Page 342 - How America's Best Places to Work Inspire Extra Effort in Extraordinary Times

Becoming a More Engaged Workplace C329

senting a desired image as an employer. One retail chain advertised
itself as “the place to fast-track your career,” but new recruits real-
ized within a few months that the company could not deliver on that
promise and that their career advancement would be much slower
than anticipated. The result: disillusionment, disengagement, and
much higher-than-average first-year turnover.

Before You Brand: A Reality Check
The retail chain noted above could have avoided this result by not skip-
ping the reality-check phase of employer branding, which consists of:

Step 1. Assessing the reality about how both the outside world,
including targeted recruits, and your current workforce see your
organization as a place to work.

Step 2. Getting clear about the kinds of talent you will need to
achieve your business objectives.

Step 3. Understanding the engagement drivers that most attract
and retain the people you need.

Step 4. Working to shape your culture and put in place the kinds
of management practices that will enable you to offer an “em-
ployment value proposition” that is authentic and will truly meet
the needs of your employees and prospective hires.

And finally . . .

Step 5. Advertising and publicizing the genuine brand you have
built from the inside out.

The key here is that step 5 must come only after you have success-
fully completed steps 1 through 4 (you may have already gone through
steps 1 through 4 in a less formal, more intuitive way, as many employers