Tài liệu Corporate Reputations, Branding and People Management 18 doc

154 Corporate Reputations, Branding and People Management efforts with the ‘business’ managers to build high levels of employee engagement and a strong employer brand. Such has been their contribu- tion to the creation of the external brand image since 1997 and the devel- opment of a strong internal identity, that they won a prestigious HR Excellence award in 2001 for the company with the most innovative HR practices. The key driver for HR’s contribution to the establishment of such a corporate reputation has been the need to recruit and retain talented people, particularly the highly paid investment fund managers who are at the core of the business and acknowledged to be the most important competitive differentiator between investment houses. These people are the equivalent of the stars in Premier League soccer or men and women’s professional tennis and can earn salaries to match. Recruiting, engaging and retaining these 150 ‘stars’, and the 500 or more people that support them, has been a critical issue, especially since Standard Life is committed to its Edinburgh base, outside of the main labour mar- ket in London. Sitting alongside this ‘talent management’ driver has been the desire of the company to create a more ‘professional’, team- based culture, based on ‘adult’ relationships and high levels of trust, instead of the previously hierarchical culture which they inherited from their mutual assurance heritage. So, for example, the previous 20-graded jobs structure has been eliminated, as has payment for overtime and detailed job descriptions and evaluations. These have been replaced with an output and high trust regime in which there is very little close monitoring of work but individualized pay, in which the variable pay elem- ent ranges from 15% of base salary for junior administrative staff to 200% for the investment fund managers. The HR team has worked with business colleagues in investment and marketing since 1997 to create a strong ‘internal’ or ‘employer’ brand, which is treated as the key to matching client experiences and expect- ations with the company’s promotional and advertising strategy and its external image. This began with focus group interviews with customers on determining the external brand values, which were fed back to employees in numerous workshops to help them understand how clients saw the organization, how they wanted to see it and what employees would need to do differently to support the brand. Early on in this process, they realized that achieving this aim would require a heavy invest- ment in promoting ‘engagement’, which they defined in terms of loyalty and psychological commitment to the company. Following some early Chapter 4 The quality of individual employment relationships 155 investigative work, they commissioned the Gallup organization to con- duct an investigation into the levels of engagement amongst employees. A survey tool called Q12 was amended by the HR team to include eight of their own questions, which subsequently became known as Q20 internally and has been the principal means of measuring progress in employee engagement since 1998. This measure has the added advantage of allow- ing the company to benchmark its employees against other organizations in financial services and against similar companies worldwide. Since the first survey Standard Life have shown a steady improvement in those employees defined as ‘actively engaged’ from 12% in December 1999 to 33% in February 2003, with those defined as ‘actively disengaged’ declin- ing from 14% to 7% over the same period. According to Gallup external benchmarking figures for the financial services industry, this has moved Standard Life Investments from around the 50 percentile to the top quartile of companies in terms of employee engagement. In addition, the company reduced turnover levels from 12% in 1999 to 5% in 2002, and calculated they have saved £0.5 million. Senior HR staff saw these measurements as a critical element in help- ing them make their case for continued inclusion in the corporate reputation process with business managers who are used to financial measurement. However, these measures are only the starting point in the conversation about how to develop further the team-based culture and individuals, all of whom undergo a ‘strength-finder’ career development review and a 360 degree appraisal. HR staff stressed the importance of integrating the internal and external image of the organization in these interviews and the role of continuous communication in developing a positive corporate reputation. They also stressed the importance of senior management involvement in this process, with Sandy Crombie, the head of Standard Life Investments in 1998 and now CEO of the main board of Standard Life, taking an active role in the external and internal brand- building process. Conclusions To bring this chapter to a conclusion, we have tried to set out a necessarily more complex view of what it takes to connect people to their organizations, hopefully in a readable way. This is best 156 Corporate Reputations, Branding and People Management summarized by the processes and formulas in Figure 4.1. In our view, organizations that really want to understand and manage the quality of individual employment relations to create greater organizational identification and positive outcomes such as cus- tomer loyalty, positive reputations and brands need to adopt a more evidence-based approach to HR (Pfeffer, 2005). This evi- dence base may need to go beyond the current fashion for engagement surveys, which are a rather blunt, but nevertheless useful, instrument for tapping emotions, understanding and behaviours in employment. For example, in our case, Standard Life Investments have, wisely in our opinion, added additional questions to the standard engagement survey. However, they, like many organizations, may not have gone far enough. Our main recommendation from this chapter is that organiza- tions wanting to know about their employees and wanting to engage in more sophisticated HR practices, such as segmentation and high performance work practices (see Chapter 5), need to understand the nature and variation of psychological contracts in their organizations, the key individual–organizational linkages of identification, internalization, psychological ownership and con- tinuance commitment, and the levels of engagement behaviours claimed by employees in their day-to-day work. This need not involve enormous questionnaires that employees are reluctant to complete because of being over-surveyed, but will necessarily be longer than the typical, 12-question engagement survey. Good examples of standard questionnaires used to identify the state of psychological contracts are contained in the book by Conway and Briner (2005). 