Got the t-shirt?

Six years ago, I was based in Denmark and working for a small subsidiary of France Telecom Mobile called Mobilix. Then one day I was told France Telecom had bought Orange. To provide a seamless customer experience, the company wanted to rebrand its existing mobile companies throughout Europe, Asia and Africa. I was given the responsibility for the internal part of the rebrand: winning hearts and minds; engaging employees in the change; and making them proud to be part of Orange.

In order to ensure the commitment of top management, the chief executive’s objectives and bonus were linked to her success in ‘turning the business Orange’. So how were we going to measure her success? I put this question to the company’s executive vice president of Europe and his answer was unequivocal: “I come to the Denmark office once a month. My measurement of success will be how many employees are wearing Orange-branded clothes.”

It could have been so easy. We knew exactly when he’d arrive every month so we could just hand out Orange branded t-shirts on that day and ask people to wear them. We didn’t of course, but the point of my story is that while I’m very pleased to see how many companies are beginning to work with and manage their employer brand, too many internal-branding and employer-branding activities focus on  coming up with a catch phase or strapline for recruitment ads, or only address the obvious ‘look and feel’ projects, such as changes to workspace environment.

The risk is that an holistic understanding of what engages employees is lost. When working with culture change and rebrands, the key is aiming for sustainable change to the way your organisation does business, taking into account every piece of the jigsaw. There is no one single activity that will encourage cultural and behavioural change or engage people. It’s all the little things in the day-to-day interaction with our company that, when put together, will either make us feel valued and engaged or undervalued and disengaged.

The same fallacy surrounded the concept of corporate branding when it was in its infancy. Organisations were falling over themselves to come up with a vision, mission and values. But if you fail to gain any insight into the strengths and weakness of your organisation and what your reputation is, then you run the risk of your employer brand coming across as insincere, untrustworthy or not representative of reality. This means employees and prospects will potentially become disillusioned. To help guard against this, lessons can be learned from the approach marketers take towards customer engagement. They monitor every customer interaction and ensure it is always a reflection of the company’s brand promise.

It is equally important to understand what the key areas are for your employees as well. At Bernard Hodes, we call this mapping out the touch points on the employee lifecycle, which ensures a company’s people processes and practices encourage and reward behaviours that help deliver on the customer promise and the objectives of the business. In essence, it’s about keeping the ‘service profit chain’1 intact and delivering on the expectations you create through your brands (corporate, product and employer).

A symptom of employer branding projects not being embedded in the way you do business and not being reflected in your people processes is that you find yourself asking, ‘How do we keep it alive?’ This question will only present itself if you have put all the emphasis on identifying the employee value proposition. If, however, you have approached the exercise as an opportunity to improve the way you do business, identified all the employee touch points that need to be ‘on brand’, engaged the people responsible for these touch points, and mapped out an annual employer reputation communication strategy around it, then ‘keeping it alive’ won’t be a problem.

Finally, your measurement tools must be fit for purpose. Audit your current employee survey processes (eg,  satisfaction, opinion, engagement), as well as any key performance indicators and return on investment measures, leaving out all the things that are ‘nice to know’ and focus on the ‘need to know’.

If you do this, you should be on your way to achieving your ultimate goal of engaging your employees and making them so proud you won’t have to ask them to wear the t-shirt. They’ll come to you and ask for one.

Reference

1. Heskett, J., Sasser, W. E., & Schlesinger, L;

The Service Profit Chain. New York: Free Press, 1997