Right, colleagues, this is The Big One. Never mind creating employer brands for your own organisations, it’s high time we created one for the planet.
After all, if employer brands are intended to engage people culturally and emotionally with where they work, maybe the planet as a whole could benefit from something like that. There are plenty of people who feel they don’t want to be here, or don’t understand why they are. An HR intervention on a pretty grand scale could be the answer.
It’s at times like these that a CIPD Fact Sheet comes in terribly useful. First off, fellow Earthlings, what’s our ‘distinctive value proposition’? What, in short, does Earth plc stand for?
Well, it’s a medium-sized blue planet, three fifths water but only one in ten parts common sense, offering habitation for many millions on condition they come to some sort of arrangement for peaceful co-existence. This hasn’t happened yet after 100,000 years of trying. That strategic failure aside, Earth plc also stands for over-priced coffee, chat shows, a bewildering range of languages which is proof of its diversity, sunsets, and shared service centres.
So what does Earth plc expect of its employees, ie humankind? A certain amount of realism, incompatible with the more ambitious male hair products. A certain amount of imagination, too – but not as much as on some astrology websites. Thereafter, to give where you can, listen at least as much as you talk, always leave the toilet seat down and on no account forget to Mind the Gap.
Good. So what’s in for employees? Well, on average: raspberry ripple ice cream, old age, death, liking or not liking football, falling in love, head colds and tennis elbow, itchy jumpers, market rationalisation, over ninety different species of antelope, a wide choice of inexplicable fears, and of course over-priced coffee. Employees have varying reactions to all this and should be managed accordingly. Further iterations of this employer brand are welcome at the usual address.
This has been re-posted origianl post date - 7 Sept 2010
A trackback is a method for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking, and so referring, to their articles. Some weblog software programs, such as Wordpress, Drupal and Movable Type, support automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published article can be pinged when the article is published. The term is used colloquially for any kind of linkback.