You’ve worked hard on your employer brand. You’ve got a robustly and topically researched employee value proposition. The brand articulations look consistent and aspirational – they might even be winning you awards. You’re able to segment your messaging across different professional talent pools and even different international locations. Your MI is suggesting that you’re reducing cost per hire, time to hire, whilst increasing advocacy and the size and diversity of your recruitment audiences.
Not only that, your employer brand is acting as an engagement and alignment driver as much as a resourcing magnet. Congratulations, you are a true employer branding ninja.
That’s great, but how do you really know how strong your employer brand is? It looks good, feels good, but how to put it to the test?
You get a pretty strong indication when something unpleasant hits the ventilator.
The last few days might not be considered to have been overly propitious for insurer Aviva. Just seven days ago, the company made unwanted headlines by sacking around 1,300 of its employees via email. Unfortunate, you might think, but certainly not unheard of in today’s rocky financial services waters. However, the email proved to be a mistake, and not one designed to benefit the organisation’s carefully honed employer brand and tireless engagement activities. The email, asking employees to hand over company property and security passes on their way out of the building was intended not for the entire employee base, as happened, but for just one errant individual. Minutes later, presumably 1,299 further emails went out apologising for the initial 1,300.
This unfortunate PR experience was followed by another later in the week, as PIRC (Pensions and Investment Research Consultants) went public in urging investors to vote against Aviva’s remuneration report which included a generous, very generous, £4.25m welcome to incoming UK CEO, Trevor Matthews. As a result of the pressure, the board were forced into a u-turn around senior level pay and benefits.
This then, for me, is the test of Aviva’s employer brand. There is little doubt that internal engagement will have been impacted by mass mistaken email sackings and ‘excessive’ remuneration at senior levels. At the same time, how do candidates currently going through the application process with the insurer respond? Does this feel like a credible employer with whom to entrust their career? Or does the organisation seem too accident prone and not the sort of employer on which to take a career risk given the cautious economic times? This will depend on the corporate goodwill built up, in part, by the organisation’s investment in its employer brand. For organisations with a great employer brand, these candidates and employees may well extend Aviva the benefit of the doubt. If not, then an organisation whose share price has fallen by more than 25% in the last year, as is the case here, may be about to experience further pain.
The organisation’s website suggests that Aviva recognises its employees for who they are and what they contribute. Whether this continues to be mutual in the light of the last week will depend, to a large degree, on how robust and embracing Aviva’s employer branding investment has been to date. A true test, then, for Aviva’s employer brand.
Getting to the heart of your employee mindset 
Yes, your brand is not your own. It's the sum total of how others see you. I think in the digital age, this is more difficult to control than ever before. And that's without the kind of PR shambles you describe above.
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Interesting as always Neil. I wonder if the 'errant' employee had had previous communications in person before being shown the door via email. Because if not, even a single use of email to terminate someone's employment is one too many!
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This, in common parlance, is now known as a latter day 'Phil Collins' divorce: no whispering in ears before you're f*cked / fired, just employment of technology. It's cowardly – not to mention – brand-suicide behaviour. And for once, the advertising is a true representation of the company it promotes, since I seem to recall that their latest features a great big pile of shit.
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