The Steer (Feb): A thought piece from Ginni Lisk
Fail to prepare…
By Ginni Lisk, Ex-VP of People & Founder @ CultureClimate
Fail to Prepare…and, well, we all know the rest of the adage!
What we don’t seem to all know is whether it is a relevant adage to be using at the moment. Aside from ‘fail to prepare, prepare to fail’ being a clichéd phrase, preparation is not the mode companies are in; we’re all just reacting, coping and focusing on immediate-term decision making, right?
Perhaps... It is however a fact that plenty of companies have faced scrutiny for the treatment of their employees in the midst of reacting, coping and focusing on the immediate-term. What's really interesting is the presence of any debate about whether that scrutiny is deserved or not.
Actions Speak Louder Than Words
My Linkedin feed is a mix of stories of periods of sustained unemployment as a result of being suddenly fired (often as an apparent high performer, and from a busy job that certainly didn’t feel redundant) juxtaposed against founders doing ‘hopes and prayers’ announcements.
And for those who are in the ‘lucky’ position to have been spared from the list of job cuts, the extra workload, survivor's guilt and anxiety over their own job security is ignored. Instead the advice is for those who remain gainfully employed to cover more surface area (even if their skill is specialist) take on extra work (even if they’re already teetering on the edge of burnout) and make sure their impression management game is on fire.
It’s bleak for all involved and the belief that a company would or should sail through that unscrutinised, is surely only one of two things; blissful ignorance or massive arrogance… and either ain’t great!
When it comes to the commercial narrative, there is open discussion of the inflection point we’ve reached.
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Now is not the time to diversify or get creative with nice-to-haves, or to push ROI on buyers or to invest in growth tactics that have delayed impact, now is about nailing the core with a focus on stickiness, and ‘cost of inaction’ becoming the primary sales tactic.
I’m left wondering…
When is a company’s culture and the treatment of its employees going to finally be considered ‘core’?
When is the ‘stickiness’ of a company’s employer brand going to be measured against the employee value proposition (EVP) actually experienced internally?
When is the responsibility for answering those questions going to be addressed by anybody other than the People team? (Employees are still looking for these questions to be answered, whether or not you’ve just fired those with the relevant expertise)
Think I’m just another ‘snowflake HR person’ demonstrating an inability to cope with the reality of business in a recession? Sure, sure. Then, if all the hypocrisy has to be highlighted via something commercial, answer me this…
How many companies are applying the lens that they’re asking their customers to adopt in their buying decisions, to their own decision making?
The (Human) Cost of (Your Own) Inaction
The problem with short-termism is that the short-term comes and goes… How agile a company has been in reacting and coping is hopefully a cause for celebration (although likely only for a few people at the upper tiers of a company’s ownership and organisational hierarchy) however, that immediate response will need to be nothing short of a miracle to successfully pave over some of the deeper, structural weaknesses that have been evidenced - without a shadow of doubt - in the process of being so agile.
Your company’s agility isn’t fixing the cavernous cracks that have formed in the foundations of your culture.
There are legitimate financial reasons for headcount reduction and cost-cutting initiatives. That legitimacy doesn’t make the decisions any less difficult, or their impact any ‘easier’ to handle. But that’s just a basic observation - and this People professional is tired of basic observations being accepted as excuses.
When a company says ‘...there is no easy (read: nice) way to do this’ and then does the easiest (read: laziest) job of whatever ‘it’ may be, whether the sentiment is meaningful is entirely irrelevant. The actions speak louder than the words and your compassion looks fake.
Brands take time to build, and to rebuild after they’ve taken a hammering.
Companies must act to get ahead of the curve, or the proof of their inaction will be in the proverbial pudding, soon enough.
EVP & Employer Brand
Now is the right time to be thinking about EVP and Employer Brand and to investigate the relationship between the two certainly related, but crucially different concepts.
There is an opportunity to take a damaged employer brand and use a time of slower growth to polish it to a shine.
Even better, there is an opportunity to take a poor EVP and correct it so that your employer brand isn’t, well, a very shiny bag of lies.
It may feel at a time of mass layoffs that you can excuse yourself for cutting EVP corners and for getting lazy with employer brand (the theory being that there is a tonne of people on the job market and so, the power dynamic is pro-employer, and so we’ll focus on that fluffy people & culture stuff when times are good again.)
I say now is the right time to get humble, drop the excuses, look in the mirror and ask this question: has our recent behaviour clearly and emphatically aligned with our company's values and mission? If the answer is no… you have an employer brand problem.
The size and scale of the problem depends in part on the state of a Glassdoor profile, but mainly on the observations and feelings of the people who were retained, who know the truth and know just how much of a gap exists between what the company says and what the company does.
There will come a time when companies are returning to hiring. And I stand by this article’s title…
If you’re not thinking about your employer brand then you’re failing to prepare, and as I said up top, we all know what that means!
Ginni Lisk - Ex-VP of People & Founder @ CultureClimate