Organizations must think differently when it comes to attracting and retaining talent. Most employers are interested in recruiting talent to build the company’s brand. This traditional perspective ignores the opportunity to engage employees proactively in building their marketability.
Purposefully engaging employees and job candidates will create healthy dialog and tap into each employee’s innate creativity. While this conversation will be foreign to many employees, you can bet, that your high performing employees will be highly engaged in this concept.
Employers can assist employees’ build their brand by actively engaging each employee in a brand creation process. Brand creation should begin with innate individual strengths. Discovery of strengths using Taylor Protocols, Core Value’s Index is an excellent place to begin. https://www.taylorprotocols.com/ @Travis Stovall I also recommend reading Fascinate by @Sally Hogshead and having fun with Sally’s assessment tool https://sallyhogshead.com/the-fascinate-test/ We each have a unique superpower!
Building an individual’s brand should not exclusively focus on development that aligns with company objectives. If an employee wants to learn how to tune-up a lawnmower, gain an understanding of neuroeconomics or become a yoga instructor the organization should support and celebrate. Adopting a broad perspective on what personal development means – being open to individual interests. Openness is critical and will demonstrate to the employee that they are more than a fungible unit of labor.
An equally important action step is promotion of employees’ learning and accomplishments through social media and internal communications. By promoting employee brand development – companies will reap the benefits of a more loyal and productive workforce. Another important effect is it will provide employees a reason to engage and share their learning with each other. Enabling a connection culture is key to engagement and retention.
As contrary as this concept may seem, deliberately developing your employee’s personal brand will differentiate your organization from your competition.
