Best & Worst in Employer Branding: February 2022
Episode two of Best & Worst features a tiny company’s generosity toward its staff and a massive company’s vindictiveness toward exiting employees. Watch as the world of employer brand reputation cracks in two when the warmest feelings and the coldest feelings meet.
The best: Yolk Recruitment Ltd takes its staff on a four-day vacation
Welsh company Yolk Recruitment Ltd is taking its entire 55-person staff on an all-inclusive four-day vacation to Tenerife in the Canary Islands. NPR reports that even staff who joined in January and February of this year are invited to go.
Yolk says the trip is about showing appreciation to their employees who put in so much work during the pandemic. It’s also garnered the tiny company—which, we should note, has sixteen open jobs at the writing of this article—impressive press coverage from NPR, the BBC, and a long list of international outlets.
This is a concrete example of a company walking the talk of employee appreciation. Few organizations will be able to compete with an offer like this one, but I’d really like to see them try. Employers have to compete for candidates the same way they compete for customers.
The only drawback is that you have to go on vacation with your coworkers, and there are some things you just can’t unsee.
Reminder on employer sponsored vacation etiquette: you will see these people again (Photo via Giphy)
The worst: Goldman Sachs gets petty
On the opposite end of the niceness spectrum, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon was reportedly so angry about departing workers that he tried to take back bonuses, and even vested stock options, from employees leaving the company.
Here’s what happened: Earlier this year, a high-level employee who had spent his entire career at Goldman left the bank along with one of his staff to work for a startup. According to Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs is “exploring” confiscating these employees’ vested stock. On top of that, Solomon pulled the ultimate mean-girl move and banned the two employees from company alumni events.
Goldman Sachs rebranding as Coldman Sachs? (Photo via Giphy)
So why is this happening? Wall Street has been bleeding executives for two years and Goldman is panicking. In a frenzied attempt to retain employees, the bank is trying to enforce non-compete clauses and strip employees of legitimate rewards when employees go to pretty much any other company, even those that aren’t competitors.
What’s ultimately happening is that Goldman is turning their workers into hostages, not employees who want to stay.
I hate that I have to say this, but apparently I need to: Retaliation is not an employee retention strategy.
Wall Street banks don’t exactly elicit the warm fuzzies among the American rank-and-file workforce, and the plight of investment bank executives aren’t likely to pull on heart strings, but if this is what they’ll do to their elite, how can regular employees expect to be treated?
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance writer based in Richmond, VA, who writes about workplace culture and policies, hiring, DEI, employer branding, and issues faced by women. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Fast Company, and Food Technology, among others, and has been syndicated by MSN and The Motley Fool.
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