Employee Branding means in simpler terms what a employee projects about himself and

the organisation culture. He/She should be able to serve as a brand ambassador for his/her
Organisation. A strong sense of affiliation is seen of the employee towards his /her
organization

Employee branding as "the image projected by employees through their behaviours,

attitudes and actions". This image is impacted on by employees' attitude and engagement
towards the employer brand image promoted through the culture of the organisation.
Employee branding can influence the perception of the employment experience offered to
current and future employees.

Employee branding is an indirect branding effect in which the communication of

company employees serves to characterise their company's employer brand. The term
also refers to the effects that company employees have on the image of their employer
and the employer brand by publicly voicing their opinion on their place of work.

The year-end celebrations have got much better for top executives and star performers
this year. India Inc has woken up to the need of gaining HR mileage from the Christmas
and New Year season, much like their Western peers. Companies feel such efforts are
directed towards ‘employee branding’ to build loyalty and be part in their festivities.

Apart from the plain-vanilla company sponsored year-end parties to off-site employee
bonding programmes, companies are also using the season to dole out rewards to top
performers. This includes employee stock options, year-end bonuses, target achievement
rewards, gifts and sponsored holiday overseas.

FMCG major Dabur India will dole out a special recognition reward which is a mix of
Esops and promotions for its top executives on January 1. “This reward scheme will
primarily target the middle-level management executives. This apart, we also have non-
monetary rewards such as laptop,” Dabur’s vice-president (HR) A Sudhakar said.

India’s largest consumer electronics firm LG Electronics has drawn up a ‘best employee
bonus’ this year. This scheme has a pyramidal structure, wherein the top 20% of the best
employees will get nearly seven times their salary as a bonus, following which, the kitty
will slowly taper off. In addition, there are fully sponsored overseas holiday tours in
Europe.

“Employees tend to be in high spirits during this time of the year. We wanted to
capitalise on this to reward and motivate our top talent through various schemes,” LG
Electronics India director (HR) YV Verma told ET. Several companies such as LG and
Philips’ IT arm in Bangalore have announced holidays during this period keeping in tune
with global best practices. Auto major Maruti has an innovative ‘collective vacation
scheme’ whereby the employee enjoys an eight-day vacation starting December 24.
“Of the eight days, employees need to take just four days off and the balance four day is
sponsored by the company. This is a Japanese concept which we have adopted. If a team
wants to go for a short outbound training programme in the hills or other location during
this period, we sponsor the entire trip,” said Maruti Suzuki India director (HR) SY
Siddiqui.

It is also the time when companies execute their team building initiatives. Bharti
Enterprises, for instance, has organised employee lunches and special movie screenings.
“Dr Reddy’s Lab will undertake its global employee meet in January which bonds
employee across the globe and also reward star performers,” the company’s global chief
(HR) Prabir Jha said.

Though HR activities around New Year are still limited largely to MNCs in India,
analysts feel it is a trend which will become louder. “Till lately such activities were only
limited to Diwali. But now Indian companies are even extending it to the Christmas-New
Year period as a policy,” said James Agarwal, head, BTI Consultants, a part of HR
consultancy Kelly Services.

The brand-developing process centers on the messages the organization sends and the
processing of those messages in its employees’psyches.

Employee branding is a process by which employees internalize the desired bran dimage
and are motivated to project the image to customers and other organizational constituents.
The messages employees take in and process influence

• the extent to which they perceive their psychological contracts with the
organization to be fulfilled
• the degree to which they understand and are motivated to deliver the desired level
of customer service

In so doing, they drive the formation of the employee brand. The messages employees
receive must be aligned with the employees’organizational experiences if the
psychological contract is to be upheld. Therefore, the conscious development of
organizational messages is the fundamental building block in this process.

The messages must then be delivered through appropriate message sources.The following
guidelines provide a starting point in this process:

