The office as your employer brand — lessons from Urban Sports Club
Sarah Briddon, Employer Brand Lead at Urban Sports Club
Building a strong employer brand is essential to a company’s success. By creating a compelling narrative around a company, employers are more likely to attract the best talent and to keep employees engaged. We spoke to Sarah Briddon—the Employer Brand Lead at Urban Sports Club—who shared her expertize in employer branding strategy.
Sarah started her career working in Music PR and communications. She joined SoundCloud in 2014 as a people and recruitment specialist—gaining experience from these roles that supported her shift into brand strategy. “From an employer brand perspective, you definitely need to have a people and human-centric approach,” she explained.
Since then, she has shaped the employer brand identity for some of the biggest players in the Berlin startup scene. Sarah first worked in employer branding at SoundCloud, after transitioning from recruiting and people. She went on to develop the global voice of N26 employer branding, before moving to Urban Sports Club in late 2019.
Learning why employer branding is important
Before we got further into our discussion, we asked Sarah what she understood employer branding to mean. “Employer branding is the identity of the company as an employer—so it's your reputation, it’s your value proposition to current employees, and future employees,” she said. But better recruitment and employee engagement isn’t the only role of employer branding.
As consumers are increasingly concerned with social responsibility, one of the most important employer branding trends is authenticity. In the age of cancel culture (see the recent backlash against Oatly over a new investment deal), companies are expected to live up to the image they project:
“Now it's also customer centric. If you don't treat your employees well, then it's front page news for some big corporations, and that will be detrimental to your business goals.”
Covid-19 has made this even more apparent. During corona, employer branding has been tested through companies’ responses to the crisis—Sarah mentioned Airbnb's support for laid-off staff as one example of how companies can maintain a positive brand identity while making tough decisions.
Developing effective employer branding for startups
We wanted to know how Sarah went about developing the Urban Sports Club employer branding strategy. She told us the first step in kicking off any brand is to create an employee value proposition—she had to find out “why people are proud and motivated to work at Urban Sports Club.”
This meant talking to employees at all levels of the company to clarify three points: “what's unique, who we are, and what are we standing for.” This will then be fed back to the employees for validation, before being developed into a set of brand guidelines and accompanying messages.
“Branding encompasses everything across the business… The main thing for me is to really align [the employer brand] not just with talent acquisition efforts, but with how to achieve business goals.”
Measuring employer branding impact
Sarah knows “building a unique, strong employer brand takes time,” but there are ways companies can measure the effectiveness of their brand efforts. At Urban Sports Club, she uses different metrics for evaluating impact, based on the audience.
To measure external brand performance, Sarah tracks recruitment metrics, such as the time it takes to fill a position, candidate quality, cost per hire, and Net Promoter Score. She also measures engagement with the content Urban Sports Club publishes on social media, and explained how to improve employer branding through personal storytelling:
“If you create human content that evokes emotion, you should be growing your follower base and have an increase in engagement… We've just hit over 10,000 followers on LinkedIn—that was such an achievement after creating the account under a year ago.”
Internally, employee engagement is measured through internal surveys. Surveys act as “a pulse check on the business and the culture… These are key for any company to manage employee experience.”
Evaluating the role of the workplace in employer branding
We wanted to hear Sarah’s thoughts on the role of greenery in creating a great workplace. She told us that the Urban Sports Club headquarters has a huge number of plants in their reception area—“I’m not a designer but that was a conscious choice. Plants play an integral role in employer branding.”
Having greenery in the office comes with other benefits beyond furthering an employer brand. “To have plants around you is going to support employee well being, and that will have a big impact on personal productivity, leading to business productivity as well. So I'm 100% an advocate… Everyone needs plants.”
Plantclub.io provides you and your colleagues with the benefits of plants, wherever you work. Rent office plants and transform your space into a green oasis, with flexible monthly membership options to suit your size. Diversify your employee perks with a dedicated company store, where you can give green gifts and your team can buy plants for their home office. Book a time to chat with us today.