How reward communications can form part of your employer brand

We know how important it is to build a successful employer brand. There are lots of different elements that need to come together to formulate a strong EVP (Employee Value Proposition) and one of these is reward communications.

 In this episode of The Big Bright Podcast, we chat with Becky Hewson-Haworth on this particular aspect of building a strong employer brand. We chat about the importance of reward communications and how you can incorporate traditional marketing storytelling into your comms, forming a larger part of your employer branding strategy. 

Listen in to discover:

• What are reward communications?
• Why are reward communications so important?
• How does reward communications fit into your employer brand strategy? 
• How can you measure success and ROI in reward communications? 
• How to ditch the jargon and make your reward comms accessible for all 

Interviewer: Amy Burchill 

Guest speaker: Becky Hewson-Haworth from Clarion Call Communications 

Podcast produced by Let’s Talk Video Production: 

Transcript

Hello and a warm welcome to the Big Bright Podcast. I'm Amy, the marketing executive at Bright and today I'm joined by the lovely Becky Hewson-Haworth. Becky specialises in helping marketing and HR professionals to engage customers and employees with powerful communications. Comms is such an important part of any employer branding strategy. And it's vital that you get your message across in just the right way back in.

I'll be chatting about employee communications, why reward comms are so important and how recruitment marketers can measure the effectiveness of these comms. So welcome, Becky!

I'm really interested in delving into this topic. I think that brands and businesses are becoming more in tune to employer branding and the importance of effective communications, not just for attracting new staff, but also retaining the team they already have. And a part of that is reward communications, which I mentioned in the introduction. So if anyone listening who doesn't know, could you give us a quick explanation of what reward coms are?

Yeah, so the way I always think about them is that when a business has products and services, it markets those to its customers externally. And your reward package is the products and services that you provide internally for your employees. But a lot of businesses don't market them to their employees. And when we say market, we're not talking about sort of selling per se, it's more driving awareness, driving engagement, all of which are the same things that you do with marketing, but internally to employees.

And it's really important because reward is one of the biggest budget items in nearly every business's entire budget. So there's a huge amount spent on pay compensation plans, like bonuses, employee benefits, which of course are really important for things like ensuring wellbeing, employee engagement, all of which drives performance and profit for the business. So if you're failing to invest in communicating about these plans to your employees, you're failing to invest in return on investment for your whole reward budget, but also the well-being and the engagement of your employees, which of course drives better business performance. So fail to invest in employee reward communications, you're failing to invest in the business.

You run your own copywriting business called Clarion Call Communications. If we take a step back, could you talk about how you got into the world of reward comms?

It's a bit of an odd one. I'm a bit unusual, always have been always will be. I started in reward a long time ago. I fell into it after university. I ended up working in job evaluation for a university and went from there into financial services doing a full proper reward role specialised in HR. I did my masters, did 13 years purely in employee rewards, so became really quite specialist in that area. I also unfortunately, at the same time, as all this happened, developed a long term health condition. So I suffer from something called ME. And this really impacted my health. I kept plodding along and kept pushing myself and I ended up doing 60-70 hour weeks in my final job, collapsed in work, had a night in hospital and decided to sack it it all off and choose a new path.

So my degree's in English, so it's weird that I ended up doing reward, which is pay and numbers and spreadsheets. That's what happened. I thought, right, let's go back to the things that I enjoy, which is writing and communication. And a friend of mine said "your text messages are always really grammatically correct. You should be a copywriter." So I googled copywriter and just thought, "yeah, sounds good".

So I went for it. That was five years ago. I upskilled myself in copywriting, I think some people have a natural talent for writing, I would give myself a pat on the back and say I'm potentially one of those people. And within two - three years, I'd written for some really big clients, some big UK businesses, but also some major corporate global businesses, some of the top technology firms in the world. Yeah, sort of went from zero to hero very quickly, but then realised that actually, I had all this reward knowledge. And although I fell out of love with doing reward, I still found a topic really interesting. And I knew looking back from my old job that there just wasn't time to get to the reward communications. And it was the thing that I always wanted to do, but could never quite get to. So I just thought there must be a gap in the market for reward communication support. And it turns out that there is so I do work through agencies, but I also have my own clients as well. And that's the sort of side of the business that I'm really trying to drive at the moment. Yeah, I do a lot of specialist reward comms for agencies, the projects that they're working on, but also  wider HR and reward comms projects for my own clients too.

