a surplus of more than 1 million high-skilled tech workers by 2030, it’s not difficult to imagine them as the next tech leader.

“As a result,” the report says, “organizations may be prompted to relocate their headquarters and operational centers to places where the talent supply is more plentiful. Governments will be forced to invest in improving their people’s skills to avert corporate flight and to defend their nations’ income and status.”

Be a Life-Long Learner

The savviest organizations are taking on the onus of training talent themselves, increasing their hiring of people straight out of school, says Jean-Marc Laouchez, president of the Korn Ferry Institute. These firms are also trying to instill a culture of continuous learning and training. “Constant learning – driven by both workers and organizations – will be central to the future of work, extending far beyond the traditional definition of learning and development,” he says.

Though we love to blame robots, the truth is that global growth, demographic trends, under-skilled workforces, and tightening immigration policies are much more sinister culprits. There isn’t one solution to this alarming trend, but there are a series of insights and implications we can use to inform how we attract and retain top talent.

Insights

  • Demand will be biggest for highly educated professionals, technicians, and managers. Professionals will be in particularly high demand in the trade, transportation, and communications industries in developing nations.
  • In the next two decades, demand for professionals in manufacturing will peak at more than 10 percent in developing countries, exceeding 4 percent across all countries sampled.
  • Healthcare research and development alone will generate enormous demand for skilled labor worldwide.
  • Employees without critical knowledge and technical skills will be left behind.

Implications

  • On the business side, introduce strategic workforce planning to address imbalances between labor supply and demand.
  • On the government side, easing migration will attract the right talent globally.
  • On a personal level, increase your chances at long-term employability by advancing technological literacy and cross-cultural learning skills.
  • For HR managers and recruiters, develop a talent “trellis” by focusing on horizontal and vertical career and education paths.
  • Management should be willing to ditch the 9-to-5 and encourage contract, freelance, and virtual mobility to access required skills easily.
  • Hiring teams need to continue their diversification and equality efforts by tapping women, people of color, folks from the LGBTQIA community, older professionals, and immigrants.

To learn more about how your brand can prepare for the looming talent shortage, contact Founding Partner Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm in San Francisco.

Employer Branding Trends for 2019

Posted on by Chris Ames

Fun Work vs. Fulfilling Work

How we hire changes every year. Is there any page on a company’s website more volatile than its careers tab? At the start of the decade, it seemed like a place for plucky young startups to showcase almost everything besides what the organizations actually did. You’d have to scroll through two ping pong tables and at least one company dog before you got to any open positions. But at the end of the day, fun will only get you so far.

Why We Work

Now, the tech scene has largely outgrown its dorm room aesthetic. Prospective hires are looking for far more than bean bags and free lunches. Expectations have shifted from a place of amusement to a place of personal, professional, and emotional fulfillment. A modern company is required to have a handle on everything from 401(k)s to mental health benefits.

“The contract between the organization and the individual is beginning to change,” says Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management Practice at London Business School. “The old contract looked like this: ‘I work to buy stuff that makes me happy.’ The contract is negotiated by tangible assets. The new contract will be, ‘I work to make me happy.’ We have to think about work as being the thing, not the money you get from it. I don’t see many companies realizing how profound that change will be.”

How We Work

Beyond finding meaningful work, how we access that meaning is transforming as well. Eighty-two percent of people want to work from home at least once per week. In addition, it’s estimated that by 2028, 78% of employers will offer remote opportunities in some capacity.

By the numbers, you could view this mobility as chaos, but employers have a unique opportunity to rethink the way they build teams. As Rachael Klinefield says, “Rather than being wed to a finite group of employees who may or may not have the skill and passion to meet a company’s expectations, HR departments can nurture an ever-growing network of high-quality talent.”

This approach challenges the traditional hierarchical management style – and that’s a good thing. Instead, employers will shift toward relationship-oriented strategies that align with their pace, culture, and values. In this style of work, design and communication tools are absolutely essential to keep your talent network in sync, so find whatever works best for you.

Who We Work For

The idea of reputation management, perhaps something once relegated to a buzzword in the past, has never been more important in the age of purpose-driven brands. Like Yelp before them, sites like Reputation.com and Glassdoor act as gatekeepers between brands and top talent.

Recent research from Glassdoor found about half of more than 4,600 people surveyed use Glassdoor at some point during their job search, and that good ratings of a company’s compensation and benefits factor heavily in their decision about where to apply for or accept employment. If companies want to stay competitive, they have to treat their employer brand like they do their corporate brand and heavily manage its online reputation.

