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      The Impact of Sustainability on Your Employer Brand

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      At Link Humans, our goal is to help you understand why someone would want to join and stay at your company. The better you know your reputation as an organization, the easier it will be to attract the right people and get them to stick around.
      To do that, we do research and analysis to transform sentiment into data, analyzing over one million employer brand data points to create the Employer Brand Index. At its core, the index measures what current and prospective employees care about and how likely they are to say something about it.
      We also use this methodology to research trends in employer branding and talent attraction that may have implications for the industry’s future. We’ve previously looked at the role of diversity and inclusion at 20 top US tech companies, the state of innovation and technology at the top 10 US banks, and how employer brand values have shifted during the pandemic.
      For our newest study, we’re looking at how Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles impact employer brand and why they’re more important than ever, especially as we begin to recover from COVID-19. In our recent podcast, I caught up with Olivia Thompson, our Account Manager, to discuss the study results.
      What Our Data Tells Us About ESG
      In creating our Index, we go through a pervasive process of categorizing commentary according to positive and negative sentiment,” Thompson says. “From these comments, we categorize them even further into our sixteen employer brand attributes.”
      As we’ve been looking over our data for Q1 2021, we’ve noticed that ESG has been a significant driver of positive commentary. “85% of commentary towards this attribute is positive,” Thompson reports, and it’s also the second-highest mentioned attribute on social media. This combination of something likely to be talked about positively and widely shared is potent when it comes to your employer brand. This makes ESG a great driver of positive impact towards your overall Employer Brand Index score.
      Why Sustainability Should Be a Key Part of ESG Initiatives
      In her research, Thompson found that sustainability, in particular, formed 23% of the total number of positive ESG mentions in Q1 2021. Whether you’re talking about reducing plastic use, aiming to be carbon neutral, or starting initiatives to combat climate change in other ways, both employees and candidates are taking notice.
      ESG initiatives also have a strong link with another high-scorer from Q1 2021: mission and purpose. Candidates, employees, and alumni were likely to talk about an organization’s mission and purpose, and the commentary was overwhelmingly positive.
      “From a talent attraction and productivity perspective, maintaining a strong ESG agenda generally is important for both keeping your current employees motivated and attracting new ones,” Thompson says. The Future of Work study from PwC backs up this sentiment, finding that 65% of people worldwide want to work for an organization with a powerful social conscience.
      Activating Your Sustainability Message
      Our data also enables us to contextualize this information regarding who is saying what, which can help you understand how to make a plan for activation and impact. 46% of positive commentary on sustainability has come from senior management, and 90% of it happens on social media.
      Senior management needs to lead the charge in discussing sustainability and ESG initiatives on social media. Meanwhile, your team should look to leverage a range of channels, hashtags, and campaigns to boost activation—and track your success. “It’s people’s stories that are going to be of interest,” Thompson says, “and if the conversation is positive, you should try to boost it as much as possible.”

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      How European Companies Can Kickstart Employee Engagement

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      Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2021 Report found that European countries were remarkably resilient to the effects of the pandemic in 2020, but their longer-term track record of employee engagement still raised significant concern. European employees are among the least engaged in the world. However, while the scale of the issue is continental, the solution could be relatively straightforward.
      Flatlining employee engagement
      While there is considerable variation in the level of employee engagement from country to country, Europe as a whole has experienced a long-term stagnation in its engagement levels. Less than 20% of the continent’s workforce is engaged by their daily experience of work, and the situation has failed to improve for some time.
      Europe’s flatlining engagement looks even starker in light of the slow but steady increase in engagement levels across the globe: 20% in 2020 compared to 12% in 2009. In the US, for example, engagement has risen from 28% to 36% since the turn of the century. Compare this to Germany, for instance, where engagement has remained rooted to the level it was at in 2001 (see below), and it is clear that even Europe’s economic powerhouse has been caught in the doldrums.