Why do you think there was that gap in the market? Do you think people just weren't in tune to those really important aspects of their employees and needing to communicate to them? What was it that you saw that you want us to grasp onto?

Yeah, I think it's a funny area because if you think of reward, it's like I say, numbers, spreadsheets, logic, it's not creativity and words. And a lot of businesses do have internal communication support from their internal comms teams. And that can work but a lot of businesses don't. So the business that my last job was with that was 40,000 people globally, we had a very tiny internal comms team, and we just didn't have the capacity to get to the reward comms, it just kept always falling off the bottom of the list. So I think that people know that it's something that needs to be done, but I don't think that they always understand what could be done. So I think because I've got a foot in both camps with marketing, copywriting and reward, I put both specialisms together and like, well, all this stuff we do in marketing, we could be doing exactly the same internally for employees and with reward. So I think people don't know that the capacity or the option to do that kind of work is there.

It's probably really only the last sort of few years where I've been talking to smaller businesses . A HR director recently said to me "we've got a really good reward story to tell." And I just thought, oh, that's new. I've not really heard anybody saying it in that way to me before. HR directors are realising the power of storytelling, they're realising that they can actually apply those skills and that set of capabilities from marketing into employee reward.

That's fantastic. And I really want to delve into that idea of storytelling a little bit later on. But before that, could you tell us a little bit about the sorts of communication pieces that you work on day to day?

Yeah, so it sort of falls into several camps, really. So first of all, it's probably compensation. So things like gender pay gap reports, pay compensation, annual salary review guide. So guides for managers for what they're meant to be doing what they need to look at, during the pay review process. And then a lot around bonuses as well, because bonuses schemes can be quite complex for people to understand.

You can be paying huge and I'm when I say huge, I mean, I really do mean eye watering sums to executives, you know, more than our earn in the next five - six years in one year. And if they don't understand how the scheme works, then it's not quite throwing your money away, but you'll be leveraging your money for more benefit. So a lot of compensation stuff, some stuff around benefits, but more in a total reward way. So what happens is businesses take up benefits for employees through different providers, and the providers provide different specific communications packages. So marketing tools and things they can use internally, posters, branded guides, whatever. So that's good. But what businesses don't have is that kind of joined up thinking around how are we going to communicate the total reward package, so everything from employee experience, work environment, learning and development, compensation and benefits. So instead of having ad hoc communications, it's a strategy and they've got clear narrative and messaging that they want to deliver.

There's also a lot of communication around things like pensions, pension, again, is very misunderstood. Again, if people are getting quite large percentages, potentially, of their salary paid in, you know, quite often 9,10, or 12%, maybe more. So that's a big cost to the business. Employees need to understand the importance of pension savings and how it works. It's not straightforward. That's a good area to focus on. And then things around employee engagement surveys as well. So interpreting results plans for businesses to take action.

Another one at the moment, which seems quite popular is HR policy rewriting. So all of these policies that HR teams have written that have all this horrible legal language in, people read them and just either don't understand them, or they look at them, and don't bother reading them and then phone HR. The idea is to rewrite the policies, get them in plain English, make them really usable, they're user friendly, people can refer to them and use them and it takes the pressure off HR team. So yeah, loads of different elements of reward communication.

So do you help with building that overall strategy then? Or do you come in and help with the individual bits?

Depends what a client wants. Sometimes it's bits. The agency, they've done the strategy, and I come in and deliver elements of it. But when I'm working with clients, myself, I'll be looking at the whole reward communication strategy.

Is a lot of what you do around education towards these companies as well, to show them why it's so important and why they need to be putting more attention on these sorts of communications?

So this is the challenge. The businesses that knock on my door are people that contact me on LinkedIn, they understand that already. That's why they've got in touch with me. People that don't - it's not that people don't understand the value of it. I think people do. - I just think they don't always know that there's somebody like me who exists. I got hired by global reward director, and he said that there was me and one other person on the whole of LinkedIn they could find with that skill set. So it's quite niche. So I think people just don't know it exists and that they can tap into that. It's a mixed bag.

