Status anxiety
Would HR benefit from a new brand?It’s a December Saturday night, and half the country is watching the X Factor final on the telly. The first ad break decends, and in between the usual glossy messages for yoghurt, cars and supermarkets comes a commercial the like of which no-one has ever seen before.
Blimey – it’s an ad for the HR profession. It shows us a young woman (probably) attending a series of meetings – one-to-one appraisals, team objective-settings, a conference at which she’s addressing a good couple of hundred people. Noticeably, she’s leaving a trail of improvement in her week. After meeting with her, people are smiling, thinking and getting it.
The ad closes with a confident strapline spelt out in gold: HR – Improving the workplace, one meeting at a time.
Maybe. Admittedly, a big campaign in which the whole HR profession is re-branding sounds a tad far-fetched.
But there are precedents, of sorts. Other professions which have had mixed or indistinct reputations, shall we say – such as teaching, the armed forces, accountancy, social work – have tried similar projects before.
Recently, a US consultancy has been advising on how to rebrand educators (‘We arrived at a core idea: teachers enable potential in every student’) while another has been helping out the National Association of Social Workers (‘We positioned social workers as the “helping profession.”’)
And last year, writing in Forbes, Marian Salzman noted other professions that have been successfully re-branded (although arguably not as a consequence of a managed process):
‘Engineering used to be the domain of Dilbert-style dweebs, but thanks to Silicon Valley, engineers are the rock stars of the digital society… A generation ago, secretaries became personal assistants, reaffirming their close connections, organizational savvy and invaluable helpfulness… Bloggers became citizen journalists… Editors became curators… Old-school commission-based travel agents went upscale and rebranded themselves as private travel designers.”
We’d like some of that, wouldn’t we? So what’s to stop HR from doing something similar?
The multi-million dollar question
Well, money, to begin with.
‘Our re-branding campaign has to reach 80% plus of the working population and last long enough so that the current consensus view of HR is expunged and a new norm established, so £100 million would make a start,’ says John Langford, of Bristol’s Genius Consultancy.
But Langford adds that there are more cost-effective ways of changing perceptions than a campaign running on all the priciest media channels. And before any money was spent, some tricky questions would have to be answered.
‘We’d need to decide whether we’re talking about HR, or people in HR. There’s a difference. An institution and the people within it can have distinct, even contradictory, brand lives. You can adore France, but be lukewarm about the French. Proud of parliament, but think MPs scoundrels to a man.’
Which is the better course for us? ‘We’d better stick to the profession, in case someone sues.’ OK. And then?
‘There are cheaper ways for HR to become more popular. Wear a uniform – seriously. A uniform says order, discipline, organisation, status, trustworthiness. It endows the wearer with the authority and prestige of higher powers. It comforts people because it offers consistency and a sense of guarantee. A good uniform will iron out a lot of wrinkles.’
And if the idea of a uniform doesn’t grab you, Langford has another suggestion hot on its heels. ‘Think of accountants, doctors, clergy, lawyers. The professions with the highest status and regard all involve saving people from something. Clearly a good professional brand becomes easier to achieve if the people you deal with are in a state of peril.’
Positioning HR as a means of protecting or rescuing things – businesses, profits, talent, the self-respect of individuals – sounds like a strong idea. But it’s not the only one the brand gurus have up their sleeves.
Production valued
‘HR is largely focused on productivity at the moment,’ says Finn Lynch of Blackbridge Communications. ‘The CIPD talks a lot about it, and when put alongside effective measurement, it’s a very good way for HR to articulate the value it brings to organisations.’
But isn’t productivity essentially an imbalanced issue – that is, might embracing the idea suggest that HR exists to squeeze human resources for the good of the top brass and shareholders?
‘You can position productivity more judiciously than that,’ Lynch responds. ‘For example, productivity is what fuels pay rises and career opportunities. You can talk about personal productivity too – the realisation of individual potential. You can also qualify it with the idea of sustainability. The core brand idea behind HR might be productivity done in an intelligent way.’
Gavin Anderson of the agency 33 agrees that an HR brand could be about change. ‘It’s unfortunate that the name ‘Human Resources’ has such a reductive, industrial tone,’ he says. ‘So in building a brand, you’d probably want to play up the ‘human’ or ‘people’ angle in a more positive way.
“We might want to link the role of HR to generational change – employees increasingly expect organisations to put them at the heart of everything they do, and employees are in many ways now in charge. Employers need to work hard to attract the talent and keep it engaged. Arguably, HR’s key brand promise should be to make all that happen.’
Brand on the run
But Helen Rosethorn of It Takes People, a sometime columnist of this magazine, suggests that HR should be wary of the dangers around the word ‘brand’.
‘It’s still, for too many, about packaging and not enough about the substance that lies within,’ she warns. ‘The last thing that HR needs is fresh packaging – and in some eyes that happened when HR was born out of ‘Personnel’ and everyone ran around accusing it of being old wine in new bottles.
‘What HR needs – but then this is what any smart HR leader will do, anyway – is to consider its ‘strategic’ positioning, and how that positioning stands up to questions of relevance, credibility, differentiation and stretch.’
Rosethorn suggests that doing a good job – and making their organisations look good – might be all that HR needs to continual reputational improvement.
‘I had the privilege of talking to an HRD this week who spoke about her people strategy, with everything about that strategy aligned with and threaded through that organisation’s goals and plans for the next five years,’ she says.
‘The element that she wants to invest in to glue the elements of her people strategy into the very fabric of how that business accelerates its growth is their employer brand. HR does not need a brand – getting her employer brand right will do that for her.’
Don’t hold your breath
So maybe, then, that X Factor spot isn’t just around the corner. And a lovely integrated campaign for schools, designed to get students who are aspirant marketeers and finance types to switch allegiance to HR, might be even further behind.
But when the opportunity finally drops, at least we’ll have ideas, a decent articulation of which could bring a whole raft of clever, commercial, curious new talent into the ranks – wearing uniforms or otherwise.
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