Mrs Harrison and I took a spur-of-the-moment city break in Amsterdam last week. Having only been there on business previously, I struggle to sing the city’s praises sufficiently. There’s beauty, there’s energy, there’s positivity and there’s an awful lot of bikes. And canals. I think more bikes than canals, but it’s pretty close. As a wonderful weekend drew to a close, we began, however, to sense impending disaster. Our Easyjet flight was delayed and then delayed some more. Other Easyjet flights were suffering similar fates. With stunning predictability, an hour and a half after the flight was scheduled to leave, the airline decided to cancel it altogether.
And here’s the nub of the story. Every customer-facing organisation will encounter challenges, issues and calamities. Be they mechanical, attitudinal, cultural, you name it. It will happen.
It’s all about the response.
And Easyjet’s? Not so great.
‘Flight cancelled’ popping up on the departure board turned out to be the sole indication of what was happening. As to next steps, that was rather up to individual customer interpretation. Several flights worth of, by now somewhat vexed, would-be passengers went in search of an Easyjet desk, person, uniform, anything. Largely without obvious signs of success.
Schipol isn’t the largest airport in the world, but it’s sufficiently capacious in which to get lost and irritated. Finally, and if hearts hadn’t sunk entirely by this stage, they plummeted vertiginously on being greeted by a queue several hundred customers long.
Cutting to the chase, flights do get cancelled – and any number of excuses were bouncing around by this stage – but it’s an airline’s response that we remember. Easyjet’s? To not communicate, to leave it up to passengers to sort their own alternative travel and accommodation out and to leave two young, ill-equipped reps to handle the ire of an awful lot of deeply unimpressed travellers.
It wasn’t the only example of a brand compounding an unfortunate situation with a response that only added to the reputational damage over the same weekend.
The UEFA Champions League final is the pinnacle of the club game in football. This year, two giants of the game, in Real Madrid and Liverpool, reached the final. Two teams with global reach, history and brand. It was a final watched by a staggering 380m around the world.
And those 380m people witnessed drama, spectacle, excellence and two mistakes of unimaginable woefulness.
Liverpool in attack are fast, fluid and free-flowing. In goal and defence, the picture is less convincing. Sure enough, their keeper, Loris Karius, who has previous, made two errors likely to follow him around for the rest of his career. A career likely to unfold away from Liverpool, it would appear.
At the end of the game, the cameras zoomed in on a by-now distraught Karius. He, his team and close to half a billion people were all too aware of the magnitude of what had just taken place and his contribution to this. He clearly needed consoling – and indeed, that’s what transpired. However, the people commiserating and supporting him at the end of the game were Real Madrid players, not his own team mates or his manager.
Much of the Liverpool brand is aligned to the song and lyrics of the song, ‘You’ll never walk alone’. The song communicates a feeling of togetherness and unity – particularly relevant across a much-beleaguered city.
Liverpool, having played well but come up ultimately short, compounded the result by effectively abandoning their stricken goalkeeper. He was, indeed, walking alone in the aftermath of the game.
But brands often do respond appropriately to challenging situations, creating positive reputational traction.
Two very brief examples.
The US comedienne, Roseanne Barr was all over the media earlier this week, making some fairly appalling and racially motivated comments about Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Barack Obama. In the face of near-universal condemnation, Barr attempted to blame her late-night tweeting on the medication she was taking.
Very speedily, Sanofi, the makers of said medication, Ambien, the insomnia treatment, were quick to post their response – “While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects, racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication.”
Elegant, dignified, responsive and full of purpose. With one well-crafted tweet, Sanofi has turned around potential association with an ugly racial outburst and created positive brand equity.
Another example of an organisation responding quickly, with personality and charm, and positively impacting its brand is, perhaps improbably, Poundland.
In the face of criticism around its revised (other adjectives have been used) timetable, Thameslink drew comparisons with one of Poundland’s products – “Very sorry. Appreciate at the moment the service is less Ferrero Rocher and more Poundland cooking chocolate.”
The retail chain was not about to take this lying down and their response was both forceful – citing a twitchy legal team – and not without charm. Accusing Thameslink of being ‘off the rails’, Poundland contrasted its ability to deliver customer service to 8m people a week with those services typically provided by train operating companies.
Whereas Thameslink’s efforts had the effect of continuing to dig when finding oneself at the bottom of a deep hole, Poundland were the clear winners. Interestingly, they chose too to focus on the efforts of their people in delivering some exceptional examples of service, despite, in one example, of the entire flooding of their Welshpool store.
So, what are the learnings for talent acquisition?
That wherever organisations are in the lifecycle of their employer brand, they never arrive. They should never stop, never consider the job done. Their brand is always being impacted by external events, competitor activity, internal performance levels, brand ambassadors. By arrivals and departures. Maybe not so much of the latter in Easyjet’s case, perhaps.
An employer brand is organic, is always in motion, always in play, always under the microscope.
Take Glassdoor/Indeed – it has become a key influencer of all organisations’ employer brands. According to their own research, 65% of Glassdoor users feel that their perception of an organisation is positively impacted when they see an employer respond to a review. Similarly, the same piece of research suggests that 74% of the employer comparison site’s users are more likely to apply for a role if they feel that an organisation is actively managing its employer brand.
Top of the pile in this regard, according to Glassdoor, is PepsiCo. For 3,800 reviews posted on the site about the employer, PepsiCo has posted no less than 1,300 responses to such comments. All this, too, with an already impressive employer brand.
So, how do the response levels of your own organisation compare to PepsiCo’s one in three ratio?
Candidates want, therefore, to see activity and movement and reaction in an employer brand. They do not want a static, immovable, aloof and one-dimensional brand – probably because that rather implies that the culture of an organisation once they join may well share such characteristics.
Take Pret a Manger – the successful sandwich chain is being sold to investment organisation, JAB Holdings, for a chunky £1.5bn. Such M&A activity is rarely entirely positive news for the employees involved. People fear a change of culture, cost cutting, new senior leaders. The response of Pret a Manger? Getting in front of the situation. Their people will all be tucking into a £1,000 bonus – regardless of tenure – as part of the deal.
Few talent acquisition professionals would see the current labour market as anything but competitive.
This applies as much to retention as it does recruitment. An interesting piece of research from Korn Ferry Futurestep suggests that 93% of organisations feel that the retention of new hires in their business is an issue. 82% of new joiners felt they would leave even a well-paid job if it were not to their liking, as soon as they had somewhere else to go. And 26% would leave regardless of whether they had another job to go to or not.
We hire and are hired in a complex and kinetic environment. Research from Blu Ivy in North America this month suggests 50% of talent acquisition leaders feel their organisation has experienced some form of social employer brand crisis within the past 12 months.
Doing nothing in the face of such crises feels like an ill-advised option.
Whether they respond with dignity and wit like Sanofi or with very little in the case of Easyjet, speaks loudly of their respective organisational cultures, value system and purpose. It’s hard, too, to make a confident claim that your organisation is nimble, flexible and responsive in the complete absence of any form of response to the likes of Glassdoor and Indeed. Or indeed, the entire candidate touchpoint journey…
Getting to the heart of your employee mindset 