Okay, what are some of the other challenges that you face in this line of work?

budget, so always a biggie. So obviously, budgets get set at a particular time of year. So I've had somebody got in touch with me sort of September time, something like that, I guess they're coming up to year end, maybe. So they had a bit of budget left and thought brilliant, we can finally crack on with getting our HR policies rewritten. But other businesses, obviously, they may be right up to the budget. So you know, having additional money to spend on this kind of work can be a challenge. So sometimes that's about for planning and making sure you've got money in the budget for the next year to do this work. But of course, you need to know who you're going to spend the budget on. And if people don't know that there is somebody out there who can help them with this work. Why would you put the money aside? So it all sort of folds in together really those challenges?

Okay, so just going back to this idea of storytelling as marketers, you know, we love the power of storytelling. We talk about it all the time. How does this feed into employee branding, communications and sort of the overall lifecycle of the employee?

Yes. One of the things that is good reward communication practice is to build a reward brand. And that quite often links very closely with the company's brand. So I do training as well, for HR teams, if they don't have the budget to pay for me to do a tonne of work for them, I just train up the team. So the team's in a better place to produce better communications.

I did some work with a business who had the whole HR team there. And we were looking at all of their different elements of their well being strategy and the benefits that they provided. And they did a lot. They just weren't communicating it effectively. So we looked at how they could do that. We looked at establishing a reward communications brand. And they said, well, we don't know where to start. And I said, Well, let's look at what branding you have got. We don't want a brand internally that is totally disassociated with external brands. So using the same colours, the same fonts, all of that brand architecture that's there, but perhaps, you know, designing a different logo or something that's meaningful internally for the reward team.

And then tone of voice was another one. Well, I said," ell, how do you want to speak to your employees? Well let's look at the tone of voice that you use externally, because actually, you're fairly plain English, nice and warm, professional."

And we looked at the tone of voice guidance. The HR director said, "well, that's exactly how we want to talk to our employees". So it was a no brainer. Quite often, the clues are there you have the information. Sometimes businesses don't. It depends on the size and where they're at in their evolution. So sometimes you have to do that work yourself. Or perhaps it might have been we looked at that information, the tone of voice wasn't quite right for employees, perhaps they wanted to talk in a slightly different way. So all of that sort of needs to be looked at, but you can link it. I would always suggest linking it with the marketing strategy. You don't want to be one thing on the outside and something else internally. And that kind of taps into culture. So I mean, people say, culture should be like a stick of rock, you cut the business in any place, and it runs all the way through. And if you've got a culture of being honest and open, and that's something that appears on the outside of your business to customers, then obviously, that culture should also apply to employees through your values and all the rest of it. So there's quite often a stronger link than people might think between what you're saying externally and what you're saying internally. I think it should be on a continuum, not necessarily exactly the same. But it shouldn't be saying something wildly different on the outside to what you say on the inside.

In terms of narrative, and actually getting down into the nitty-gritty of actually writing these stories and stuff. Can you give some advice on that?

When we think about marketing, externally, we will have a framework, we know what story we want to tell about the business, you should have the same internally. So where does that framework come from? What is the story that you want to tell?

There's a lot in the news at the moment about purpose led businesses. So if you have a very clear purpose, mission, vision values, that for me is the framework of your storytelling architecture. That's what you want to fit your stories within, and always link them back to your values back to your purpose, your mission and vision.

A good way of doing that is through storytelling. So people think oh, you know, reward is really boring bonuses, dull pension, oh, even more boring. I mean, sadly, I do love all that stuff. But how can you bring those stories to life?

So a really good example is we had an employee discount scheme when I worked at Royal London. It's one of these schemes where you get your membership, and you can go on and you can get 10% off your holidays, or I don't know, 2%, off Apple or whatever it is. So we actually had a flag come through from the provider saying, this employee has spent a huge amount like we just want to check is not fraud. So we had to get in touch with the employee. And it turned out that actually what they did was, I mean, there were quite a high earning individual, but every month or quarter, they got a Love to Shop gift card for their wife and for their daughter. And I think they maybe save something like 10% or 15%. But when you're spending 500 - 1000 pound a month, 10 15% over the year adds up. They put all their holidays through it. And they did loads of other stuff as well.

