For many that go through this, it's hard to escape an unspoken level of silliness and absurdity -- it's like the company trying to apply a topical medicine (like Neosporin) to fix a deeper, more involved sickness, like depression or pneumonia.
But there's another part of this equation that gets hidden, swept over by the decorum of not being to vocal or outspoken in the face of management when they hold the purse strings of your livelihood (or the other aspects of the culture that drove the idea of the consultant group in the first place). In essence, this is brand alignment problem.
Brand Alignment in the Context of Employees
You can find a lot of definitions and explanations of brand alignment with a quick Google search. In essence though, brand alignment is all about being what you say you are. For example, if your message is that your products are high quality goods, but in reality, your products are poorly manufactured and often break, you have a brand alignment problem. It's an inconsistency between message and factual reality.
The most fundamental aspect of this brand alignment equation that you have to understand is, there is no escaping reality, no escaping the truth that lives outside of the message. You can scream and shout, pay for massive advertising, social, viral, guerilla, -- choose your marketing buzzword, it doesn't matter -- if your products are poor quality, the reality of your brand identity will not be "quality products". In short, a key component of brand alignment is about what you do, not what you say.
Another important aspect of brand alignment is the idea that employees are essential to expressing the company's brand, that in their interaction with customers and the rest of the world, employees are the ambassadors and evangelists for your brand. In that respect, you'll find a number of brand alignment posts that talk about how important it is for companies to provide brand training to their employees.
But here's the thing about training. You can teach employees your company's brand message, but if the relationship with the business isn't aligned to that message, the words are hollow. To quote three questions from this Ignyte Brands post on brand alignment:
Do my employees feel appreciated? Are they invested in the success of the brand? And, most importantly, do they feel like an integral part of the brand story?This essential element of brand alignment may be one of the most underappreciated, misunderstood aspects of branding and brand identity. Not just that, but it probably provides some key insight into whether a business is performing at it's full potential. Consider, apathetic employees may "meet expectations" and execute their duties within the framework of the required tasks, but uninspiring environments are not going to motivate them to go above and beyond. And, if the business' relationship with employees is simply "competitive salary, competitive benefits", don't kid yourself into thinking that this is operating as an effective motivation engine for brand enthusiasm.
The underlying framework of "competitive salary, competitive benefits" is an HR organization that has basically done their version of competitive research and distilled it down to a set of features that they can match without much risk. That's not product design. If I tell you that making a "Me Too" physical product won't win you any business, most people understand that. But when you put that framework around HR, compensation, hiring and retention, suddenly you'll find a lot of people claiming that business doesn't work that way.
In some respects, you can blame HR and the people that run that department for this. Human Resources is not marketing, and they're not used to looking at things through that lens. I can't tell you how many times I've had to work with HR people and, in discussing even something as straightforward as writing descriptive promotional text about the company, found them unable to to produce something more than a copy/paste version of some other company description they found. They're unable to differentiate the company or even put together a basic framework of a story about what makes the opportunity interesting and why you'd want to work there. If your HR person can't sell your company to prospective candidates, how can you expect to have success in hiring and retention?
You've Got A Lot of Nerve To Say You Are My Friend...
Human Resources is Not Your Friend
If you search this term, not only will you find numerous articles written on various aspects of this, you'll also find horror stories of people who sought help from their HR department, only to discover that the HR group was either no help, or worse.
If human resources can't position the company, if they can't produce a compelling framework for why you'll want to work there and if, in the day-to-day work environment, they are not your friend -- how can you expect them to contribute to building a culture of evangelists in your company? Cute newsletters? Internal events? Imagine trying to sell prospective hires on the unique excitement they'll experience because your company also has a summer picnic. Or hosts a pizza lunch for everyone, occasionally. Rah rah rah!
Can you see start to see the framework of issues that are potentially eroding employee enthusiasm for a company -- the elements that are contributing that brand alignment problem?
Another tool that's sometimes referenced in marketing is the Net Promoter Score. For the HR people that might be reading this, here's a link that helps explain Net Promoter Score and how it's calculated. To summarize, rating your feelings about a company on a scale from 0-10, how does the company stack up? Within that calculation, it's important to understand that 0-6 are "detractors", 7-8 are "passives" and 9-10 are "promoters". If the best you can muster from your employees is, what might seem like an average 5 or 6, those people are actually detractors. How's that "competitive salary, competitive benefits" doing for you now?
One thing that I've often heard from HR departments here in the valley is that, "we'll we can't compete with Google. We can't have our own cafeteria, laundry, etc." But the problem is, they're looking specifically at these benefits like features you might offer -- or try to match -- instead of looking at the their constituent base and identifying what would be useful and compelling for them. This is why some of the culture and compensation documents that have come out of Netflix are so interesting.
