The Impact of Remote and Hybrid Work on Employer Branding
Let’s state the obvious: Since the onset of the pandemic in early 2020, the working world has experienced a major shift—especially when it comes to where teams are getting their work done. According to Gallup, in 2019, 60% of remote-capable employees spent their week working fully on-site. By 2023, that number had plummeted to only 20% of remote-capable employees.
Do the simple math and that means that now 40% of employees who can work remotely are doing so, working either within a hybrid or exclusively remote arrangement.
That’s a big shift in a few short years. But while you hear plenty about the impacts of remote work on connection, collaboration, and culture, there’s another area that’s experienced major disruption as a result of more flexible work arrangements: employer branding.
Building a best-in-class employer brand in the era of blended work
Your employer brand is the company reputation you intentionally shape and cultivate, with the ultimate goal of marketing your organization to job seekers and current employees. Put simply, it’s a people-focused marketing message that says, “Hey, this is a great place to work—here’s why.”
But your employer brand isn’t just for the benefit of candidates and potential new employees. It carries a lot of weight with your existing employees too. Your employer brand communicates and reinforces your company’s culture and values, and research shows it has a huge impact on employee retention.
So it makes sense that effective employer branding carries a lot of weight, with leaders citing it as a top recruitment strategy for 2024. Yet the playbook for building a successful employer brand has changed pretty dramatically.
Only a few years ago, companies treated employer branding as an opportunity to showcase in-office perks and company togetherness. From images of your stocked snack bar and on-site gym to social posts about your annual chili cookoff, there was no shortage of fodder and content ideas to set your organization apart.
But now? Your team isn’t all in one place at the same time—and you might not even have a central office for them to come together (an estimated 37% of businesses permanently closed their office space during the pandemic).
Work has transformed from a place you go to a thing you do. Employees are now less likely to have a shared experience and are far more likely to have individual experiences from their home offices, couches, kitchen tables, or corner coffee shops.
While this offers plenty of benefits in terms of increased productivity and meeting employees’ demands for flexibility, it also presents many challenges related to developing a compelling and cohesive employer brand.
Employer branding in a hybrid world: Challenges and advantages
What kinds of challenges are employers grappling with when building strong brands in the age of distributed work? Here’s a look at several of the most notable ones. But rest assured, it’s not all bad news—flexible workplaces offer a few distinct benefits for employer branding too.
Challenges of remote work for employer branding
Maintaining culture: Remote or hybrid work also has a distinct impact on the resonance of your company culture, with only 24% of remote and hybrid workers saying they feel connected to the culture. Particularly if your culture previously relied on a lot of in-office initiatives and together time, it can be tough to figure out how to adjust those efforts for distributed teams.
Gaining visibility: Lack of visibility is an oft-cited struggle of remote work, with 85% of leaders saying the shift to hybrid arrangements makes it hard to have confidence that employees are being productive. But beyond that, it also makes it tougher to get the organizational pulse you need to craft an authentic employer brand.
Building connectivity: Workers like the flexibility of remote and hybrid arrangements, but they can also be isolating. Loneliness is one of the top challenges of remote work, and it makes it tougher to craft a brand that emphasizes inclusivity and connection when everybody is spread out.
Supporting growth and advancement: It’s a top demand of employees, with 67% of them saying they want to advance their careers. Yet only 46% of employees feel supported in pursuing career growth—and that’s especially true for remote workers who are promoted 31% less frequently than those who work in the office. Lack of development can increase turnover and make hiring harder, especially when advancement is a top factor that job seekers look for in their next roles
Offering effective onboarding: An employee’s onboarding period is when your employer brand is put to the test. Does your organization embody the vision and values you communicated during the hiring process? That’s harder to capture with remote onboarding when you’re not able to be as hands-on with new employees. Remote or hybrid setups can make an already fragile time (30% of employees leave within the first 90 days) that much more challenging.
Advantages of remote work for employer branding
Accessing global talent: Remote work means hiring is no longer limited by location, which has opened up a world of possibilities for companies looking to hire talent. Employers can engage a global talent pool, increase inclusivity, and focus on hiring for skills rather than location.
