As part of employer brand awareness week, we’re celebrating how we create and communicate why Stonebridge is a great place to work. As part of the launch of our new careers website, we’ve been sharing stories of our colleagues and what they love about working here.
We’ve heard from our CEO Darren, and colleagues from across the whole of our business, whilst confirming that it’s not all work and no play for us. We have regular fish and chip days on-site (who doesn’t love a fish and chip supper?), we’ve celebrated the Queen’s Jubilee with lots of cake and bunting, and we’ve held quizzes that help us learn more about each other, and the business (who knew our senior technican had arm wrestled Whitney Houston and played darts with Elkie Brooke, and Justin Bieber follows one of our planners on twitter)!
We’ve been building houses for 12-years (although many of us have worked in the industry for much longer than that – the tales we could tell!) and over the last few years the word ‘brand’ has never been more important, but not just in terms of ‘this is our logo’; it goes much deeper than that. There’s a newer perception of the term ‘brand’ and it’s all about us as people – your personal brand…our employer brand…your employee brand…our internal brand – the list goes on.
But how does this fit into our daily lives, and that of our employees? The Stonebridge brand connects our organisation’s values, our people strategy and policies, and it is directly linked
to everything we promote and say about our company brand. We stand for pride, passion, teamwork and excellence and we strive to live by these values daily (although like a halo, sometimes our hard hats may occasionally slip). But we try, and we mostly succeed but we realise that none of us are perfect.
A lot of businesses focus on external promotion of their company, but internal stakeholders are every bit as important, if not more so. How we brand ourselves internally helps to create and nurture a family feel to our workplace where employees feel a part of something that is more than just a place where they work.
We’ve had to adapt our branding and the way we communicate to reflect the way our roles have changed during covid, and embrace a different way of working where the most contact we had with our colleagues was via a computer screen. But we’ve survived and we might just be a bit stronger because of that. Stonebridge Homes is a great place to work and we have a fun culture. We know that our people are our strongest asset and we reward that accordingly with decent salaries (that we openly advertise), hybrid working, company bonus scheme, pension, private healthcare, professional development and career opportunities, and lots more benefits that you can find on our website.
And if you needed any further persuasion of the power of employee branding… According to Edelman Trust Barometer Well, the employee voice is
“3x more credible than the CEO’s when it comes to talking about working conditions in that company.”
Several surveys have found that over 90% of people looking for jobs took an employer’s brand into account when applying for jobs.