COVID-19: how do you engage and retain your home-based talents?

The loss of talent is a concern for 83% of French HRMs. These issues are not new and the pandemic context has accentuated them. During the crisis and still today, employees have been questioning their relationship with work. How do you build a sense of belonging when the majority of employees are remote workers? How to engage and retain talent in a context of social distancing?

Talent drain is the ultimate nightmare for companies. Younger generations seem to be less loyal than their predecessors, which is very expensive (higher than desired turnover, which drives up recruitment costs).

Over the course of their careers, people under 30 will change jobs 10 to 13 times.

The loss of talent is a concernfor 83% of French HRDs (Source: Robert Half survey, 2013).

These issues are not new and the pandemic context has accentuated them. During the crisis and still today, employees have asked themselves about their relationship with work:

• How far am I prepared to go for my company? (Especially for those who could not work from home).
• Am I potentially capable of putting myself and my loved ones at risk for my work?
• In the end, what is it that brings us together?

These reflections raise the question of the meaning of work, of individual and collective commitment, of the culture and the adventure that the company wishes its employees to experience.

How to build a sense of belonging when the majority of employees are home based? How to engage and retain talent in a context of social distancing?

Employer brand and its limits

Employer brand can thus be seen as the value proposition and the promisescommunicated by the organisation in its role as employer. It touches on several levels: candidate experience, employee experience, strategy, management… In short, it is everywhere and cannot be reduced to simple HR communication.

Building an employer brand is all well and good, but you also need to know how to communicate about it. The employer brand strategy must be based on an effective communication plan, i.e. one that is heard and understood by the greatest number of candidates and employees. But two problems are emerging:

Mistake number 1: communicating about your employer brand only to candidates

Some companies are obsessed with conveying a good image externally, while forgetting to appeal to their employees. Yet, employees are the company’s first ambassadors.

Employees can contribute to the company’s image by promoting it through word of mouthor on their social networks. In addition, job seekers prefer to listen to testimonials from current employees rather than official company speeches.

It is therefore in the interest of companies to develop their employees’ sense of belonging.

Mistake number 2: lack of effective employer brand communications to employees.

Unfortunately, most of the time, the employer brand exists but the communication plan deployed around it is not effective. Employees often have little or no knowledge of their company’s employer brand.

As a result, they are unaware of the benefits available to them and may be tempted to move to a competitor company that has communicated more about how it can meet their needs.

Based on this, some companies have chosen to use the Individual Social Report to communicate with their employees. It summarises precisely and clearly what makes up their remuneration. The latter is an opportunity to communicate annually about benefits that are too often ignored by employees. These may include benefits in kind, organisation of working hours, social protection, employee savings schemes, etc., all of which are real assets that it is important to highlight. . A real communication ally, the ISR is the ideal channel for engaging employees and building long-term loyalty.

Unfortunately, the ISR, which is often sent in PDF format, is often skimmed over by employees, at best, and ignored, at worst.

How can we communicate more effectively about the ISR and thus improve employee loyalty?

Customised video to boost the visibility of your employer brand, from a distance.

Groupama Loire Bretagne, one of the leading insurance companies, had a double objective:

• To buildemployee loyalty by summarising their Individual Social Report (ISR) in an educational and entertaining way.
• To strengthen the employer brand by explaining the remuneration policy and social benefits to the employee.

Once a year, Groupama Loire Bretagne’s Human Resources Department sends each employee his or her Individualised Social Report (ISR) by email: it includes the main elements of individual remuneration (fixed part, variable part, amount of profit-sharing, bonuses, leave taken, CET, and social benefits).

The principle is to make the email and the report more dynamic by embellishing it with a customised video that summarises the remuneration elements.

The employee receives an email with a customised GIF. They click on the email and arrive on a landing page where they can watch their customised video. . At the end of the video, they click on a CTA to access the detailed ISR tool.

The customisation video impacts, engages and builds lasting loyalty among Groupama Loire Bretagne employees.

Employees appreciate this format as96% watch the video to the end. Employees rediscover the different components of their remuneration and the social benefits of Groupama Loire Bretagne and are less inclined to be attracted by the “sirens of the competition”.

The video helped to give visibility to the Employee Value Proposition implemented at Groupama Loire Bretagne.

As this example shows, the customised video has made it possible to communicate effectively on Groupama Loire Bretagne’s employer brand and will undoubtedly help to retain its talents.