WHY does everyone want to be the next Google? Because, apart from making billions, it also attracts the top talent. It probably has the best employer branding in the world. This is why companies from all over the world are vying with each other to establish their employer credentials. Many CEOs have it in their vision or mission statements that their people are their most valuable assets. But for many, these are just fancy words on a plaque or website.

And this is why employer branding has become increasingly important. Employees want to know which are the best companies to work for, the ones that will treat them as human beings rather than units of production. And while a company can build its brand as a good employer on its own, it helps to have independent validation.

US-based Aon Hewitt, which provides human capital and management consulting services, has been running the Best Employers awards for 17 years. Today, this programme runs across 14 markets in Asia-Pacific, including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, India, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, the Middle East,  the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand.

Managing director for Malaysia Prashant Chadha tells The Edge that the awards came about because the company did a lot of benchmarking exercises across its different leadership programmes, but was never allowed to reveal the data.

“The question we would constantly get asked is who is better than the other. And our answer would be, we can’t really share that information,” he says.

Naturally, this left Aon’s clients dissatisfied. They wanted to know where they stood and to be able to measure themselves against the best.

“And we said, okay let’s think about it. We have a lot of data, we work with a lot of organisations. So we said we could do something around that, and we came up with the best employer concept with a small group of friends of Aon — clients who were really interested in it.”

And it took off from there and grew to be a coveted award because of the distinction it conferred on an organisation. As there has been a shift from an employer’s to an employee’s market, companies need all the help they can get recruiting the best talent. And this is one way to do it.

Chadha says this is probably one of the toughest awards to win. First, it is made up of three general judging criteria: (i) the employees’ voice; (ii)  the company’s HR practices; and (iii) the vision of the leadership team.

“For you to qualify for this award, your employees have to say you are the best. You can’t say it yourself. You have got to prove it and your employees’ voice matters,” Chadha says.

For this portion of the award, the employees of participating organisations are sent a link to a survey. “It is a pretty intense survey where we give them a six-point scale — strongly disagree, disagree, slightly disagree, slightly agree, agree and strongly agree — to choose from.

“The reason there is a six-point scale is that we want them to make a decision. It’s not enough to say, ‘everything is okay’. We need a little more than that,” he says.

The best organisations are generally the ones that elicit a mix of strongly agree and agree responses to the survey questions. The average engagement score for best employer in Malaysia is 87%, which means 8 or 9 out of 10 employees are motivated and charged when it comes to the brand.

“Employee engagement is around three things: (i) what you say about the organisation; (ii) your willingness to stay in the organisation; and (iii) whether you are willing to go the extra mile for it.

“There are a whole slew of drivers around that — career opportunities, performance management, managers, diversity, health and well-being, culture and brand (both internal and external),” Chadha says.

Responses are confidential. Employees complete the questionnaire online and these responses only come to the Best Employers award team at Aon.

A lot of work goes into ensuring neutrality. “One of the things we were asked initially is, whether, if an organisation is a client, it would automatically make it a best employer. We wanted to break that [perception], so, we said that even the country lead and some of our business units would not have access to the scores.

“It is the project team that deals with it and we have an independent audit team that comes and looks into it,” Chadha says.

He hastens to add that the winner is not selected by Aon itself. “We have actually taken ourselves out of it. We get an independent panel of judges, a mix of government and locally owned organisations and MNCs [multinational corporations] to do it. We are the keepers of the data. We make sure things are confidential.”

The judges only get to see the organisations that have made a certain cut. “So, for example, if your engagement score is 50%, which means that 5 out of 10 employees feel like they want to say good things or stay with the organisation, your company won’t make the cut,” says Chadha.

Last year and the year before last, there were two organisations that made it all the way to the final cut. As it is blind judging, the judges did not know which the two companies were when they were making their selection. Any identifying information was blacked out so the companies would be judged purely on merit and not on any predisposition, positive or otherwise, towards the companies in question.

“We do tell the judges who the winners are, after everything is done,” Chadha adds.

He says there are certain measures the company uses to ensure that the respondents are not simply making up the answers. “We don’t really disclose what those are but one of them is the amount of time it takes to answer the questions. If an organisation gets high scores and we know the employees took too short a time to answer the questions, we would know they were fooling around. And they would automatically be disqualified.”

The second area Aon looks at is whether the organisation has HR practices to back up the employees’ good opinion of it. “We ask for examples and instances of where a particular practice has actually worked. So the HR team has to complete a fairly intense survey and, because of experience, if something is not right, the team will pick up on this.

“It’s like if you go to see a doctor and pretend to be okay when you are not. The doctor can usually tell if you are lying. The same goes for us. After somebody has met numerous organisations over time, you will know when something is not right,” Chadha says.

Every assertion has to be substantiated. “For instance, if an organisation says, ‘we hire only the best’, what percentage of them do you consider the best and where do you hire them from? Why do you consider them the best? Or, if you say you have the best development programmes we would ask, give us an example of what these are.”

And the third factor is the vision of the leadership team as documented through the mission values of the organisation. This is based on an interview with the CEO and validated based on media reports.

