chapter four Putting Employees First

Transcription

1 chapter four Putting Employees First Libby Sartain Business Advisor and Former VP, EVP-HR, Yahoo! And Southwest Airlines Libby Sartain served as head of Human Resources at Southwest Airlines and Yahoo! Both companies made the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work for in America list during her tenure. She is also the co-author, along with Mark Schumann, of Brand from the Inside (2006) and Brand for Talent (2009). Since 2008, Libby has worked as an independent HR advisor and consultant, helping HR and Marketing executives to create and implement successful employer brands. Libby currently serves on the Boards of Directors of Peets Coffee & Tea, Inc. and ManpowerGroup, Inc. With a 30-year career in Human Resources, Libby Sartain knows a lot about HR. Along the way, she s learned a lot about Marketing as well. Like others we interviewed for this book, Libby defines brand as what you stand for in the big picture. It s a big idea. To Libby, brand is also about the promises you make. When it comes to brand, Libby sees two sides of a coin. I look at brand as having two aspects. I look at the external, consumer or corporate brand as one side of branding; and then I look at the internal brand or employer brand as the other side of branding, Libby explained. When you look at the consumer or the external brand, you re looking for what you stand for as a company and what you stand for as a product. If you look inside, at your internal brand, you re looking at what do you stand for as employer. On the outside, Pat Nazemetz and Will Ruch 38

2 HR and Marketing Power Partners you make a promise to your customers or consumers; it depends on what your business is all about. On the inside, you make a promise to the people who do work for you, whether they re employees or in some other kind of relationship that they perform work for your customers. Here s what may come as a surprise to most Marketing people: Libby is adamant that the internal, employer brand must come first. You have to put the internal customer first that s the number-one lesson I learned at Southwest Airlines, Libby explained. If you think that the person who works here is customer No. 1, and the person who buys our goods and services is customer No. 2, and you live that way every day as if it s a way of life, you ll win. The brand on the outside is what you stand for and what you promise to deliver to Pat Nazemetz and Will Ruch 39

3 customers. The brand on the inside is what you deliver to employees so they can deliver on that brand promise to the customers. To Libby, it s a straightforward case of cause and effect. When you re branding outside, you come up with what you stand for and what you promise to customers. Then you have to back into it. If you want to make this promise to customers, do you have the right people inside, the right processes, the right infrastructure and the right experience for your people to deliver on that promise outside? The brand from the inside is all about the employer brand. The reason you brand from the inside with an employer brand is so that you can brand from the outside with your consumer brand. What happens on the outside can t happen unless it happens on the inside first. Marketing departments are beginning to realize the critical role employees play. As Libby explained, They can create words and feelings and big ideas and concepts, but the company cannot deliver on it unless everyone who works there or touches the customer in some way understands it, is aligned with it, has internalized it or, the best situation, becomes an ambassador for what the company does. Rich Floersch, the CHRO at McDonald s, and Dean Barrett, his partner and Global Marketing Officer, absolutely get it. They understand that the work they do at headquarters doesn t matter unless front-line employees internalize it. Their mantra is: It doesn t happen till it happens at the restaurant. (For more on the McDonald s story, see page 16.) Pat Nazemetz and Will Ruch 40

4 HR and Marketing Power Partners It Takes a Team When Libby was head of HR at Southwest Airlines, one of her peers was the head of Marketing. The vice president to whom they both reported brought them together and issued a challenge. When Marketing comes out with their attempt to tell employees how to behave and what to do and how to deliver on the brand promise, it sounds like a Marketing campaign. And employees roll their eyes with skepticism, the VP said. When HR comes out with it, it sounds like the latest HR program of the month. And if anything, employees are even more skeptical. Can the two of you figure out a way to make this brand just a natural way of life for the people who work here? CHROs and CMOs should be best buddies in the organization. That challenge started Libby and her Marketing partner on the road to employer branding. They approached their task by asking themselves a series of questions: What if we were marketing the experience of working at Southwest Airlines as if it were a product? How would we sell it? How would we describe it? How would we talk about what it feels like to work here? Pat Nazemetz and Will Ruch 41

