Employer Brand: Your People Are Your Greatest Brand Asset
This conversation isn’t new. People have been talking about building strong cultures, servant leadership, and empowering employees for decades. Yet, even with years of research and conversations, it’s not surprising that many companies have fallen short in building the cultures they want. 📉
That’s because this work is hard. We know from firsthand experience.
The challenges in building a healthy and resilient culture are proven by the simple fact of how long we’ve been pursuing this goal.
Simply put, culture building takes time, and the work never ends. With millions of employees leaving the workplace, there has never been a more important time to prioritize this work and re-recruit your people.
What Employer Brand Is
Our Employer Brand designs an employee experience* that builds and maintains employee alignment – an integral component of Brand Culture.
It is a human-centered, purpose-driven approach to engage employees.
Employer Brand consists of four components.
Positioning: getting clear on the value you offer as an employer
Values: expanding your values into action
Architecture: building systems and structures that empower your team
Language: crafting stories and vocabulary that create shared understanding
*The employee experience is the journey your employee takes in your organization. It includes everything that happens along the employee journey, specifically the experiences that involve an employee's role, workspace, leadership, and wellbeing.
Think of Employer Brand as taking your Brand Heart and transforming it into meaningful action for both leaders and employees.
Why Employer Brand Matters
Employees are looking for a sense of purpose, belonging, and impact. A recent McKinsey survey found that 70% of employees said that their sense of purpose is defined by their work.
As employers, you're being called to do the hard work of building cultures where these desires are met. To stay competitive, there isn’t an alternative.
In today’s world, you can’t predict what the next quarter will bring.
Resilient brands are brands that can adapt and still act in ways that are aligned with their purpose, values, and vision. When there is a shared understanding of what these fundamental brand components look like in action, your team can navigate challenges in on-brand ways – even producing quality outcomes during turbulent times.
Employer Brand benefits include the following:
Shared understanding
Aligned decision-making
Retention of the right people
Recruitment of the right people
Increased trust, innovation, creativity
Shared accountability
Once in place, these benefits begin to compound into brand cohesion. And when brand cohesion is present, teams experience less burnout and achieve goals faster – ultimately leading to increased impact, equity, and loyalty.
How We Do Employer Brand
In the Brand Development Process, we set out on a path toward authentic brand consistency. We do this through conscious branding, which is the act in which both our team and the client practice self-awareness of the culture we’re designing.
Alongside our strategic partners, who are formally trained in psychology and experienced management consultants, we create a scaffolding to kickstart your culture journey.
Positioning
Objective: to align your brand as an employer with the right employees
When we approach employer positioning, we start by answering, “When your brand is at its best (which is living out your Brand Heart), what are we offering our team?” We know you can’t be for everyone as an employer, so we want to focus on what type of person, based on motivations and values, will be a good fit.
We then craft a belief statement that communicates what your brand believes about your work and how that makes you different from other brands. Your team must align with every aspect of this belief statement.
Values
Objective: to identify on-brand behaviors to build a true values-based culture
Shared values in an organization are important because they provide a map of how your team is expected to behave. As important as it is to name these values, it is more important to define behaviors that support them – what we refer to as operationalizing values. Through clear behavior expectations, employees begin to embody the values and consumers feel them.
Purpose-driven brands go beyond naming, defining, and operationalizing values. They determine what reaching and exceeding expectations look like for each behavior, so your employees are clear on what you’re asking them to do. For example, ‘I bring the right energy into the room’ can mean many things to many people. Being clear about what expectations are for behaviors, sets your team up for success.
Finally, we dig into how to normalize the right behaviors. Here we concept unique behavior tools for your team, invite leaders to model on-brand behavior, and practice active feedback to empower and hold each other accountable.
Architecture
Objective: to support your team in producing quality, on-brand outcomes
When designing architectures, we start with the understanding that employees are your greatest brand asset. Because of this understanding, we approach architecture with the goal that the systems and structures of your organization should work for your people and not against them.
Simplifying systems involves turning complexity into carefully designed ways of working that feel simple and support your employees to do their best work with ease and clarity. When structure and systems provide clarity, ambiguity and doubt are lessened, resulting in more headspace and energy left to be spent on creativity and problem-solving. We do this through exploring hierarchy, teams, and decision-making.
We then move into the intangible of architecture: psychological safety and how to go about fostering it. With psychological safety in the workplace, your employees feel comfortable being themselves and bringing their full selves – and therefore full potential – to work.
Next, we review the employee experience. This section is centered around developing autonomous employees, so your team can contribute to the brand in a big way. The key to fostering autonomy in your people is entrusting, engaging, empowering, and accountability. We walk through what these look like in action for your brand.
Lastly, we review incentives to make sure they convey what your brand stands for. Everyone is different, so creating a plan that is specific to each individual’s needs is best for optimal performance. Nevertheless, we explore general guidelines you can use to create individual plans.
Language
Objective: to create shared language that calls employees to action
Consistent use of internal messaging has the power to shape the way we work.
Stories are accounts that give power to our present realities. As Brené Brown said, “You either walk inside your story and own it, or you stand outside your story and hustle for your worthiness.” Articulating and owning your story is essential to leading and calling employees to action. For this reason, we start this section by crafting an origin story.
We then concept internal mantras to remind your team what’s important to your brand. Frequent use of internal mantras keep your priorities top of mind for the organization. For example, ‘what we do is important, but how we do it matters most’ reminds our team that leading with our values and how we tackle our to-do list is more important than the items on our to-do list.
To wrap it up, we build a glossary of words unique to your brand. Words have the power to drive connection and conversation in a way that highlights what your brand values. When a team is aware of how they should speak to each other and consumers, you further align your culture with your values.
Ready to take your team to the next level?