Highlighting flexibility: When looking at the top drivers candidates cite for accepting a new job offer, flexibility ranks at the top—even ahead of work-life balance and higher compensation. That makes offering remote and hybrid work arrangements a competitive differentiator. It’s a benefit that job seekers prioritize and specifically look for.
Prioritizing intention: With a remote or hybrid team, culture is no longer something that happens—it’s something you need to shape proactively. Remote work arrangements inspire leaders to be far more intentional about fostering and promoting a positive culture.
4 best practices to build a better employer brand
Remote and hybrid work models offer distinct advantages and drawbacks. So how do you reap the benefits while minimizing the downsides? Here are four strategies to build a solid employer brand in the age of remote and hybrid work.
1. Prioritize consistent communication
Distributed work shouldn’t mean detached work. Prioritizing clear and consistent communication keeps everybody in the loop, regardless of whether they’re in the office or not.
It is important to have a strong internal communications strategy in place for this. This can take shape in several different ways, such as:
Setting up an intranet to share company announcements and other important updates
Hosting a regular all-hands meeting to share company-wide information
Creating dedicated channels or office hours where employees can access leadership and ask questions
Sharing information through different mediums and across different channels, rather than over-relying on emails that are easily buried in inboxes
Organizations should also offer relevant training to managers to equip them with the tools and knowledge they need to communicate effectively with their teams—such as training on how to host successful one-on-one meetings and how to handle conversations about difficult subjects like burnout and well-being.
When 70% of managers say they have no training to lead a hybrid team, giving them the information they need to be successful boosts their confidence, improves their relationships with their team members, and ultimately benefits the company’s culture and employer brand.
2. Regularly solicit feedback
Effective communication isn’t just about broadcasting your message—listening is equally important. 82% of employees say they have ideas to improve the business but don’t feel confident enough to bring them forward.
Actively soliciting feedback from employees (through methods like surveys or conversations) allows you to tap into those insights and make relevant improvements to your company culture, candidate experience, onboarding process, and more.
Integrate feedback into your culture by soliciting pursuing opinions from:
Recent hires to gain insights into your candidate experience and onboarding experience
Unsuccessful candidates to gain insights into your employer branding materials and candidate experience
Current employees to gain insights into your company culture, leadership, and more
Exiting employees to gain insights into what about your company made them look elsewhere
In short, feedback isn’t something you should collect once per year from a specific group of people. Prioritize it at all points of the candidate and employee lifecycle. Ultimately, more information and insights means more targeted actions to improve your employer brand.
3. Encourage employee advocacy
What makes for a compelling employer brand when you can’t showcase in-office perks and team events? Employee advocacy.
Your employer brand isn’t something that should inform your employees—it should involve them. Turning them into vocal champions of your brand engages candidates while also making your existing employees feel included and valued. For example, you can ask employees to share:
Written testimonials about why they enjoy working for your organization
Video recordings talking about their career or why they chose your company
Pre-drafted social posts to promote your company and open roles on their accounts
You’ll get relevant and engaging content to include on your careers site and with your other employer branding materials while your employees gain recognition for their contributions.
4. Emphasize the right benefits
Gone are the days when you could use your office’s catered lunches and rooftop bar to swoon candidates. Those perks don’t hold much appeal if they’ll be working from home anyway. And even if your employees are working in-office, you need to dig deeper than Instagram-worthy perks.
For that reason, your employer brand should showcase company benefits and values that are relevant for all employees, regardless of where they work. This includes things like:
Clear and consistent communication to ensure alignment
Flexibility and work-life balance
Career growth, development, and upskilling
Meaningful and purpose-driven work
Supportive leadership
Competitive compensation and benefits
Not only are those things not beholden to any specific work location, but they’re also far more meaningful to job seekers than a ping-pong table or catered lunches.
Employer branding beyond the office building
Remote and hybrid work has shifted the working world—and it’s shifted employer branding too.
But one thing hasn’t changed: your employer brand matters. Arguably even more so now, when employees and candidates don’t always have a shared physical space to unite them around your values and culture.
While remote work arrangements certainly introduce challenges in crafting a strong employer brand, there are some benefits to be had too. Use the above tips and you’ll build a compelling brand that positions remote or hybrid work as a competitive distinction—not a disruption.
