Key takeaways:
- Glassdoor as a Feedback Hub: Schneider Electric utilized Glassdoor as a platform for receiving candid feedback from employees, former employees, and candidates to foster transparent dialogue and allow the company to address perceptions and highlight positive aspects of working at Schneider Electric.
- Strategic Responses and Consistency: Jenna Roland’s team at Schneider Electric ensured timely and thoughtful responses to Glassdoor reviews, maintaining consistency in tone and content while avoiding sounding scripted. This personalized approach enhanced the company’s employer brand perception and reinforced authenticity.
- Data-Driven Decision Making: Leveraging insights from Glassdoor, Schneider Electric validated its employer brand strategy, utilized metrics and trends to inform decisions, supported recommendations, and aligned initiatives globally. This data-driven approach enhanced their understanding of employee sentiment and guided their ongoing employer branding efforts.
For Jenna Roland, Employer Branding Specialist at Schneider Electric, Glassdoor is an invaluable two-way communications tool. From an employer branding perspective, Jenna shared that the platform allows them to get important information about what their audience (of employees, former employees, and candidates) thinks, all while allowing them to highlight the great things about working at Schneider.
And, as someone who has been working with the platform for over five years, Jenna and the Schneider Electric employer brand team have developed and evolved their work on Glassdoor into an integral component of their global employer branding strategy.
Jenna shared that, at first, their work on the platform was just making sure they owned their page and had their branded content up-to-date.
But, as Glassdoor gained traction, Jenna and her employer branding team worked on fleshing out their strategy to make the most of the platform and improve their dialogue with their audience.
“We sat down and decided that we wanted to respond to reviews and be transparent with how we operate, motivate employees to leave reviews, and encourage conversation on there,” said Jenna. “We made that decision a few years ago, and we’ve been running with it ever since.”
She shared that, as a big company, they do a lot of internal surveys, but an external site like Glassdoor is going give more candid feedback — so she and her team want to take advantage of that insight.
The first thing her team does is ensure they respond to every U.S. review that comes in.
“We want to respond to all reviews within a month — ideally sooner,” said Jenna. “Obviously some require more thought and care as to how you go about your response.”
Jenna shared that the bulk of the responsibility for responding to reviews falls on their Employer Brand Social Media Specialist, who manages their social content creation. For most of their positive reviews, that team member provides a response based on their employee value proposition and always thanks the reviewer for sharing their experience.
“Then, for almost every review, we like to acknowledge people’s opinion,” said Jenna. “We don’t want to necessarily say we’re sorry when someone shares a negative experience, but we want to acknowledge that their feelings are valid.”
For the more challenging reviews, Jenna explained that they turn to their HR community to consult on what responses are appropriate and how to deal with sensitive situations. According to Jenna, although they handle much of the work on Glassdoor inside their team, that relationship with their HR business partners has been invaluable.
Jenna said that another key focus of their responses is maintaining consistency — without sounding canned.
“We have brand guidelines around tone that we like to follow — which is upbeat, to the point, and simple,” explained Jenna. “But it’s also really authentic to us. It’s important for us to come across as positive and understanding; we don’t want to sound too ‘corporate-speak.’”
Jenna and her team keep all of their responses in a Word Document for reference, but they are careful not to copy and paste them when they’re responding to new reviews. Jenna emphasized they want to make sure their messaging is consistent, but don’t want to fall into giving the same response to every reviewer.
They’ve also achieved consistency in their tone and content through having that singular point person on their team spearheading the responses. “It helps to have a single person or a small team that handles the responses to maintain that consistency,” said Jenna. “I’ve heard of scenarios where anyone in HR is allowed to respond, but I think that would be more difficult to manage, so we’ve shied away from that structure.”
Aside from their work responding, an important part of their Glassdoor strategy is reporting progress to the business community.
Jenna and her team put together quarterly reports where they pull information they garner that is important to them from an employer brand perspective.
For those reports, they pull the ratings and trends snapshot from global and country-specific perspectives. Then they include analytical notes for how each rating category, like business outlook or CEO perspective, changes from quarter to quarter.
Then they include a summary of the insights and different competitor comparisons that align with Schneider Electric’s business and employer brand goals.
“We will also look at different keywords in the reviews to see what they can tell us,” said Jenna. “I think there are some really important pieces of information that you can garner from that. When you see work/life balance as one of the biggest pros and cons, that means you have an inconsistent experience for your employees. And that’s important to note for leadership and HR.”
Jenna said that a lot of the insights they receive from Glassdoor help to validate their employer brand strategy and recommendations.
“As the employer brand team, we have a pretty good pulse for how the business is feeling,” explained Jenna. “But seeing those instincts reflected in the data from Glassdoor helps us know that we’re on the right track and backs up what we’re saying to leadership.”
She explained that, through their strategy, they’ve been able to use metrics from Glassdoor as a source of valuable information to support employer brand decisions. “We sometimes struggle to find valid data to support us, but since Glassdoor is such a large, reputable data source, it allows us to make informed, analytical decisions,” explained Jenna.
For the next step of their Glassdoor strategy, Jenna wants to roll out a lot of their U.S. tactics globally.
“We’ve been doing it longer in the U.S., and so that strategy is a little more fleshed out,” said Jenna. “But not all of the reviews that come into your organization are from the same place.”
She explained they want to make sure their global teams are following suit in their responses and are taking advantage of the opportunities that Glassdoor provides.
“And those global scores affect our overall score as well, which is the first thing that people see,” she said. “There’s only so much you can do from one geographical location to the overall score.”
They also plan to continue looking for opportunities to increase the number of reviews being submitted on the platform.
“You don’t want to over-survey people,” said Jenna. “But we want to continue to make sure our general employee population is more active and present in social media, because the more reviews you have, the more authentic and true the experience looks.”
According to Jenna, it’s important they keep up the dialogue with their employees internally to remind them to submit these reviews and talk about their experiences so they can instill it in Schneider Electric’s culture.
“When you’re not asking for reviews, you’re going to get people who were upset or people who have a truly exceptional experience,” explained Jenna. “You’re not going to get the people who are casually happy unless you ask.”
Jenna shared her best advice for getting started on Glassdoor is to know your own message and speak authentically to that.
“Responding to reviews is, I think, a great place to start,” said Jenna. “It’s a great way to promote yourself and makes an avenue for a two-way conversation. It allows you a way to be present and have a voice in the conversation that’s going on around you and gives people a view of who you are as an organization.”
She also advised taking what you learn and sharing it with your organization so they can be more informed on what the external perception is of your company. “If the people on your employer brand or recruitment marketing team know about it, that’s great, and it can lead you in the right direction,” said Jenna. “But the information is also valuable to your whole organization.”
