| Traditionally,
Marketing and Human Resources (now variously
called People and Performance, People Capital
and People Enablement) have tended to work
separately from each other - operating essentially
within corporate functional silos and only
interfacing in any significant way during
the performance appraisal process or when
there are hiring / firing / counselling
issues.
Marketing
and HR - in a de facto sense - have even
been required to competed with each other,
as Finance routinely pruned funds and resources
from "support" functions during the annual
budget review process.
However,
this is changing quickly and radically with
the recognition that key business strategies
- with organisation-wide impact - such as
CRM and employer brand are more about creating
the right culture and attracting, retaining
and rewarding the right people, than they
are necessarily about technology and corporate
identity.
Here
the nexus between Marketing and HR becomes
compelling.
As
companies increasingly implement "employer
brand" positioning and strategies, marketers
must work with HR professionals in their
brand planning and thinking from the very
beginning -indeed, getting the internal
brand culture right first is critical before
any external brand activities; equally,
HR needs to ensure that the programs and
activities focused on sustaining an "employer
of choice" positioning interface with the
organisation's external brand strategy.
For
example, a number of the key initiatives
and measures required to create and sustain
a true brand culture across an organisation,
demand HR expertise and participation, including:
- Creating
and maintaining a synergy between corporate
and brand values
- Incorporating
core brand values into recruitment and
induction processes
- Building
brand values into KPIs as part of the
performance appraisal process and into
Balanced Scorecard frameworks
-
Recognising and rewarding behaviour and
effort which effectively "live" the brand
values
- Training
frontline and customer-facing staff in
the organisation's brand values and brand
vision.
In
terms of CRM, there is widespread recognition
that a customer-centric business model and
ethos is very much about changing and rewarding
the right behaviours amongst staff and creating
the right culture, rather than just CRM
technologies and data mining / warehousing
capabilities.
In
this equation, HR has a central role to
play with Marketing (and other business
areas) in delivering CRM.
Moreover,
within the wider CRM universe, there is
acknowledgement of the inexorable link between
employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction
(i.e." happy employees make happy customers").
Again,
Marketing and HR need to work together to
understand the drivers and influences behind
this link, and rather than treat the two
dimensions of employee and customer satisfaction
as separate elements (as has tended to be
the case in the past), recognise them as
being closely interrelated, with a corresponding
need to develop integrated strategies and
programs.
So
going forward, there are some practical
steps both Marketers and HR professionals
can take to increase mutual cooperation,
understanding and respect, such as:
- Identifying
appropriate seminars and courses (and
units of post-graduate degrees) where
an overview of key strategic Marketing
/ HR issues are addressed
- Establishing
internal education programs where HR professionals
can increase marketer's knowledge of HR
practice and vice versa (this can embrace
information on company intranets, holding
lunchtime seminars / breakfast briefings,
providing suitable reading lists etc)
- Recognising
that for major organisation-wide initiatives
(e.g. employer brand / brand culture,
CRM, employee-customer satisfaction) task
forces / project teams involving Marketing
and HR representation is essential.
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