🇨🇦Feeling a disconnect between your employer brand and your everyday HR communications?

How imagining you’re talking to your favourite colleague can make your communications more human

Are you disconcerted by the gap between your awesomely well-defined employer brand and your job advertisements? Do you struggle to align your corporate values with the need to clearly guide unruly employees in your HR memos? Do you wonder how to convey your company culture in legal documents? We understand that incorporating your employer brand into your representation of the company on a day-to-day basis can be difficult.

What do you struggle with when communicating? What would you like to be able to achieve with your employee communications?

Are your job ads, candidate emails and memos reflecting your culture and values?

For us here at Usher & Spur, it’s heartbreaking to see HR people like you devote yourselves to defining the essence of your company culture, understanding what binds you together, developing those notions into full-fledged values, embodied in behaviours, and launched as a cohesive whole for maximum engagement with your existing employees—and then not convey it consistently.

We can only imagine how you must feel thinking about the hours (and money) spent. Especially, when you remember how delighted everyone was to realize that your values as a company corresponded to what the workforce is looking for. Or, perhaps, how hard you all worked to make changes that would make your company more attractive to potential candidates.

And yet, the vast majority of job advertisements don’t even talk about company culture and values. At best, they say:

🔩  What your company does and what benefits the successful candidate could claim.

🪞They barely try to show the company to best advantage.

📣 This is the space to tell people what your company stands for, to shout about what makes it great, to inspire people to come and work for you.

Don’t hold back!

And don’t forget that the job ad is just the beginning; do your emails to candidates also reflect your values and remind them of the great reasons to come and work for you, right up till the moment they sign your offer, and beyond, to when they actually set foot in your company? (Because some don’t turn up, do they?)

Once they do, are you sure your internal communications continue to reflect those values the candidates were attracted to, and support your goal of creating a positive work environment? Are you certain they’re encouraging the legal, policy and administrative compliance you’re seeking?

How do Human Resources communications contrast with the employer brand?

Voice, tone and content are all involved. Here are some examples of things that make me cringe as I revise employee and talent acquisition communications to make them more effective… and human: 

👑 The “Royal We” aka speaking as the company (voice) ≠ “inclusive and friendly”

👨🏽‍💼 Business formal language (tone) ≠ “relaxed, family atmosphere”

👩🏻‍⚖️ Authoritarian language (tone) ≠ “open-door policy and accessible management”

🎺 Tooting the HR horn (content) ≠ “our people are our most important asset”

Of course we realize that there are legal implications to certain communications. But we also see that complex HR organizations struggle to fully roll out the employer brand. And of course we understand that HR people are not Communications people.

From what we’ve seen, Human Resources communications often ‘speak’ as the Voice of the Company (“We have decided that…”). And they address employees as a group, often in the third person, with a Ten Commandments-like tone (“Employees shall provide HR with…”). Imagine how hard it is for said employees, when they read such language, to believe that their concerns will be heard by their managers or Human Resources employees, or that they won’t be judged.

It’s also common for any non-communications professionals to default to a formal tone, because you learned, in school or through osmosis, that that was an appropriate way to write in a business context. We’ve even wondered whether training for human resources professionals, whether at university, through professional associations, or on the job, is based on a more distant, more authoritarian model of the role of HR. And, have you noticed that the more sensitive the subject, (such as redundancies or a shift layoff), the more serious your tone? As if you wanted to actively put distance between your feelings and the impact on others? If you were on the receiving end of that, how helpful would you find it?

Regarding content, we know that you, as HR professionals, have a lot on your plate, and the rate of change in the world of work, particularly over the last few years, has added to your load. It’s only natural therefore to want to celebrate the successful launch of a project that’s taken a lot of time and effort to implement, and of which you and your colleagues are very proud. All your colleagues around the company should be made aware that a team of dedicated individuals (you are human beings and employees too) was responsible for the desk-sharing reservation system that’s just made their lives easier, or the employee referral program that could earn them extra cash. Of course they should. Just as all their contributions to the greater good should be recognized.

But if your goal is to get people to use the new program or system, focusing on the program or system will achieve it better than focusing on your team. Remember: a memo is not a press release or a birth announcement (“We are very proud to announce that, after months of hard work, we are launching…”).

How can we make HR communications more human?

Putting ourselves in the shoes of our *colleagues*, rather than addressing “employees”, helps to focus on what they want to know and not on what HR, management or Legal want to say. We’ve all been candidates and employees, so that should be easy, right? 😉 Here are some tips to overcome the pitfalls we highlighted above:

👍 What if you separated the legal parts (e.g. signed acceptance of a job offer) from the human parts (“I’m happy to tell you that we’d love you to come work with us. Attached is a formal offer.”)?

👍 What if you imagined speaking to one of your favourite colleagues? Would you still talk in that ‘professional’ way? Would you demand they do something, or ask them nicely? Would you say, “we” when you mean “I”, or talk about your department as if you weren’t part of it?

👍 What if it was “the more serious the subject, the more sensitive the tone”? Of course, the words used are important, and often prompted by our colleagues in the Legal department, but adopting a human tone, that shows understanding and empathy, is not mutually exclusive to protecting the company’s legal position, and also protects the company’s brand.

👍 Would you give your favourite colleague a birthday card while telling them how much money you spent on it and how long you spent choosing it, or would you just watch for their smile as they read it?

In today’s uncertain world, employees want to feel supported, valued, and empowered. And it is more human communications that convey the trust, transparency and care that foster those feelings. Even when drastic measures need to be taken. That’s what builds a strong employer brand.

In short: To fully realize the potential of your employer brand investment, ALL your HR communications, at every step of the employee journey, need to reflect your culture and values, in a human-to-human way. Do you have the internal capacity to do that? Would external resources and personalized templates help you?