      What makes an engaged employee?
      Employee engagement is about more than just satisfaction, though that is obviously a key component. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace Report measures engagement using 12 metrics, each of which has a proven link to performance outcomes. Engaged employees know, for example, what is expected of them at work and how their day-to-day activities contribute to the purpose of their organization.
      Organizations which perform well against these emotional workplace needs are more likely to enjoy positive outcomes, such as high retention rates among staff as well as increased productivity and profitability. Moreover, employee engagement becomes an even stronger predictor of organizational performance during difficult economic periods – an extremely important finding as the impact of the pandemic continues to be felt throughout the global economy.
      Engagement also has strong links with workers’ wellbeing. This may not be surprising; people who feel more heard at work, praised and appreciated for their contributions, or feel that they are playing to their strengths tend to feel better about their lives overall. On the other hand, the majority of actively disengaged employees in Europe reported feeling stressed during the previous working day. As organizations gain a greater appreciation of the need to support workers’ mental and physical health in the wake of the pandemic, recognizing this link between engagement and wellbeing could be crucial for improving the employee experience.
      Raising the bar
      Despite a decade of stagnation, Europe’s comparatively low engagement levels are by no means doomed to continue. Returning to Germany, when Gallup asked employees whether they would continue working even if they inherited enough money to live comfortably without doing so, 74% said they would still work. Some signs are promising, therefore, that European engagement can rise again.
      A simple solution is for organizations to look at the success stories and try to emulate what goes on there. Gallup’s research has found that employees have the same basic emotional needs across the globe, so European workers should close the gap on their extra-European counterparts once employers commit to fulfilling these needs. Indeed, organizations working with Gallup in which engagement is a strategic area of focus achieved engagement scores of 44%, as compared to the European average of 16% – showing that improvement is possible.
      European organizations, therefore, need to recognize that employees want more from their jobs than just a paycheque. A sense of purpose and development is equally important.
      Management matters
      Ensuring that organizations meet the needs of their employees is the responsibility of the leadership team. Analyzing organizations that have driven engagement levels up from below-average to 70% or more, the commitment of leaders to long-term change is consistently the decisive factor.
      Accounting for 70% of the variance in engagement levels, the manager is the single greatest influence on employee engagement. Organizations should therefore concentrate attention and resources on providing more comprehensive management training, which will equip managers to effectively deliver on the emotional workplace needs of their employees.
      Moreover, while 97% of managers feel that they do a good job of managing their teams, more than two-thirds of employees report the direct experience of bad management in their careers. This, of course, does not add up – and organizational performance is suffering as a result of this managerial blind spot.
      When it comes to improving employee engagement, therefore, European companies have to start from the top. Investing more in the quality of leadership is by far the most effective way to improve engagement levels, which in turn will impact positively on performance. What may at first seem like an intangible concept of ‘engagement’, is actually very quantifiable and, more importantly, incredibly valuable to European organizations.
      By: Pa Sinyan, Managing Partner for Europe, Gallup; & Marco Nink, Regional Lead in Research and Analytics, EMEA, Gallup.
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      A Strategic Approach to Employer Reputation

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      What makes your campaigns instantly recognizable as belonging to your brand? When your employees talk about your brand online (and they do), do you know how and where?
      These are the questions Kirsten Bethmann has been asking as Global Employer Reputation Lead for Mars, Incorporated. Mars has set an inspiring goal for itself: to become one of the most attractive employers in the world by 2025. Achieving this goal, Bethmann believes, requires a renewed focus on brand consistency.
      The journey toward greater employer brand consistency supports greater brand awareness—often the biggest ongoing talent challenge organizations face. Unless you’re a beloved consumer brand with widespread name recognition, your employer brand team is likely all too familiar with this struggle.
      Establishing a Shared Vision
      A clear employee value proposition is the cornerstone of a consistent employer brand. For Mars, that EVP is built on three pillars: people, purpose, and development. The employer brand team took this EVP development a step further by adapting the Mars statement of purpose (“The world we want tomorrow starts with how you do business today”) into a tagline: “Your tomorrow starts today,” which personalizes and transforms the Mars mission into a call to action for its employees.
      Standardizing Brand Guidelines
      Companies that operate in multiple markets must walk a fine line between enforcing brand guidelines and empowering markets to represent themselves authentically. Mars began this work by creating a central platform for its guidelines, a “one-stop-shop” for learning how to use color, messaging, and more.
      Leaving Room for Personalization
      Within these brand guidelines, employer brand teams in each of Mars’ markets have the flexibility to make campaigns their own. Brand guidelines dictate certain standards for social media messaging, but Mars’ employer brand leaders recognize that messaging from sales employees may sound different from engineering’s messaging. Bethmann and her team welcome those differences.