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As we have already pointed out, however, this is not a one-way process. Just as HR can drive reputations, brands and performance, in turn, these outcomes help attract and retain talented people, one of the major challenges facing most organizations (see Figure 5.1). What people on the inside think about organizational identity and image is informed by how they think relevant outsiders see them, for example from the views of professional colleagues, potential employees, the financial press, customers, CSR ratings, environ- mental activists and the public at large. So, employees’ views of positive perceptions are likely to influence their willingness to remain with the company; furthermore, talented people are The connections between HR drivers, however, and these other variables are not as clear-cut as many of the more pre- scriptive HR texts would have you believe, nor as simple as Figure 5.1 would imply. How HR fast-forwards into individual employment relations and interpenetrates with corporate strat- egy is a rather more complex process; it is not just a question of aligning HR with the business strategy and pulling the right levers to generate positive psychological contracts and engaged employees. If life were so easy, there would be little point in writing yet another ‘how to’ book on the subject, since the mar- ket is awash with them. Most of these, researched and written with varying degrees of sophistication, are of the ‘one-best-way’ variety, with a basic but compelling message (not always intended but often read as such): search for best practices among ‘best- in-class’ firms on a range of HR variables, benchmark yourself against these firms and implement those practices that fit your needs, sometimes in a ‘pick-’n-mix’ fashion. Some of these works are naïve in the extreme; others are exceptionally good. We would include in the good category Jeff Pfeffer’s (1998, 162 Corporate Reputations, Branding and People Management Corporate identity Corporate leadership and vision HR competence and credibility Communications and employer branding Quality of individual employment relations and behaviours Corporate strategy HR strategies and talent management Figure 5.1 Linking HR and talent management to strategy and the quality of individual employment relations. attracted by high performing and reputable companies, one of the reasons underlying an employer of choice strategy (see Chapter 7). 2005) works, discussed later in this chapter, especially in provid- ing ‘evidence-based’ practices and in simplifying and commu- nicating complex realities. The very idea of best practices, however, has been roundly crit- icized by writers and practitioners who argue that ‘context mat- ters’. This has resulted in another school of thought in strategic HRM, which focuses on the ‘fit’ between bundles of practices and organizational contexts. This ‘it-all-depends-on-the strategic-envi- ronment’ approach is based on a few simple ideas. The first is that HR has to address the key strategic drivers of an organiza- tion, though these may vary according to competitive circum- stances. The second is that there is no sustainable competitive advantage in doing what everyone else is doing, especially if you are one of the late-comers. The third is that there is little sense in treating all employees the same, in terms of their added value to an organization’s key strategic drivers, their abilities and what they want from work. These are the messages of a number of influential books and articles, including one by Huselid et al. (2005), which we shall also examine in this chapter and when dis- cussing segmentation approaches to people management and HR in Chapter 6. As important as the best practice/best fit debate is for our understanding of HR, reputations and brands, under-girding it is another level of analysis with even more profound conse- quences for HR and its connections to outcomes, ethics and change models. To paraphrase the title in the excellent stra- tegic management book by Richard Whittington (2001), we really should be asking the questions: ‘what is HR strategy and does it really matter to reputation management and brand perform- ance?’. The answers, according to Whittington, in his more general discussion of business strategy, depend on what the outcomes are/should be and how we should/do go about devising and implementing such strategies (see also Legge, 2004, who also adopted Whittington’s model to explain HRM). Concerning the first of these questions on the outcomes of strategy – the goals to which strategy is (or should be) directed – we have to ask ourselves: are we trying to achieve a unitary goal such as increased shareholder value, or are we looking to balance this with other outcomes such as public good, good governance and a socially and environmentally responsible reputation Chapter 5 Four lenses on HR strategy and the employment relationship 163 . Corporate Reputations, Branding and People Management Corporate identity Corporate leadership and vision HR competence and credibility Communications and. attachment 158 Corporate Reputations, Branding and People Management to the local subsidiary and the global organization, International Journal of Human Resource Management,