Your Employees ARE Your Brand
You work hard on your brand. It’s your identity, the way you present your company to the world, the way you sell your products and services, the way you tell your story and court investors.
But how often do you turn your brand inward?
Most of the time, when we are flexing our brand through marketing and advertising or speaking engagements, we are facing outward. We are, almost by definition, talking to people who are not a part of the company. They are outsiders who we are trying to charm.
But too often the brand that we work so hard to show to the outside world is disconnected from the internal brand that we cultivate.
What is it like to work for your company? What is it like for your people to wake up in the morning and think, “Time to head to work.” Is that a moment of excitement or a moment of dread? Or even worse… a moment of “eh”?
Your employees are your brand.
Your employees are a group of people who spend a great deal of time working for you. But when they’re not at work, they are out there in the world. They are at cocktail parties and restaurants and concerts and soccer games and baby showers and weddings and family get-togethers.
Because work is such a large part of our lives — according to the Labor Department’s Time Use Survey, Americans spend as much time working as sleeping — when we are not working, we often end up talking about work. “How are things at work?” “Where do you work?” “What do you do?” These questions are a part of the standard playbook of casual conversation.
And those casual conversations are happening all the time with each of your employees. Depending on the size of your company, you may have hundreds or thousands of brand ambassadors out in the field on any given day talking casually about your company and your culture and your brand.
Let’s look at two scenarios:
The Potential Damage
If you are not spending time caring for your people, investing in their development and career growth, rooting out toxic cultural elements, ensuring that the hiring process is enjoyable and informative, that the onboarding process is engaging and supported, you are setting the stage for these brand ambassadors to cast your company in a negative light.
Sure, it’s possible that clients won’t care about whether or not employees enjoy working for you as long as the product or service is solid. But more and more, companies that practice Corporate Social Responsibility are becoming the places that top talent is interested in working and that clients look to hire. Consider what Susan Cooney, head of global diversity, equity and inclusion at Symantec says about CSR: “The next generation of employees is seeking out employers that are focused on the triple bottom line: people, planet and revenue.” (What is Corporate Social Responsibility, Business News Daily, 6/8/18)
The Potential Upside
If you are spending time and resources caring for your people, you will have an eager fleet of brand ambassadors out there in the world saying great things about your company and what it’s like to work there… every day!
So what can that do for you? For one thing, it reinforces what you are trying to tell the world through your marketing and advertising and eliminates the potential disconnect or even discrepancy between those two avenues of communication.
But beyond that, it begins to build a pipeline for talent. People are always on the lookout for the next great gig (now more than ever if the statistics about the gig economy are to be believed). That requires keeping one’s eyes open and listening for cues. “What? Your company is a great company to work for? Hmmmm. Maybe I should check them out.”
Once you’ve got people looking at your company and becoming interested in working there, you’ve got the luxury of being able to pick and choose who you hire (as opposed to taking what you can get). Before long you’re getting the best talent. And talent begets talent. The more top talent you attract, the more top talent you’re going to attract.
“talent begets talent”
And the more talented your people are, the better work you produce, the better reputation you get for your product or services, the more you charge… you get the idea. Ultimately, investing in your people’s happiness does translate to your bottom line. Moreover, you are running a company where people are happy!
“Having a reputation as a good employer — one who cares enough to provide training — is great both for hiring new employees as well as how customers see you. Word gets out about who is good to work for, and that can affect sales as well as the hiring process.” (5 Reasons You Should Be Investing in Employee Development, Inc.)
We at CultivateMe talk a lot about talent retention — investing in your people to keep your best talent around. We talk about it as a moral imperative. We talk about the replacement costs for hiring new people and about the negative cultural impact of losing great people (and having everyone else think to themselves, “Hmmmm… Should I be thinking about leaving, too?”).
And all of those are important pieces of the puzzle when you are thinking about the value of investing in your people.
But it may be that the brand ambassador angle is the best case of all for investing in the happiness (as defined by ongoing engagement, challenge and growth) of your people. If they are happy, they spread the word that this is the place to be if you want to be happy. And then it becomes a magnet for people who want to be engaged, challenged and grow.
Here’s your challenge: Find out what your people say when they are out and about and are asked the question, “How is it to work [for your company]?” Are they saying what you’d be saying as a leader and true-believer? Or are they implying that things are fine but that they are totally open and maybe even actively looking for better opportunities?
We at CultivateMe are fascinated with the way people work now, the way people wish they could work and how we can build the bridge to the new world where learning and work are two parts of the same whole. Send me an email at doug@cultivateme.xyz.
If you’d like to learn more about CultivateMe and the way we are turning companies into communities, check us out at cultivateme.xyz.