1. Organizational messages should be carefully thought out and planned in much the
same way mission and vision statements are thought out and planned.
2. The organizational messages should reflect the organization’s mission and values.
3. Messages directed toward external constituencies must be in line with the
messages sent to employees.
 4. Messages directed toward external constituencies should be sent internally as
well.
5. The design of recruitment and selection systems should incorporate messages that
consistently and frequently reflect the brand and organizational image.
6. The compensation system should incorporate messages that consistently and
frequently reflect the brand and organizational image. For instance, managers in
organizations that value training must be held accountable when they fail to train
and develop their employees.
7. Training and development systems should help managers and employees
internalize their organization’s mission and values and help them understand how
the mission and values pertain to their roles in their organization.This should
enable them to more effectively articulate messages that consistently and
frequently reflect the brand and organizational image.
8. Advertising and public relations systems should communicate messages that
consistently and frequently reflect the brand and organizational image.
9. Managers should be taught the importance of communicating messages that are
consistent with their organization’s mission,vision, policies, and practices.
10. Performance management systems should address inconsistencies between
practices and policies to minimize violations of employees’ psychological
contracts.
11. Accurate and specific job previews should be given to new employees so that
realistic expectations are incorporated into their psychological contracts.
12. Corporate culture (artifacts, patterns of behavior, management norms, values and
beliefs, and assumptions) should reinforce the messages employees receive.
13. Individual output should be measured and analyzed to determine if there are
message-related problems at the departmental, divisional, or organizational levels.
14. Individual messages should be continually examined for consistency with other
messages.
15. Message channels should be examined to ensure consistency of message delivery.
16. In the event that messages need to be changed or psychological contracts altered,
organizations must take careful steps in rewriting the messages.
17. Measures should be used to assess outcomes such as customer retention, service
quality, turnover, and employee satisfaction and performance

When the organization that you are part of becomes tainted by a public scandal, you and
other members are likely also to be "tarred by the same brush". This is the flip-side of the
employer branding process.
Employee branding is when you, the member, display characteristics of the organization
in your own behavior to help the organization promote its brand. When an organization’s
members behave in ways that promote the organization’s brand, they encourage others to
treat them as representatives of the organization. They ask to be seen and treated as
carriers of the organization’s values and to be experienced by others as a proxy for the
organization itself.
(Note, whether this transfer of values actually occurs is a different issue. What matters
here is appearances and presentations.)
When the organization’s reputation is good, this employer branding process can benefit
the organization member, who gets treated with the warmth, respect, or enthusiasm that
someone has for that organization.
But the reverse is also true — once you have aligned yourself with the organization,
and acted in ways that encourage others to treat you as the organization’s representative,
you become vulnerable to any repercussions of the organization’s negative behavior.

Over 19,000 Satyam employees are actively looking for new jobs. Who will hire them?
Not Infosys, Satyam’s competitor.
And why not? Said Infosys founder and non-executive chairman N R Narayana Murthy:
“We will not touch such a tainted company,”
Ostensibly, Murthy was commenting on whether or not Infosys would "poach" Satyam
employees. At the same time, however, the Infosys chairman was also expressing an
assumption shared by many:
If Satyam’s employees really "are" the company, if they really have internalized the
company’s values and defining characteristics, then they must also have internalized
whatever values (or lack thereof) created these ethical breaches.
Note that this logic is not the same as saying that any Satyam employee knew about and
assisted with these unethical behaviors. Instead, it’s all about the values of the
organization and the degree to which these values are held by employees. Whether an
organization’s values are ethical or not, these values influence corporate and collective
behavior. And, when employees are strongly connected with or branded by their
organizations, these corporate values influence individual behavior.
Employee branding is a two-way street.
Even though we usually focus on employee branding as a way to have what’s good about
an organization spread from the organization’s core values out to the individual
employees’ behaviors, employee branding can spread any corporate value, good or bad.
Thus, employee branding can spread values that make bad corporate behavior possible.
Will people think of Satyam employees as being tainted, just like the organization
they are part of?
Yes.
Does it make sense to think of Satyam employees as being tainted?
Yes.
is it fair to think of Satyam employees as tainted?
That’s another story… .
What are your thoughts about employee branding in reverse and/or the plight of Satyam
employees? Please share in the comments, below.

Company vs individual - differences in marketplace impact

• Company: The company influences an audience who speaks to the marketplace

and in turn purchases from the company.
• Individual: The individual influences an audience, who speaks to the marketplace.
The marketplace goes back to the individual and asks for a product or company
endorsement.
Personal branding pros vs cons

Pros

• Easy to identify
• More trustworthy
• Able to transition
• Transitive branding

Cons

• Might leave
• Not scalable
• Vulnerable to negative association

Before you create a personal brand….

• Goals of building a personal brand: attention

• Investment costs and clear strategy
• Resources

Analysis

There are many more pros to personal branding, but from the organizational level, they
want to build corporate spokespeople that understand the corporate messaging, so they
can attract others to the company. As you develop your brand and become more
visible, other companies will want to hire you, which is a threat for a company that
doesn’t have a strong employer brand. I think personal brands are scalable with
evangelists, but not with person-to-person contact. I think companies can be just as
trustworthy as people, depending on the reputation they’ve built up over time in the
publics eye.