      To follow Kirsten Bethmann’s work in employer brand, connect with her on LinkedIn. For help building your EVP, the foundation of your employer brand, get in touch with us.
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      Crafting an EVP That Serves Multiple Brands

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      Some employer brand leaders know how difficult it can be to unify an entire brand under one employer value proposition. That’s the challenge LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group (RSG) faced in 2020.
      Under the leadership of Director for Employer Brand Shelley Jeffcoat, LexisNexis RSG launched an EVP that served each of its eight brands while helping them distinguish themselves as employers.
      Get Brand-Specific as Early as Possible
      As early as the research stage, Jeffcoat’s team was organizing data by brand. With help from an external research firm, LexisNexis RSG explored each brand’s target candidates and demographics, its competitors, its functions, and more.
      Then, when moving from the research stage to the analytics stage, Jeffcoat tagged her colleagues in marketing. Together, they created a unique tagline for each brand that echoed the overarching LexisNexis RSG EVP (“Explore more”) while painting a more specific picture of the individual brand (“Explore our passion for discovery”).
      Think Bigger Than Promotion
      The choice to equip each LexisNexis RSG sub-brand with its own EVP wasn’t simply marketing cleverness. Getting specific made the company more competitive as an employer and continues to impact the employee journey as well.
      In creating these flexible EVPs, “we’re defining our values and culture in a way that’s much easier for our candidates and employees to articulate,” Jeffcoat says. “This improves our competitive advantage as an employer.”
      Invest in Your Employee Advocates
      To generate internal momentum around brand advocacy, Jeffcoat knew she’d need to find employee advocates. She started her search with the talent acquisition team (a natural choice, as they were already skilled and experienced at representing the business to the public). But because of the company’s unique structure, Jeffcoat knew she couldn’t stop there; she’d need to pull in stakeholders from every brand and balance each brand’s representation.
      In an organization that houses so many brands and employs thousands, the best strategy is to “consult and empower,” than surrender control. In Jeffcoat’s words, “Trust the process!”

      To follow Shelley Jeffcoat’s work in employer brand, connect with her on LinkedIn. To identify the values and culture you want to create in your own company, get in touch.
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      How Royal Caribbean Group Navigates Employer Branding