But even with individual benefits and compensation, you've created a communication framework with your employees. For example, while I've worked with organizations that negotiate a basic package of health insurance coverage and pass some percentage of those costs onto the employee. I've also worked with companies that covered 100% of health insurance costs because, as they said, these are our employees and we want to take care of them. Which message resonates better with staff? Which is more likely to be something that people might evangelize about?
What Message does your Salary and Compensation Package Communicate?
Although salary and compensation are not typically viewed in a messaging context, compensation represents a direct message of employee value by the company to the employee. That being said, many businesses expect that, by implementing a "competitive" salary framework, they have matched a feature and taken that off the table. But what about companies with salaries on the low side? Here's a quick hint, when you're interview process delivers "final stage" candidates and you're making offers -- if some percentage of them choose not to accept, you probably have a compensation problem. Going through a series of interviews is not an uninvolved process on the part of your hiring candidate, so (put in a sales and marketing context), having people drop out of the pipeline at that point should raise a flag. What's more, it should also raise flags about the people who accept -- do they feel under-compensated, but didn't negotiate well or signed on with some sense of desperation?
All that being said, you'll find studies about compensation and salary that offer a few caveats. First, while some people are particularly focused on salary, not everyone is. Additionally, I've seen another salary study that basically said, if people are paid enough, they don't really worry about salary. Rather, the key driver for them tends to be about meaningful work. In that way, I think the key thing to take away with respect to salary is that, while there is no magic bullet for communicating positively through salary and compensation, there are many potential negative messages and wrong turns that a business can make.
Negative, under-compensation messages aren't limited to hiring though. Consider the annual performance review. If the percentage increase a company awards an employee is less than the cost of inflation, the "increase" is still conveying a negative message. Remember the story of Paul Ryan tweeting about the $1.50 per week increase the secretary at a high school got from the Republican tax plan -- enough to pay her Costco membership for the year? When he read that, he was seeing "increase", but what the secretary (and the rest of the world) was writing about was the insignificance of the amount. In Net Promoter terms, she was a detractor -- moved to the point of being vocal about her dissatisfaction.
How Do You Make Employees Promoters?
First, consider the start-up. Start-ups jobs often include company equity -- stock options. In that way, most people working for start-ups are, in essence, partial owners of the company. Often, they will accept a lower salary number with the hope that their efforts will vest in a longer term, larger pay-off. To accept that position, they must buy into the idea of the company, into the potential for it's success.
Another aspect of the start-up that may be even more significant in terms of aligning employees with the company and the brand is the framework by which corporate goals are defined. For start-ups, goals are often simple, tangible, and with a clear purpose. For example, during one business review meeting at one start-up I worked at, they told us, "right now, if everything holds steady, we have enough money to keep operating through to the end of the year." Beyond the long term goal of trying to make the company successful, this set a simple framework -- find customers, grow the business, or we're out of runway.
Contrast this with the goals defined by established businesses like, "last year our business made $200 million, this year we need to make $250 million." There's no why. For the average employee, there's no clearly defined requirement to do anything different than the previous year, no driver to act. Imagine the employee that made an extra effort to help the company hit the $200 million goal -- does $250 provide any meaningful framework for matching or exceeding the efforts that they just made?
For public companies, stock purchase programs and option awards can help provide employees a sense of ownership in the company. This can help mitigate some of the emptiness of arbitrary corporate financial goals. In it's simplest sense, owning stock in the company means that, if the company is worth more, your portfolio is worth more. You own a piece of that and your efforts are an investment in making it worth more.
In this aspect, there's a correlation between the size of the company and the ease of aligning employees with organizational messages. Smaller is easier. It's a lot easier to connect and align employees with corporate goals in smaller organizations. As organizations grow, people become more removed, more alienated, more disconnected from the influence, impact, and reward loop.
It should go without saying that simply adding start-up aspects to an established company isn't a solution. A great example of this is how many established companies these days undertake initiatives to eliminate offices or cube walls. I once worked in for a business that offered stock options and entertained questions of when they were thinking about an IPO -- this was post dot.com bust. Having gone through an IPO with an earlier company, I knew that this company would never go public, but that didn't stop their management from using the whole stock-option framework to grift employees -- they even sold options to outgoing employees. If you're running a grift on employees, you're probably going to have some brand alignment problems. That being said, the employees that didn't have enough understanding to be skeptical, they were certainly excited by the "stock options".
Ultimately, the way to meaningfully connect with employees and make them Promoters is not to simply copy-paste cultural aspects and incentives onto an environment and expect people to perform. Rather, it's something that requires design thinking, something that understands the unique challenges that your business faces and building an environment that's conducive to making business operations easier and better. It's about understanding what the business machine, your business, is trying to do and optimizing everything for that. It's also about making that machine inclusive. Rather than treating employees as cogs or dumb components, think of them as smart components with sensors and intelligence. Or better yet, think of them as people, people who, if they believe in a goal, will make an extra effort to help achieve that goal.
That makes the framework pretty simple. You need to define believable, meaningful goals, and you need to build an environment where people believe you're taking their interests into consideration.