When I got chatting to them and found out what they were doing, the savings were huge. That's an amazing story to tell. Now I have to hold my hands up, we wouldn't have found that story if the provider hadn't flagged it with us. But it was it was a good story. And that was a story that we could then share with other colleagues to get them on board with the benefit. That's quite an easy one. It is harder for things like pensions. Yeah, things like bonus. We don't like talking about money in this country. Perhaps not very tasteful. I think we think for somebody, oh, you know, I've got this massive bonus. And it meant this for me. But I mean, maybe we could find the stories in bonuses.

A business I'm working with at the moment. They're a financial services organisation, their purpose is about connecting people with better financial futures. So it's really there's an obvious link there between purpose and reward. Yeah, I mean, what does it mean for somebody to get a bonus? Does it mean that they can save money towards a house? Does it mean they've put some extra money into pension? And actually they feel more secure and comfortable? What are those stories that theycan tell us? I think if we sort of dig around and we talk to people and we you know, have good ideas, we can write case studies, we can write new stories and get them on the internet and we can put them on reward pages and really bring the reward package to life.

How would you find these stories then would you literally chat with the employees? You mentioned earlier a little bit about employee engagement surveys as well. How's the best way to find these stories and get them out?

I think it is just talking to people. Yeah, that's probably really the only way. And it's trying to find people who have used the benefits, who have had a really good outcome off the back of it. And you really only get that by chatting to people.

Depending on the engagement survey that you use. So I know some businesses, it will be an annual cycle, some maybe every six months, other businesses do it monthly The business I'm working with at the moment, they have monthly engagement surveys go out sort of quick snapshots, but they actually have a specific rewards section. So we can see the feedback that's coming through there, we can see what people liked. It is anonymous, but we can sort of get a sense as to what's happening in the reward world. So a lot of people are very happy, say they got, I don't know, one off spot bonus, or there was a decent pay review. That sort of thing. And so you can sort of tap into what's going on in the business through the engagement survey results, and then go out and find your story, I suppose a bit like a journalist really.

So how would you then present these results back to the business?

I should have mentioned this actually as a challenge earlier on. So measuring effectiveness of communication plans is quite often a bit of a challenge. So I like to understand where we're at before starting on a reward, if it's a big reward or communications piece of work, sort of a one offs, perhaps not so much. But if you're doing a full strategy, it's nice to understand where are we now and wherever we move the needle from and to is it from a to b that we wanted or we end up at C?
 
So it's good to measure where your reward packages out in terms of things like use. So are people actually taking up the voluntary benefits that you offer them? So that's things like cycle to work, for example, as a benefit where you put it on for employees, and they can choose whether to take it up, hence voluntary benefit. But you do also have core benefits, which are things like private medical insurance, which we would just provide for a particular grade of all employees. And they get it whether they want it or not essentially. They could opt out, I suppose, but that's the core difference.

So you can measure things like what's the take up? How are people using the benefits? Is that a good thing? So private medical insurance, that's a classic example. It's a benefit that you have in place, you want employees to use it, because it means they get back to work quicker. And so less sickness absence, and more engaged, more looked after workforce. But at the same time, some businesses kind of don't want their private medical insurance to be used too much. Because it can really tip the claims experience and ends up being very costly. So sometimes there's a balancing act, but it depends on the business as to what they think is a good result and what is not a good result.

So it's been very clear as to what do you want your reward package to do? How do we measure that? How do we measure in terms of potentially engagement? If they have an employee engagement survey that has a specific reward element? Yeah, there's lots of different ways that you can measure it, you need to think about what is the right way to measure it for that particular business. And then make sure you've got your benchmarking in the first place. You're measuring results before you do anything, and then maybe a year or however long afterwards, measuring again to see are you actually moving in the right direction.

