NI Water’s Employer Brand is essentially a mix of our identity as an organisation – our vision, purpose, values, culture and reputation. Our Brand and reputation is highly influential in the retention and engagement of current employees, who are proud to work for us. It is also important for the overall perception of NI Water as both an employer and an organisation through many different eyes in Northern Ireland – customers, employees, potential job applicants, business partners and other stakeholders. From the perspective of HR Strategy, however, our employer brand is most critical to the success of our recruitment and retention strategy, and is becoming increasingly important as we strive to differentiate ourselves as a destination employer and to attract and retain talent in an increasingly competitive market. Employees are increasingly seeking social awareness, business ethics and sustainable working practices in the companies they choose to work for
In 2018 HR created a new Business Excellence Awards Team with representatives across the business to identify suitable awards for us to enter to help build our brand reputation as an organisation and particularly as an Employer of Choice. Building on the company’s growing reputation for excellence recognised for many years in consistent top 5 ranking in Northern Ireland’s annual ‘top 100 companies’ and with a string of business awards, the new team expanded our record of achievement in new areas of recognition including HR. During this time, NI Water won the prestigious Queen’s Award for Sustainable Development and a host of HR awards including Best Place to Work and Best Health and Wellbeing programme in addition to other awards across the business.
Our brand reputation strategy for the next three years aims to continue to build a strongly positive perception of our organisation and our people in terms of what we do and how we do it. The purpose of the strategy is to give our current employees a well-earned sense of purpose and pride and to attract new employees to a company that they will also be proud to work for. The strategy incorporates a number of work streams: 1. Business Awards Business Awards are one of the most visible ways of building organisational reputation and they are also an acknowledgement of the contributions of or employees to the success of the company. Identifying appropriate awards to enter is an important part of building and maintaining our organisational reputation and NI Water has deliberately focused on categories such as Business Excellence (in all our areas of work), Sustainability, Great Place to Work and CSR. These particular categories reflect some of the great work that we do and help to shape public perception of our company as a reputable organisation and an employer of choice. In the next three years we will expand our entries into new areas of achievement and recognition. In recent years NI Water has earned a name for being ‘the one to beat’ in some of the most prestigious business awards and our record of achievement is impressive by any standards (See Awards Awards List)