Small businessess need an Employer Brand too

- a new frontier for the Employer Brand?

Most Employer Brand conferences are attended by delegates from large businesses, so it was a special event to be asked to talk about how the employer brand might be considered by 130 lawyers gathered at a recent NetLaw Media conference in London. While there were a few ‘magic’ or ‘silver’ circle firms present the majority were small businesses with not more than 10 partners . All the delegates were lawyers themselves, mostly senior partners facing with all the usual challenges of running a small business eg:
- cash management,
- client relationships,
- the pressure to bill (write offs can come in separate time period!),
- whether to concentrate services and build a reputation for particular expertise (in which case what to drop?)
- How and when to outsource (given the low prices for Asian work)
- Poor leadership –as one said law firms have rarely been led just managed
- How good are lawyers at being seen to deliver?
- The relationship between actual time recorded and that billed.
- Debtor management –why are lawyers last in the line to get paid?,

In addition to all that they had the impact of the Legal Services Act (coming into place in October 2011) to consider.

HR, Marketing and Communications people are naturally interested in the Employer Brand – it forms part of what is expected of them - but small businesses rarely employ such specialists. They have to live with the immediate issues and I would doubt that many of these firms have a strategic plan. Thinking ahead will be limited to a budget.

Yet small businesses do of course have an individual reputation for the working experience they offer. They will have to cope with managing that experience and they will have to recruit, engage and motivate their teams. They will also have to worry about how their business stands out versus their competitors. While they may not realise it in the mass of daily pressures they will need the insights, the planning and the implementation which an EB process can provide. We must make the case in a way which is relevant, ‘grabbable’and affordable in senior time and out of pocket cost – showing what EB management has done for a FTSE company is no substitute for that.

There is an opportunity to bring the best of EB to small businesses and we need to create the process for doing so. I suspect that there is a human as well as a commercial need – any analysis of where unfairness, prejudice and evasion or avoidance of employment law is most prevalent is likely to be found among small employers.

Simon Barrow