For some reason, getting businesses to commit to this is probably one of the most challenging parts of the job, not just in internal comms, but also marketing as well. So I like to do is for the copywriting side. If I'm going to be writing a blog post a month for a company, I want to know like what's working well, what's not working? What can we do more of how many, you know, new people are coming to your website, how many downloads are you getting from gated content. So it's that same sort of approach that we would take to marketing but applying it to internal comms as well.

And so for anyone working in house at the moment in employer branding, or recruitment, marketing, what are your top tips that you can offer them? I feel like it's one of those jobs that I see come up more and more and more. So I think it's going to be more of a focus for businesses. So any tips you can offer would be fantastic.

I put in my notes, recruitment marketing often leaves a lot to be desired, which might sound a little bit harsh, but I do think we could do a lot better in the way that we advertise jobs.
So I've literally just ghost written an article on this. One of my clients, I interview CEOs, and entrepreneur in residents, it's a private equity business. It was a really interesting article, this person has really quite a rebellious streak, I would say they call it rebel recruiting, but it's all about how can we do recruitment in a different way? I'm basically going to rip off their answer. It's not my answer!

Basically, they think we need to take more of a human approach to recruitment. And I would really agree with that, because I think it can be quite process-y. It can be about getting a certain number of CVS through the door and getting a certain number of people through a recruitment process. And actually, they were saying, we just need to be more human about the whole thing. So even up front in the job description, let's say to people, here's the good stuff about the job. Equally, here's the bad stuff. Because what you really want to do is filter at that stage, you want to put people off the job if it's not going to be right for them. And that's fine to do. That's not an issue. But I think a lot of businesses would be quite wary of doing that.

To me, that seems like a very sensible approach. I mean, if you get half the number of CVS through but they're better quality, it's a win. So why wouldn't you be honest and up front?
Some of the other things were about being really flexible with the process. If a process in a fit everybody if there's somebody who you think could be a good fit, but there was an answer they gave that you weren't quite sure about and you leave the interview process thinking, Hmm, I'm not 100% sure about that one aspect of that person, could you have a 20 minute chat with them? Could you get them to talk to somebody else in the business about this and get somebody else's take? So just opening up that process and being a bit more flexible.
I think the point that I really loved was always providing feedback to everyone that you speak to. So my husband had just gone through the process of applying for jobs, it was hard work that he put a lot of time into the one of them, you know, it was a full day job, it's seven hours to do the application form. And then to get no feedback whatsoever is heartbreaking. And actually, all it takes really is 5-10 minutes after an interview to jot down five or six bullet points for somebody. And you know, you don't have to sort of tiptoe around the feedback, be honest with it, but be human. This is an individual, real person that you're talking to. But you know, always providing feedback. I just think that is really important as well. So I think there's a lot that could be done. But yeah, job descriptions for sure. Leave a lot to be desired

Yes, I 100% agree. And feedback is so important. I mean, I remember applying for jobs. And yeah, it's like a full time job, isn't it? Like applying for them when you really need one. And as you say, heartbreaking when you don't get any feedback.

Especially when somebody is interviewing you. They'll have written notes. So they've got the notes, all they need to do is pop them in an email. That's it. Yeah, it's like five minutes. Okay, you might have 20 people, but you know, what, five minutes for each person? It's what hour and a half out of your day, something like that.

I mean, people don't like giving negative feedback, perhaps that's why they don't do it.
 
I think for most people, I mean, you  want to know why you haven't got the job. If you haven't got job, it's not a good reason, you haven't got the job. So you know, there's a negative there, but not knowing what the negative is, is worse.

I think the other big thing that's actually quite a big discussion on LinkedIn, I'm sure everybody's seen that. Should we put salaries on job adverts? I say yes, yes, yes. But I can see the argument for both sides. Some people say, well, sometimes we have a range, but we'll be willing to go above the range, if you put the range on and people won't apply because they think the top of the range is at the top of the range, as it will just say it's the range, but could be negotiable. And then other people are saying, well if we put the pay range on it can be problematic for women, because they may restrict themselves, perhaps to the lower end of the range. There's all sorts of reasons why. So I understand them. But I just think put the salary out there. Because I would never apply for a job if I didn't know what the salary was. I mean, I've even phoned up recruitment agencies in the past and said, You have to tell me what the salary is. Because otherwise I'm not going to apply. And it's easy in reward because everybody wants you because there aren't very many people working in reward. So they tell, you maybe not so easy in other other areas, but just put the salary on the job description, and you're going to get people apply the right people who want that salary, not make everybody jump through hoops, waste your own time, and then they weren't going to go for anyway, because salary wasn't right. I just I don't get it.

