The implications of COVID-19 for your company’s reputation and future performance
This is a really tough time. There are of course a thousand other things on your mind at this moment other than your company’s reputation as an employer and your organization’s overall business performance.
We are all anxious about what life will look like for everyone in the coming months. For many of us, our daily lives have shifted significantly over a short time period. More weighty than the unsettling changes in routine, however, is our worry about our loved ones and our concerns about our own health too. In short, this is a really difficult time.
Why you need to need to continue to focus on your employer brand during this time of crisis
While there are more critical things to be thinking about at this time, we also can’t lose sight of the fact that this is a time where there is a lot of spotlight on our organizations and how leaders are handling this crisis and protecting their employees’ health and well-being.
Important decisions like encouraging and facilitating remote work (if this is something your company has the ability to support) can send a strong message about who you are as a company. Organizations’ sick leave, PTO, and health and safety practices are all coming under tight scrutiny as well.
There is already a lot of media coverage around employers decisions during this critical moment in time. Tim Horton’s, for example, has received significant backlash in Canada over their sick leave policy, which requires that employees provide a doctor’s note. In addition, Glassdoor reviews are already starting to emerge that offer employees’ perspectives on how their organizations are handling the COVID-19 crisis - and many of these reviews are not painting their employers in the best light.
HR and leadership teams need to think carefully about how the decisions they make now and in the coming months will influence the public’s perception of who they are as an organization and employer forever. This perception will linger and have a major impact on business performance now and once the crisis has passed too.
How to protect your employer brand during the COVID-19 crisis
In order to avoid fallout (and to do the right thing) here are a few recommendations of areas where HR, talent acquisition, and employer brand professionals can focus some of their attention during this tough time:
This will probably come across as obvious – but I’m going to say it anyway because it is the most important thing we can do as HR professionals. We need to do everything in our power to influence leadership across the organization to prioritize employee and customer health and well-being first and foremost over anything else. Period.
Over any bottom line or other business imperative, this needs to remain the main focus. This is the right thing to do. And if your leadership team neglects to take this approach to heart fully in all decision making, your organization could pay the price in the long run with negative brand exposure that impacts your business. So, where you can influence decision-making to ensure health is prioritized and the spread of this disease is reduced, please do so.
Revisit your HR policies that pertain to remote work, travel, time off for sick leave, time off for caring for a family member, vacation time, etc., and make sure that all of this still holds true given the current environment. Adjust and build out a specific COVID-19 policy to address the unique situation requirements. Workable has put together a good COVID-19 template that could act as a starting point for your own policy.
Since your employer brand really emerges from the overall employee experience you’re providing, your HR team needs to think about what the employee experience looks like during this time of crisis. You might consider:
-How can you continue to try to promote a positive culture during this tough time?
-Is there any programming you can create to help employees and try to foster positivity and group connection amidst turmoil and isolation?
-What types of communications can you produce to reduce anxieties and keep up morale?
Here are some crowd-sourced resources on how to thrive during this time of isolation that might prove helpful for improving the employee experience and answering some of the above questions. Notion is also host to a great wiki on remote working best practices that could be useful too.
Avoid making light of the situation in any candidate or employee communications or recruitment marketing content. As Lori Sylvia, CEO of Rally Recruitment Marketing, advises in her post on the topic, Coronavirus: Should Your Recruitment Marketing Change in a Crisis?, now is not the time for humourous social media posts or ‘rah-rah’ culture content. This type of content has the chance of coming across the wrong way given how serious the current cultural tone is.
When it comes to recruitment marketing content you might consider sharing stories of courage, perseverance, and goodwill that emerge from your company at this time. You can pair this alongside employee-generated content showcasing what the new normal looks like (#remoteworklife). Producing content that addresses the situation seriously and that resonates with what others are experiencing may help to cheer up your employee base during a time when there is a lot of doom and gloom everywhere you look.
If you want more ideas on how you can shift your content strategy during this time, I would also reference Lori Sylvia’s aforementioned blog as she has some great thoughts on adjusting your content during a time of crisis. We will also be sharing more ideas here, on The Employer Brand Shop blog, in the coming weeks and months.
In short, however, what I really want to get across here is the following:
How we choose to respond to COVID-19 as employer brand, talent acquisition, and HR professionals can have a big impact on how people perceive of our organizations long term. Our actions today have the power to protect employees’ health and well-being, raise morale, attract much needed talent in important front-line roles, and create positive perceptions that employees, candidates, customers, and prospective customers will remember long after we have dealt with this public health crisis.
What you can expect from us
Moving forward, The Employer Brand Shop will continue to create content that addresses employer branding and recruitment marketing best practices. We will do our best to ensure this content is addressing topical areas that are helpful given the unique challenges that this public health crisis is creating for people working in HR and talent roles. We will also share useful articles and tools from others across our social media channels.
Our small team is wishing you all the best during this challenging time. I hope that you and your loved ones remain safe and healthy in the coming months.
Any questions or comments about this blog post, or if you have any topics you’re curious about that you’d like me to write about next, please feel free to get in touch with me at kaitlyn@theemployerbrandshop.com.
Thank you,
Kaitlyn Holbein
Founder & Principal Consultant
The Employer Brand Shop