Building the HR Brand through People Analytics
Here's a funny story for those who are new here and might not know this: I fell into HR by accident. I went to school for marketing and sales and was promised CRM-related projects when I first joined the consulting industry. After sitting on the bench for eight weeks straight without a project, I was offered a change management analyst role and took that on because I didn’t want to be fired from my first job. Fast forward 12+ years, and voila! I can say that the universe has a quirky way of working itself out.
I share this because, besides consuming copious amounts of people and culture content, I watch for marketing and branding content as they tend to dive deeper into human motivation and the human psyche. This article is inspired by a branding article in the Jan/Feb 2024 HBR titled The Right Way to Build Your Brand.
You can read the article through the link above, but for those needing a TLDR, the most effective brand advertising that attracts new customers and converts them into loyal repeaters offers memorable, valuable, and deliverable promises to the customers.
Sounds intuitive, right? So why haven’t we used the same premise in building the brand for HR through People Analytics?
Using what the research has found to be the most attractive features of a brand promise to customers, I’m going to put an HR lens on it:
The Promise Needs to be Memorable
It must be simple, and it must stick. Think about your favorite brand. Do you remember them because of their 5+ values and 10+ mission statements? Probably not. You remember them because brands like Coke promise to be enjoyable, Red Bull promises to give you wings, and MasterCard promises to cover “everything else” in your life.
So, why do HR functions still expect their executive teams and workforce to read the 10+ pages of mission, vision, value statements, and strategies? When McDonald’s rolled out their career path programs, they promised their workforce, “Your career path is yours to own, but you don’t walk it alone.” These 13 words convey an idea that some HR teams spend pages and slides trying to explain. As consumers, we all know that simple ideas stick better; it might be time for us to apply that to the HR world.
Why do you need People Analytics? Simply put, you won’t know what is attractive to your audience until you understand their values and motivations. Consider the amount of research advertising firms conduct with the broad consumer base to draw the insights they need. As HR, you need the help of your People Analytics team to research, plow through data, and draw insights from your workforce (and different segments of it) so you know where to target best and how to make it memorable to each audience base.
The Promise Needs to be Valuable
Your audience must want what the promise offers.
This aspect brings up some of my biggest pet peeves with how we unquestioningly build and launch HR programs in some organizations today. For some reason, we think “market comparable = we should do it.” Just because the market offers 401K programs, if your workforce is primarily new grads, 401K might not be their priority right now. Paying off their student loans might be more pertinent. It is the same thing with parental/caregiver leave programs. If the market average is 12 weeks, then some teams will believe 12 weeks is good enough. Given that, do we need to start a quarter-long study on why the organization cannot attract or retain female workers to upkeep their DEI promise?
Valuable promises take time to understand, refine, and tweak. Every organization’s workforce is different, so copying and pasting programs doesn’t always yield the fantastic results we hope for.
Why do you need People Analytics? There are three reasons:
You need to understand your workforce and segment them to appreciate what is valuable to your demographics
Value changes over time, so resources are needed to measure the efficacy of your programs and look at patterns to make sure the program is still delivering its intended purposes
Someone needs to help you identify future roadmap programs and initiatives with facts and data so HR can stay a step ahead of its workforce’s evolutions
The Promise Needs to be Deliverable
A customer promise is a guarantee. The moment a brand breaks that promise, they have essentially broken their customers’ trust.
Take that concept and apply it to HR. Think about the number of times an organization may have promised grand changes and excellent programs, only to deliver short of expectations and with many exceptions around the qualifications its workforce must meet for the program. Are we still wondering why the employee/employer trust equation is broken?
Why do you need People Analytics? This is where People Analytics can truly help tie HR to the business. Your analytics team should be able to advise you on:
The realistic expectations of your audience. Sometimes, small incremental changes go a long way. HR doesn’t have to launch everything as giant multi-year programs. The data will help you pinpoint what is the most important to your workforce and model out the incremental sentiment and associated financial changes of your program
The near-real-time feedback and ROI on the program so you can pivot and tweak as needed instead of launching new initiatives on a hope and a prayer
Proactively setting up KPI/ROI tracking before the program launches so all relevant data is captured for future analysis and business cases to the executive teams
If there is one thing to take away from this, then it is that HR shouldn’t only think about how it needs to function like a business unit; it also needs to think about its brand in the organization as a business. The simplest way to get there is with its People Analytics teams.