What makes a good employer? According to Hewitt – keep your promises.

Details here. 

Some good news from the manufacturing front. According to the latest Australian PMI (Performance of Manufacturing Index) employment in the manufacturing sector rose for the first time in 23 months. The index grew from 44.6 points in October to 53.7 in November. Average wages in the sector also grew, with the wage index increasing by 3.3 points.

It’s heartening news for the overall economy when one of the most vulnerable sectors shows signs of recovery. 

The whole PMI series is available here.

The difference between a good and a not so good employer – reputation worth spreading.

One of the five criteria used by Hewitt to chose a winner for its annual ‘Best Employers’ award is the likelihood that an employee would willingly recommend her employer to someone else. No surprises, best employers have happy employees keen to spread the good news.

Would current or former employees recommend your company to someone else. Should you care?

Good and bad news gets amplified easily in a connected world. You really have no choice but to build a workplace that is worth recommending. It’s one of the surest way to attract talent.

Note: Hewitt is changing the format of its annual ‘Best Employers’ award to an accreditation system

It’s one thing to have a good story to tell. It is another to tell the story effectively.

Atlassian have a good story to tell. They also tell it rather honestly and convincingly.

Dig deeper and you will see Atlassian work really hard to spread their story – they blog incessantly (it looks like half their workforce have personal blogs), they tweet, they network on Facebook and upload their videos on YouTube. Isn’t it interesting, organisations that can afford to rest on their laurels are the ones that continue to work the hardest. Attracting talent is a never ending exercise.

My point is, the media landscape is fragmented like never before; the audience even more. Attention cannot be bought, it needs to be earned. You really have no choice, but to work hard at telling your story.

So, what is your story? How are you telling your story? Is your story heard?

There is a real disconnect between employers and employees on how they view social networks. A new study by Deloitte highlighted the following:

• 53% of employees say their social networking pages are non of their employers’ business
• 40% of managers disagree, and 30% admit to informally monitor social networking sites
• 61% of employees say that even if employers are monitoring their social networking profiles or activities, they won’t change what they’re doing online

It seems that an increasing number of people do not care about the consequences of their actions on social networks (refer graph).  Why is this? Amongst other things, I suspect two trends. One, social media and networks are deeply ingrained in our daily lives that it is almost impossible to separate personal affairs and work activity. Attempts at hiding or separating the two are increasingly useless.

Second, we live in an age defined by corporate failure, greed and in many cases outright dishonesty. Reputations are in tatters. The idea that employees are expected to be blemish free, when employers themselves are far from squeaky clean, does not cut anymore. My hunch is that the vast majority of job seekers, specially Gen Y, see the employee-employer relationship in a very different light.  The dominant thinking is nearer to ‘we both have flaws, let’s learn to get along’.

While I am not against drafting social network policies in the workplace, or the importance of proper background checks, obsessing on employees personal lives or behaviour on social networks is a waste of time and resources, and at times counter-productive.

My point is, we live in a hyper connected world, where barriers to information are crumbling rapidly. Inevitably, both employers and employees will increasingly know more about about each other. It is a two way street. While information about people are easily available, at the same time, more than ever, it is increasingly difficult to hide a dodgy service, a crummy product or a bad employer.  Rather than worry too much about the pitfalls of social networks, companies ought to spend their precious resources on delivering quality services or products, improve their ‘employer brand’ and obsess on creating workplaces that will attract good people. If I were an employer I would worry more about being googled than googling job seekers.