Engagement starts now!
Why don’t companies engage immediately when embarking on an Employer Brand journey? Many organisations don’t consider strategic involvement of key stakeholders before it is too late. Those getting it right start with engagement from the very first touch point of the journey.
The global financial downturn we find ourselves in has a dramatic impact on most organisations priorities and focus. Many businesses are facing a situation with less revenue and are being forced to review all areas of the business to see where it would be possible to save money. Support functions not directly involved in sales or marketing activities like the HR and communication functions are often the place where people look for initiatives they consider a non-priority. HR and communication professionals are very likely to experience that their area is being reviewed and existing and planned projects and initiatives are at risk to being put on hold, scaled down or simply dismissed completely.
The level of engagement that senior stakeholders have with your initiative or project will have a big impact on the level of sponsorship and continued levels of funding you will receive. If your stakeholder groups have been highly involved and exposed to your initiative and project, they feel more ownership for it and have sufficient insight about the aim and the objectives to take the right decision about what needs to happen with its future. This helps overcome the tired old objection that HR and communication initiatives are deemed to be more of a ‘nice to have’ than ‘need to have’ and critical to the business success.
Employee Engagement is one of the most high-profiled topics in HR at the minute. However, because employees for many initiatives are the ‘end’ receiver of the outcome, ‘engagement’ seems to be something that finds its way into the project plan under ‘communication’ to all employees after the main part of the project has been completed. In reality, engagement needs to be something which is actively being worked into your planning before and during the project.
It needs to be invested in as a key lever for the project’s success.
Only considering ‘engagement’ as an end activity and in relation to just the employees is a missed opportunity. What you should do is consider your stakeholder group in its totality and think about how to engage them from the outset.
When your initiative or project is of a strategic nature like reputation and employer brand management the stakeholder group to consider in addition to your employees are colleagues in other departments (locally and globally), the management board and external stakeholders like scarce talent/skills groups and in some cases investors, communities and partners to mention a few.
Every interaction with these different stakeholder groups is an engagement opportunity that should be considered, planned and maximised throughout the project.
When you think about engagement in these terms, a traditional communication plan suddenly becomes redundant. A comprehensive engagement plan considering all the above stakeholder groups and working on more than one level will be much more relevant. Communicating progress to all stakeholder groups (keeping them in the loop) being the obvious one. However, working on how to involve the stakeholder groups actively in all stages, generating the buy-in and ownership along the way apparently for a lot of organisations being the less obvious one.
In times of change you don’t get many chances to get things right. Resources are scarce and the commitment to people related initiatives and projects can be limited. However, if you have been actively engaging your stakeholder groups from the beginning, then this is the key to the survival and success of your project.
Engagement starts now!
Tags: employer branding, engagement