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      “Adventure” isn’t just something Royal Caribbean Group offers its customers. It’s also a love shared by its employees, as well as the key to the brand’s exceptional success at engaging new and diverse talent.
      How do you find the perfect employee when you’re a company as intrepid as an international cruise line? Royal Caribbean Group’s Talent Marketing Manager, Thea Neal, has done it through practices like investing in team morale, practicing inclusion, taking a holistic view of the employee experience, and careful listening.
      The Challenge of Talent Marketing as a Cruise Line
      Building out an authentic employee value proposition for a single organization is difficult enough. It can be even harder when that organization houses six different brands, as is the case with Royal Caribbean Group. Employer brand leaders may encounter hesitancy, as Neal did, from more senior leaders who are wary of defining an EVP that may not feel relevant to all branches and levels.
      Invest in Morale
      To attract and retain the best talent, Royal Caribbean Group makes serious investments in its culture and employees’ well-being. Even during a pandemic, the company has found ways to preserve and adapt its office traditions, like happy hours (now virtual) and Halloween (a staff favorite).
      Practice Inclusion
      Prioritizing diversity and inclusion has helped Royal Caribbean Group attract employees from a range of backgrounds and identities. This has been a special focus of Neal’s team, which recruits talent from around the globe. Cultural context is always top-of-mind for Neal when formulating her employer brand strategy: “The employer brand that I put out in America needs to resonate just as well as the employer brand I put out in the Philippines or Indonesia,” she says.
      Consider the Whole Employee Journey
      Neal’s team frames the employee experience as a journey—in fact, the “Journey with us” tagline appears across Royal Caribbean Group’s careers site, social media accounts, and internal communications. This framing reflects the emphasis they place on supporting people throughout their time with the company, from candidate to alum, and not just on the recruitment process or the “sell.”
      Become a Better Listener
      Neal urges other employer brand leaders to listen to fellow employees as closely as possible, especially when their feedback disrupts your assumptions. “A lot of times, as employer brand folks, we have these rosy glasses on. Sometimes you need that real perspective from an employee to create something better, listen, and evolve,” Neal says.
      This approach to talent marketing has helped Royal Caribbean find perfect-fit candidates that join the family and stay for years (and voyages). These candidates-turned-colleagues share Neal’s love of seeing the world and helping others do the same. It’s a passion that unites the team, regardless of role; as Neal puts it, “Who doesn’t want to sell amazing memories and experiences?”

      To follow Thea Neal’s work in employer brand, connect with her on LinkedIn. For data-driven insights into your company that you can act on, get in touch. We can help you develop strategies for making real change.

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      A Strategic Approach to Employer Reputation Management

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      What makes your campaigns instantly recognizable as belonging to your brand? When your employees talk about your brand online (and they do), do you know how and where? Your answers to these questions paint a picture of your brand consistency, a crucial element of a unified employer brand.

      These are also the questions Kirsten Bethmann has been asking as Global Employer Reputation Lead for Mars, Incorporated. Mars has set an inspiring goal for itself: to become one of the most attractive employers in the world by 2025. Achieving this goal, Bethmann believes, requires a renewed focus on brand consistency.
      Why Brand Consistency Is So Important to Growth
      The journey toward greater employer brand consistency supports greater brand awareness—often the biggest ongoing talent challenge organizations face. Unless you’re a beloved consumer brand with widespread name recognition, your employer brand team is likely all too familiar with this struggle.
      Establishing a Shared Vision
      A clear employee value proposition is the cornerstone of a consistent employer brand. For Mars, that EVP is built on three pillars: people, purpose, and development. The employer brand team took this EVP development a step further by adapting the Mars statement of purpose (“The world we want tomorrow starts with how you do business today”) into a tagline: “Your tomorrow starts today,” which personalizes and transforms the Mars mission into a call to action for its employees.
      Standardizing Brand Guidelines
      Companies that operate in multiple markets must walk a fine line between enforcing brand guidelines and empowering markets to represent themselves authentically. Mars began this work by creating a central platform for its guidelines, a “one-stop-shop” for learning how to use color, messaging, and more.
      Leaving Room for Personalization
      Within these brand guidelines, employer brand teams in each of Mars’ markets have the flexibility to make campaigns their own. Brand guidelines dictate certain standards for social media messaging, but Mars’ employer brand leaders recognize that messaging from sales employees may sound different from engineering’s messaging. Bethmann and her team welcome those differences.
      To follow Kirsten Bethmann’s work in employer brand, connect with her on LinkedIn. For help building your EVP, the foundation of your employer brand, get in touch with us.

