topics include Employer Brand, Recruitment Marketing
Our sister company, ThirtyThree, hit its 10-year birthday a couple of weeks ago. ThirtyThree does not state its mission, print its values or emblazon its EVP on every available surface – real or virtual. But integral to the ThirtyThree culture is a genuine desire to celebrate successes and significant events, never missing an opportunity to acknowledge the part played by everybody in the company to make it what it is.
The 10-year birthday was no exception: to mark this significant occasion, but without any pomp, circumstance or unnecessary huff and puff, the directors were at the front door of the office in Clerkenwell from 8.30am to welcome every staff member with an individual birthday cake and a glass of champagne. This got me thinking about ThirtyThree's employer brand and why it is such a great place to work.
From Peer Group’s perspective, as a separate company working in partnership with ThirtyThree – so conjoined but not completely integral if you like – words that immediately spring to mind are respect, decency, autonomy, humour, collaboration, support, empathy; it’s a pretty safe bet that ThirtyThree’s employees would say exactly the same. Of course, you would hope that a business that spends most of its time advising others on how best to communicate with existing and target employees to be pretty good at doing it for themselves, but so often in our industry, the 'cobbler's children' rule applies and agency owners miss the point that the advice they give to others has relevance ‘at home’. Understanding the attitudes, motivations and behaviours of your employees is one of the basic starting points for engaging with your people; leading by example (with people clearly happy to follow that lead), being consistent and sharing in success are all pretty good indicators of an organisation in tune with its workforce. It's obviously easier to achieve in an SME business like ours, but I wonder how many larger corporates could learn a thing or two from this very simple example?