The Bull(ish) Pull - Employee Word-of-Mouth

In marketing it is said that ‘there is no better publicity than word-of-mouth’. When a marketer talks about his product/service you tend to believe some and discount some, but when your customers start talking good about your product/service it becomes much more believable. In technical terms the latter, where the customer publicizes the product, is known as ‘below the line’ or ‘pull marketing’.

‘The founder of Red Bull used pull marketing to promote his original product in the 1980s. He hired a Red Bull Wings Team to go out and talk to people one-to-one about the product. This helped to create consumer interest in the product. As people experienced the drink and appreciate its qualities, they became advocates for the brand. They shared their opinions with other consumers when they talked with friends. The promotion therefore created a ripple effect.’

Similarly the best publicity for a company’s employer brand is the voice of the employee. Puneet Bajwa, my ex-student and now a proud HR generalist at Tata Consultancy Services showed-up the other day partly by coincidence, partly by design, at my office. A customary question whenever we meet any of our past students is how are they doing? This question of mine was met with a very enthusiastic response from Puneet. She was gung-ho about her workplace and her manager. Her excitement about her organization made me to probe deeper into her experiences that ‘engage’ her so highly to her organization. My curiosity was even more since I had done a case on how TCS engages employees through a performance driven culture in my 2011 book ‘Employee Engagement’.

Puneet’s feeling about her company are so genuine and brimming-over that I just had to sit back and listen. Talking to Puneet was discovering even newer perspectives about the way TCS engages it’s employees. TCS comes-out as a very employee-friendly organization, and even more than that, a very female employee-friendly organization. Besides the usual stuff that companies generally do to engage women employees, TCS does something wonderful. It educates young mothers, amongst its set of employee, on the challenges of the early growing years of their child and the importance of spending more time with their child. The company even offers less demanding roles to such women, should they chose that way, so that they can attend to the needs of their infant child. These women employees are can later choose more demanding roles, once they feel that they can give more attention to their work.

As a HR generalist she manages the entire lifecycle of employees, her other counterparts. She was equally appreciative of her present and past managers. The support and the kind of opportunities that she received from her managers was ‘simply fabulous’, according to her. Her manager was responsible for letting her take early responsibilities in her career, that helped her to make her mark and create a space for her in the organization. Such support from managers (also read supervisors in PMS context) is not very common if research statistics are to be believed. Considering such facts, Puneet’s excitement is understandable.

I asked Puneet what are the top 5 things that she liked about her organization. She took 5 seconds to tell me these 5 points –

1. Great Manager (supervisor).

2. Autonomy at work.

3. Her role.

4. Compensation *

5. An Empathetic organization.

In my mind I thought that what better promotion of TCS’s employer brand can happen than an employee doing a voluntary publicity.

An engaged employee is not only the best brand ambassador that a company can have, through him/her it can perhaps garner the best zero cost, high impact publicity. And with social media around, the word-of-mouth may reach millions in seconds. Need I emphasize more…!!!