Chadha reiterates that this is a tough award to get. There is no set number of recipients. Organisations that do not qualify will not be given an award to simply make up the numbers.

“To give you an example, last year, in Malaysia only 10 organisations made it. There is no set number. You can have 100 employers, you can have 10. We tell organisations every year that we are open for participation and some of them do reach out to us.

“We do not disclose the names of the companies that participate because we generally call it a journey and we believe it is one. Because you have to learn. When you participate, you get a reality check: this is where you stand; this is where you have gaps,” he says.

There are four pillars that must be addressed. “The first is employee engagement. You find out what your employees really think of you, what they are feeling and what is the perception. The second is around the brand. How does the brand resonate with an employee or a prospective employee? What is the value proposition for an employee to join the organisation?” says Chadha.

He points out that it is still an employee’s market in Malaysia and organisations are all competing for the best talent. “What are you going to do about improving your chances of getting the right talent for your brand?”

The third pillar is around effective leadership. “What are your leaders doing today to ensure there is a base for your employees, not just to join but also to grow and be groomed through the organisation? What is the plan for your successors and high potentials? How are you growing your successors?”

Chadha explains that there is often confusion about high potentials and high performers. A high performer is someone who is performing well now but may not have the inclination or wherewithal to grow and develop into other roles. A high potential may not be a high performer at present, but is someone who, if groomed properly, could be a star.

“If you’ve got a lot of young talent that has been exiting, moving to countries like Singapore and Australia, what are you doing to ensure that those high potentials actually want to stay? That they are getting the value and development within the organisation rather than looking for it elsewhere?”

Chadha says the fourth pillar revolves around the high-performance workforce. “We’ve been talking about the high-performance workforce for the longest time. It’s like the word ‘strategy’. But do you really have a high-performance workforce?

“How are your managers groomed to actually lead performance conversations? Do they send emails? Are the leaders ready to have tough conversations, or even happy conversations? How do you move people around based on merit? What do you consider ‘merit’? What do you consider ‘performance’?”

These are some of the things that are sifted through to arrive at an organisation’s standing as an employer.

The judges do not just look at the scores. They break them down to see what they mean. “So the first thing they look at is the employee engagement scores. Say you score 85% for that. What are the scores for the other three pillars: compelling employer brand, leadership and high performance, if the other two are 83% and the last one is 60%, the question would be, why is it 60%? Is that the score across that industry?”

Chadha says the judges have to take apart each statement. For instance, if the company scored high in terms of health and well-being, they would need to look at exactly what health and well-being programmes are in place. If, for instance, the employees are happy with the screening and coverage, the judges have to get down to the basics. What screening and coverage? What is there to back up this statement? Is there a plan in place that really excites them? Is there a specific programme? Or is it just a general perception of a programme?

And then the judges look at the CEO’s vision. “Does what has been said tie in to the CEO’s vision? If the CEO says that the company wants to expand its presence in Asean, what do the development scores look like?

“If the leader is saying he wants to expand into Asean but you haven’t got a pool of folks that can actually move into those different countries and take on key roles, there is a disconnect. So the whole idea is to try and connect the dots for each one of the potential winners once they have been shortlisted, and then debate why,” he says.

For example, Chadha says, when there was a longer list of winners and the judges had to lock horns to debate the merits of each, they had to consider each in turn to see what made them shine.

“Is there something specific that they have done? What is the board talking about? If it is a public-listed company, is there a mention of it in the annual reports? Is there a people component to this or is it just the CEO’s vision? What does the chairman think?

“So, there is a fair amount of scrutiny that the judges put in. We joke about it but we do lock them in a room for the day and they can only say they are done when they have come up with the winners and there is a justification for their decision. Because you have to be able to justify it to the press,” he says.

This is because there are sometimes questions as to why one particular organisation won and not another. “Every time you have a group that wins and you choose one of them as the top winner, you will have a lot of people who say, ‘I don’t know why they got it’. So you have to be prepared.”

Chadha says organisations have to make sure that all three segments are balanced, make sense and are connected. “So you can have a really strong engagement score but if your HR practices and policies don’t work, there is a concern. Or if the CEO doesn’t buy into the whole programme and it is actually being led by HR, then it doesn’t work.

“There has to be alignment between the people organisation and the business organisation. We keep talking about HR getting a seat at the table and this is one of the ways you do it,” he says.

He adds that this can be seen in the way the award has evolved. “Today, when we announce the results, it is not just the HR person who comes to get the award. The CEO joins him or her. We have moved away from the perception that just because it is a people thing, it’s an HR thing. It’s not. It is an organisation thing. If you don’t have that support from your people, you are not going to meet the goals and objectives you have in place as an organisation.”

What does he think of this year’s candidates? “I am happy with them. The only thing is, I would have liked to see more local organisations. There is always this perception of ‘I will participate when I’m ready’. But the whole idea is for an organisation to embark on this journey and build itself up based on the gaps that have been identified in the survey process.

“It’s not a one-time write-up. It is action. You find out where the gaps are and you fill those gaps. We need organisations to say they are willing to take a shot and go from there,” he says.

The Edge is the Media Partner for the Aon Best Employers — Malaysia 2017

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