Seven Things We Learned at the GPTW Conference

As the Canadian Consulting partners to Great Place to Work^© Institute, Blu Ivy Group attended the annual Great Place to Work^©Conference earlier this month. We’re so glad to have had the opportunity to trade notes with many inspirational Canadian leaders. Here are a few notable philosophies that bubbled up during discussions at the event.

Seven Things We Learned at the GPTW Conference

1. Smart investors look to the culture & vision of an organization as much as, if not more than, the product or service and current balance sheet to determine the long-term viability of a business.

2. Award winning cultures are built through executive commitment. Best employer status can necessitate a CEO spend as much as 90% of their time focused primarily on the culture and vision of the organization (yes, 90%!).

3. Culture should be a line item on your budget, independent of your budget for HR administration, if you have true intention to achieve best employer status.

4. The millennial generation will surpass boomers by 2017 – only 2.5 years from now. In 7 years they will have replaced the boomer generation in the workplace. Companies that remain process oriented and hierarchical in design, lack transparency, and focus on top down communications and problem solving will continue their struggle to build cultures that attract, retain and engage this critical talent pool.

5. Social media communications can no longer be a wait and see strategy. Social is no longer a platform for product branding alone and is now outpacing traditional media consumption. If millennials trust people over brands, and seek transparent cultures and higher purpose, companies need to invest in strategies that communicate their employer brand culture in a manner that appeals to this culture – and they need to do it today.

6. Your customer experience can never be better than your employee experience, as employees transfer their attitude and emotions to clients in both deliberate and inadvertent ways. In order to deliver consistent, delightful and branded customer experiences, the employee experience must be perfected.

7. Your assets must be safeguarded. To borrow from the great President of SAS, Jim Goodnight – if 95% of your business assets drive out of the parking lot every night, you had better be convinced that you have the right amount of energy, strategy and alignment to ensure that they enthusiastically come back through the doors tomorrow.

We are passionate about our work and it was wonderful to see that many of the Blu Ivy Group employer brand strategies truly are driving great workplace cultures in Canada, as featured during the conference.