How We Find Talent

Just as technology is transforming the way people research brands, it’s shifting how brands research people. Modern recruiting software will continue to alter two key components of hiring: optimization and targeting. In other words, HR professionals will now use the time they once used combing through the slush pile to hone in on top talent. From beginning to end, the entire onboarding process will be streamlined, reducing the risk of a bad fit.

As technology continues to progress, companies will also take advantage of tools like machine learning and AI to build smarter chatbots. This will free up even more time for HR professionals to focus on the human aspects of hiring like relationship-building and discovering a value match.

The Future of Work

The future of work is a story that employers and employees are writing together. The role of an employer brand is ensuring that this story is as strong and harmonious as possible. Above everything else, a company is only as good as its people. Are you doing everything you can to attract and retain the right ones?

To learn about how you can turn your employer brand into a magnet for today’s top talent, contact Founding Partner Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm in San Francisco.

Loyalty and Productivity: Using Innovative Benefits to Build Employer Brands

Posted on by Carol Emert

A great employer brand story is important for recruiting and retaining employees – but it’s important to show workers the love and not just talk about it. Benefits are one of the best ways to demonstrate that a company values its employees’ well-being and not just their work. With a rising tide of innovative benefits, from in vitro fertilization to college tuition support to telemedicine, there’s more opportunity than ever to build a strong employer brand. HR leaders who innovate can boost their competitiveness while taking better care of their people.

At Emotive Brand, we’re lucky to work with visionary employers that have embraced HR innovation, as well as with benefits companies that are disrupting their categories to offer re-invented benefits of far greater value.

Innovative Benefits Win

In a 2017 survey of 2,000 U.S. workers, Fractl found that 88% would consider taking a job with lower pay for better health, dental, and vision insurance. The same number would consider jumping ship for more flexible hours.

Other than health, flexible work hours and PTO were the most popular benefits with employees, according to Fractl’s survey, published in the Harvard Business Review.

At Emotive Brand, we see two major trends behind the rise in innovative benefits.

Control is Out, Flexibility is In

The first trend is the rethinking of an old assumption that employees need to be controlled, rather than trusted, to make decisions that are right for them and their job. Undoubtedly, this is tied to the rise of knowledge workers who demand new ways of working and have agency to jump employers at will.

Unlimited PTO was a shocking idea when Netflix adopted it years ago for a Silicon Valley-based knowledge worker staff. Despite a lot of hoopla at the time, only 1% to 2% of companies offer it today.

More would be smart to do so.

Fractl found that two-thirds of employees would consider taking a job with lower pay if offered unlimited time off. And eliminating vacation liability saves companies almost $2,000 per year per employee, says the article, citing Project: Time Off.

Emotive Brand has offered unlimited PTO since our founding in 2009. When Emotive Brand was developing its first HR polices almost 10 years ago, setting arbitrary limits on PTO “just seemed so stupid,” says CEO and co-founding partner Bella Banbury. “It’s really about treating people as adults.”

It’s also about quid pro quo in the changing world of work. “I can’t expect someone to be available at 7 or 8 at night and to check their email after hours and then not let them go to their kid’s school play,” Banbury says.

Unlimited PTO fosters mutual respect between a company and employees. Everyone wins.

Technology Drives Innovation for HR Leaders

Technology, not surprisingly, is the second trend behind the rise in innovative benefits.

While consumers have gotten used to instant gratification via tech-based services like on-demand TV, “benefits still feel a step behind,” says Sean McBride, partnerships director at Emotive Brand client Lyra Health. “HR leaders want benefits that are tech-enabled, personalized, and as accessible and available as everything else.”

Technology is driving much higher levels of access and personalization, says McBride. His company, Lyra Health, is taking the hassle out of behavioral health care by making it easy for people to connect with treatments and practitioners tailored to their specific needs.

Employers have embraced Lyra’s model, which marries technology and hands-on clinical service for more effective care.

While many companies have at least considered next-generation benefits, McBride estimates that only about 5% “have really looked at benefits holistically, from smoking cessation to personal finance to behavioral health, making sure they all have the same ease of access and personalization.”

Currently, tech companies are the most progressive, one-upping each other with benefits like egg freezing and in vitro fertilization. Because the competition for top employees is so fierce, employer brand-building is a priority.