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      Creating an EVP That Serves Multiple Businesses

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      What if your brand isn’t a single organization but a family of several brands, each with its own priorities, competitors, and target candidates? That’s the challenge LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group (RSG) faced in 2020.
      Under the leadership of Director for Employer Brand Shelley Jeffcoat, the company launched an EVP that served each of its eight brands while helping them distinguish themselves as employers. To do this, Jeffcoat’s team needed a strategy as unique as their organization.
      Get Brand-Specific as Early as Possible
      As early as the research stage, Jeffcoat’s team was organizing data by brand. With help from an external research firm, LexisNexis RSG explored each brand’s target candidates and demographics, its competitors, its functions, and more.
      Think Bigger Than Promotion
      The choice to equip each LexisNexis RSG sub-brand with its own EVP wasn’t simply marketing cleverness. Getting specific made the company more competitive as an employer and continues to impact the employee journey as well.
      Empower Employees to Participate
      Before the EVP launch, it was challenging for employees to engage with brand advocacy. They lacked clear pathways to actions like social promotion, leaving Glassdoor reviews (LexisNexis RSG had multiple Glassdoor profiles), and helping prospective candidates get in touch (there were multiple Careers web pages).
      Invest in Your Employee Advocates
      To generate internal momentum around brand advocacy, Jeffcoat knew she’d need to find employee advocates. She started her search with the talent acquisition team (a natural choice, as they were already skilled and experienced at representing the business to the public). But because of the company’s unique structure, Jeffcoat knew she couldn’t stop there; she’d need to pull in stakeholders from every brand and balance each brand’s representation.

      To follow Shelley Jeffcoat’s work in employer brand, connect with her on LinkedIn. To identify the values and culture you want to create in your own company, get in touch.

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      Attracting Tech Talent in a New Location

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      When reaching out to a new talent market, your existing recruitment marketing strategy may not cut it. New markets bring new competitors, new biases, and new questions to answer with your messaging. How can leaders in recruitment marketing and employer branding do it? That’s what Appian and its Recruitment Marketing Strategist, Chris Fitzner, are figuring out.
      Appian, a US-based tech brand that offers an automation platform to businesses, recently acquired a small company in Seville, Spain. Rather than simply absorb the Seville team, Appian decided to grow its presence in Seville—“to capture that spirit there, and capture that culture,” as Fitzner puts it.
      Research Your New Talent Market
      Fitzner’s team started with the facts: They researched tech professionals in the Seville area to build data-centered profiles of who they needed to reach. Using LinkedIn’s Talent Insights platform, Appian identified the market’s main hitters, broken out by title, industry, and experience.
      Learn What You’re Up Against in Your New Market
      Appian’s approach to sketching out its growth challenges provides a useful framework for other teams hoping to enter new talent markets. First, using the list of major players they’d built when researching their new talent market, Fitzner’s team categorized their competitors: home-grown Seville companies, companies (like Appian) that had recently acquired Seville companies, and large consultancies that hire remote talent from Seville.
      Then, to understand their biggest recruitment hurdles, Fitzner’s team returned to their data, specifically location data. Their website analytics revealed almost no visits from local talent, and Appian’s only Seville-based LinkedIn engagement was from the local employees they’d just acquired.
      Build Your Recruitment Marketing Strategy
      When entering a new talent market, posting a job listing to Glassdoor or Indeed isn’t enough. “You have to get into where they’re actively looking,” Fitzner advises, which means devoting more attention to local job boards.
      “Who is Appian?” was still an obstacle for Appian’s recruiters on LinkedIn, so they began serving ads to targeted audiences in advance of reaching out via InMail, which earned them higher open rates.
      Adapt What You Already Know About Good Marketing
      When building a recruitment marketing strategy, innovation is great, but Fitzner cautions against reinventing the wheel, especially for those coming from a recruiting background. “There are already a lot of existing resources out there,” he says. “Look at existing marketing principles. Learn email marketing. Learn content marketing. Learn the basics of SEO. Learn how to establish a good PR/media program.”

      To follow Chris Fitzner’s work in employer branding, connect with him on LinkedIn. For more strategies and data-driven insights that you can act on to improve your company, get in touch.

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