Yeah, no, I totally agree. And I think it's one of those things that those sort of companies that aren't putting the salary on their job ads are just going to be seeing less and less applications. I think more people are becoming sort of savvy to the world of job applications and stuff. I 100% agree with you.

I'll get off my soapbox now.

Are there any challenges that you come across when you are talking to CEOs and you're maybe ghostwriting stuff for them, or you're advising them on their copy, we know that readability is so important. So do you often have to educate them around the readability of their content.

With CEOs when I'm interviewing ghostwriting, not so much because I'm I'm writing it, and then if they want to go back in and make edits and tweaks, that's fine. And then I'll just copy edit those. So quite often, I'll get feedback that's, you know, people just brain dump it down into long sentence, that's absolutely fine. Because it's not their job to write it. That's my job. That's not a problem.

But where I do see issues in terms of readability is with the stuff that HR teams have written. And again, not wanting to point the finger, you know, I didn't have the skill set when I worked in HR to write lovely, readable copy, because you're not copywriter, you're an HR specialist. So I don't think we should expect that necessarily of our HR teams, sometimes just do the things you're good at and get somebody else to do things you're not good enough.

Or if that is something that your team thinks is important, it should be a string to your bow, get trained up in it. That's the other option. Thinking of this HR policy rewrite project I'm working on at the moment. We get a lot of legal terms in there. We get a lot of very lengthy convoluted sentences, sometimes I'm reading them and I'm thinking wow, I've got 13 years in HR and I don't understand what this sentence means. And it's not just this one client that is pretty much any business I've ever worked with using things like you know, 'therefore' 'here too with' - things like that using passive voice which makes sentence structure much more complex. So trying to translate that into plain English, active voice, keeping sentences short, using basic words when we can use them. Those are really important things to do.

There's actually software out there that helps with this. I learned from copywriting that particularly when I first started out, you know you can go and even use free software you don't even have to pay for it. You can just chuck your policy into a free piece of software and it will tell you how good the readability is and over time what you'll find is that you'll get better and better and your scores will get better and better if you keep tweaking away. And yeah, using sort of good copywriting techniques, really.

So just before we wrap up, are there any clients that you'd love to talk about, any projects that you're working on at the moment you could share with us?

Yeah, so I'm doing some work with Newcastle Building Society. And it was a funny one. So I've sort of ended up going back into my old reward role, going back into my old life and doing a little bit of the reward strategy work to lay the groundwork for a reward communication strategy. Yeah, sort of had to take a step back to go forward. But that's fine. I've enjoyed it. It's been good work.

What's really exciting I think about this business is that their purpose-led. That purpose is about security and financial futures. And that really connects very closely with rewards, obviously. So there's loads of sort of strategic messaging that we can really pull on. So the purpose, the vision, the mission, the values, we can bring all of that to life through the reward package, we can think about what does that mean for employees at different stages of the employee lifecycle? What does that mean for somebody who's perhaps young out of university or an apprentice? What does a good financial future look like for them, at that point of their life? What does it mean for somebody who's about to start a family or somebody who wants to buy a house? What does it mean for somebody who perhaps developed a long-term illness, or somebody who's approaching retirement?

So it's sort of using those structures, those sort of narrative structures that I talked about earlier, that's architecture, but then also applying that employee lifecycle, melding the two together. And I think when you have a really clear vision, purpose, values, and you're very clear about what is the employee lifecycle, and what does that mean for the people that you're writing, you can pull all of that together to create some really strong and interesting employee rewards communication. So they are some projects that I'm very excited about.

Fantastic. I think that's a really lovely note to end on. If people want to get in touch with you, where can they find you?

I'm at clarioncallcommunications.co.uk or search my very long convoluted surname on LinkedIn. I think there's only one Becky Howard Haworth.

Thank you so much, Becky. It's been a pleasure.

Thanks very much.

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