McBride estimates it will be another five to 10 years before today’s innovative benefits will be mainstream in corporate America. For now, it’s a real source of competitive differentiation.

“We’re definitely in an early adopter phase,” he says. “It takes time for large companies to innovate and for smaller companies to blossom and replace legacy providers.”

Innovative benefits can have compelling value. In the case of comprehensive behavioral health care, studies show that total medical costs go down on average 10% over four years, while productivity can increase by as much as 23%, says McBride.

Not surprisingly, employers benefit when their employees thrive, and both the employer brand and the business come out the better for it.

See Change for HR Leaders

A third beneficiary are the HR leaders who are used to hearing more gripes than kudos.

“When you’re used to complaints and now people are stopping you in the hallway for a hug because it’s changed a family’s life – I hear stories like that,” says McBride. “The emotional connection is really enhanced when it feels like a company is investing in employees as much as the employees are investing in the company.”

Emotive Brand can help companies strengthen their workforce loyalty and productivity by ensuring HR leaders have the right insights to build more meaningful connections with employees.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm.

Secrets to a Great Employee Brand Story to Recruit Top Talent

Posted on by Chris Ames

Your Employee Brand Is Your Talent Scout

There’s a reason that great employees are so often referred to as “talent.” Workers are a dime a dozen, but true expertise is incredibly hard to come by. It’s the thing that propels businesses to their next level of funding, keeps the sales pipeline full, and boosts office morale high in times of unease.

No matter how advanced your technology is, people are the backbone of a successful business. Great brands tell stories, and there are few narratives more important than your employee brand story. HR specialists and recruiters have been leading this space for years, but in today’s competitive landscape, companies can’t afford to let someone else tell their story for them.

Who Do You Trust?

When you’re trying to recruit excellent people to your brand, where should you point the spotlight?

Well, according to the 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer, “Employees rank higher in public trust than a firm’s PR department, CEO, or Founder. 41% of us believe that employees are the most credible source of information regarding their business.”

Simply, if you want to demonstrate the advantages of working at your company, let your actual employees do the talking. By turning your current employees into brand ambassadors, not only will the message be more authentic, but it will directly impact retention.

In the daily shuffle, employees are rarely encouraged to think deeply about what they do and why it is important. This simple exercise can bring in new talent while reaffirming those who have already joined.

Money Isn’t Everything (Really)

If your employee brand story is a paycheck, free snacks, and a standing desk, you’re probably not thinking big enough. As outlined in Dilys Robinson and Sue Hayday’s influential report “Employee Engagement,” employees are motivated by intrinsic factors like personal growth, working for a common purpose, and being part of a larger mission, as opposed to solely extrinsic factors such as pay and benefits.

What’s the why? of your company? Is it compelling? Is it something your current employees can easily articulate in a meeting or at a cocktail party? The more concise and impactful you make your brand narrative, the more incentivized your employees will be to enlist other top performers.

Employee Brand Storytelling 101

There’s no such thing as the one-size-fits-all employee brand story. Delivering it in a medium that feels true and authentic to your brand is key. But here are some ideas for getting the word out.

  1. Social media: Facebook and Instagram can be fantastic windows for showing a glimpse into the employee side of your brand. Strike the right mix of delight and professionalism to show that your brand is fun, connected, and promotes self-discovery through personal branding.
  2. Live events: Especially in today’s digital marketplace, the power of an in-person event is stronger than ever. From career fairs and conferences to more casual drinks and networking, there’s no quicker way to determine if someone will be a good culture fit than meeting them face to face.
  3. Employee reviews: Employees tend to only leave reviews on sites like GlassDoor and Indeed after they have left. Encourage your current employees to leave reviews while they are still with you. Positive reviews will boost your brand awareness and desirability, and any negative comments will help you address internal friction.
  4. Refresh your job listings: For many employees, a job listing is the first piece of your brand that they see. Plus, they are seeing it in a sea of 100 other applications. Are you making the right first impression? Highlight differentiators like culture, growth, and a compelling mission. You’ll attract people who are passionate about finding the right fit.

Turn Job Shoppers into Job Seekers

Top performers are 46% more likely to be attracted by a better company reputation and 29% more likely to be attracted by more interesting, challenging work. If you want to obtain – and retain – top talent, create an employee brand story that’s compelling, impactful, and irresistibly shareable.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy and design agency.