5 For Libby, employer brand encompasses the whole experience of working for an organization. Each phase and each stage should be treated with the same amount of forethought, planning, process and structure as the customer experience. Nirvana would be if you took every employee experience, every touchpoint, and you branded that experience and you created a consistent experience throughout, Libby said. Right now, she believes that many companies should be focusing on what is probably the most neglected part of the employee life cycle: how to help people depart in a way that helps them feel good about themselves and tell a good story about their experience at the company. At the time, Libby and her Marketing partner at Southwest Airlines thought that they were the first company to come up with branding from the inside out or employer branding. It was an idea whose time had come, however, and they later discovered that other companies had independently started working on the same concept. Based on her experience at both Southwest and Yahoo!, and working with her co-author Mark Schumann, Libby s perfected an operational definition of employer brand that she continues to use in her consulting work: How a business builds and packages its identity, origins and values, and what it promises to deliver to emotionally connect employees so that they, in turn, deliver what the business promises to customers. Libby establishes some prerequisites before agreeing to work with prospective clients or startups. She knows what it takes to build and Pat Nazemetz and Will Ruch 42

6 HR and Marketing Power Partners launch a successful employer brand. You ve got to have HR, Marketing and Corporate Communications, as well as the head of Operations, the individual responsible for customer-facing people. You ve got to have them all in the same room, working on it together, Libby said. It s never going to succeed if they don t have a collaborative effort involving the whole company, including the CEO. If he or she isn t behind doing this, it s not going to happen. Brand and Talent The thesis of Libby s second book is that brand and talent are related. Talent is attracted to the best brands, she explained. The best brands are going to have the best talent because people who really understand a brand, and a brand that s done a very good job of stating what they stand for, who they are and what they promise to customers, can reach out and appeal to potential recruits. Brand can be a magnet for the talent that will deliver on the brand promise. In fact, Libby and Mark Schumann set out to write Brand for Talent because they thought that a lot of people were approaching brand in the wrong way. They were saying, We need talent. Let s come up with an employer brand to advertise to our potential talent. What we were saying is that you have to have the internal brand first. Before you reach out, you have to know who you are and what you stand for, Libby said. Once that internal brand is out there, you can use your marketing tools to reach out to the talent segment you want to bring into the company Pat Nazemetz and Will Ruch 43

7 Libby pointed out that Gen Y employees, the Millennials, are highly attuned to the concept of brand. Many of them are looking for what she calls a Facebook- or LinkedIn-worthy job something that will give them bragging rights with their friends and at reunions. She goes on to say that the top talent will not affiliate with a company unless the brand says something about their own brand. They understand that where they work says something about them. There are 20 or 30 companies that maybe have that panache. But other companies should be creating that panache around what it s like to work there. Some Recommendations Based on her experiences, Libby has some suggestions for developing talent within the HR function, particularly preparing HR leaders of the future. We ve specialized so much in the last 20 years that we have a lot of very deep subject matter experts in comp or talent management. But to run an HR function, you have to know it all. My advice is to move people across the different specialties throughout their careers. Libby recommends that HR leaders set up a structure that facilitates that kind of movement. Development isn t limited to HR specialties; HR people should develop skills and knowledge beyond the function. It s more important than ever that HR people have a business background to do their role, Libby said. She went on the highlight the importance of Marketing. If you find yourself going into HR, that s another skill you ll need. An HR person is more or less an internal marketing person when it comes to the strategic elements of the job and selling the employer as a place to work Pat Nazemetz and Will Ruch 44

8 HR and Marketing Power Partners And for CHROs, Libby offers this Texas-blunt, but effective bit of advice: I think that chief human resource officers need to attach themselves at the hip with their CMOs, and they should be the best buddies in the organization. In the past, we operated in silos, and we can t do our best work unless we do it together Pat Nazemetz and Will Ruch 45

9 Ask the Partners Q: I think one of the biggest issues out there, when it comes to the work of employer branding, is how do we measure success? Marketing has all kinds of tools where they measure brand valuations, top brand identification there are several well-accepted tools. And HR doesn t have those tools yet. What are the top employer brands? How do they deliver on that corporate or consumer brand promise? A: Libby is absolutely right measuring the success of an employer brand and how well a company manages it is a huge issue. So we consulted with the best expert we could find: Simon Barrow, founder and chairman of the firm that originated the employer branding approach. To share Simon s expertise with the broadest audience, we ve dedicated a chapter to his response. It starts on page Pat Nazemetz and Will Ruch 46