(a) Rational understanding

In the absence of significant and tangible change, it's advisable to think twice about a major launch to employees. A more appropriate approach in this context would be a more targeted management briefing and commitment to improving those aspects of the employment experience which support the underlying employer brand proposition. Whether you opt for a major launch, or take a more gradual approach to introducing your employer brand to employees, the clarity and focus of the communication is key.

The overwhelming evidence from external brand research is to ‘keep it simple’. Consumers receive thousands of brand messages a day, and advertisers need to keep their core messages simple and direct to cut through. While employees are sometimes regarded as a more captive audience, in reality they are just as likely to suffer from information overload. Employer brand messages therefore need to be equally simple and direct. Ensure you are absolutely clear about the two to three core messages you want employees to consistently associate with the employer brand, and put 90% of your attention into getting these core messages across. This may mean sacrificing some of the more detailed information you would ultimately like to communicate to employees, but if you take the longer term view, as we will discuss shortly, there should be time to build this up over time.

You not only need to be clear in your communication you also need to ensure relevance, and this starts with the language that you use. You would never use brand jargon in communicating the benefits of your brand to customers, so why use it with employees? While brand marketing tools are extremely useful in defining how communication with employees takes place, it is far more effective to frame what is communicated in terms that employees will more readily understand as relevant and meaningful to their everyday working lives. This ‘plain speaking’ approach also tends to focus the mind on the substance of the brand offering rather than the ‘wrapping’.

The second priority is ensuring the relevance of the brand to the employment experience. Many ‘living the brand’ campaigns focus almost entirely on how the employee needs to behave to deliver the desired brand personality and value to the customer. This is of course relevant in terms of the commercial objectives of the company, but it fails to address the more direct benefits of the organization's brand values to the employee. Employees are far more likely to accept the organization's brand messages if they experience the value of the values for themselves. Taking a selection of typical service brand messages to make the point, do the employees of the hotel chain that claims to be ‘Always warm, always friendly’ feel that way about their management team? Do the employees of a leading mobile phone company feel ‘connected’? Does the technology company that offers its customers ‘sense and simplicity’ ensure that it delivers things in a user friendly format for its employees? I would sense that in many cases this is a constant challenge, and that the proverb of the cobbler's children going without shoes captures the common experience within many organizations.

(b) Emotional engagement

People may understand a message, but it makes little difference unless they care. It strikes me that the difference between a product and a brand is much like the difference between an indifferent employee and a fully engaged one. It's all about the extra meaning and value that positive emotions bring to the equation. When people are fully engaged they will go the extra mile, and in a highly competitive world, it's the extra mile that makes all the difference. While we have already addressed the general subject of employee engagement in the previous chapter, it takes on a more specific aspect when it comes to internal communication. How do you get people to engage with a new set of messages and ideas?

The first principle of active engagement is that it requires active leadership. There is nothing more engaging than personal contact with someone who is already highly engaged, particularly if they have the power to shape the course of the organization. It should be clearly evident from the beginning that earning the reputation for being an employer of choice, and delivering a consistently positive employee experience, should be a personal mission of the CEO, not just good housekeeping.

There is an enormous benefit to be derived from the CEO going on tour to carry the message directly to employees. However, this can take a great deal of time and is often impractical. The common alternative is for the senior team to share these responsibilities, and host a series of events designed to launch the key messages and brief people on the ensuing change plans. Where the organization is large and widely dispersed, the role of the senior team is often to ‘light the fire and fan the flames’, by which we mean engage the next management layer or two down, and then support the enrolment of ‘ambassadors’ to carry the message out to the furthest reaches of the organization. This can take an enormous logistical effort, and a fair degree of courage. Even with carefully planning and a series of pilot sessions, this kind of intensive cascade always feels like a tough mountain to climb. However, what it does ensure is that people receive a consistent message and they receive it face to face from the leadership team.

A further benefit of this kind of event is that it helps to dramatize the key messages. As the 1960s media guru, Marshall McLuan, once said: ‘the medium is the message’, by which he meant the channel through which something is delivered often communicates as much as the content of the message itself. In the context of an event, the fact that it is being staged outside the normal business premises, and delivered personally by a senior leader within the business, signals that the message is important. The fact that many otherwise separate groups of people have come together to participate in the event signals that it is a message designed to bring people together. The very act of ‘staging’ an event for a large group of people also helps to imbue the messages with drama. People on stages act differently from when they are in small briefing sessions. People within large groups also respond differently. It's the difference between watching football on the television and experiencing the match live in the stadium. There is a quantum leap in atmosphere (as long as the performance is up to scratch!).

Film can also deliver a more powerful effect on a big screen, and a well-constructed dramatization of the brand messages on film can be highly engaging. The ‘talking heads’ formula, by which I mean senior managers providing context and pledging commitment to the cause on video, is really a small screen format. What has become far more common is for employees to be used in more dramatic situations to get the message across, and for the senior managers to stick to delivering their messages face to face (which communicates far more powerfully than any statements they may commit to video).

Even with the most inspirational of leaders, the most dramatic of venues and a brand video shot by Ridley Scott, you may still be lacking one vital ingredient in fully engaging your audience. Fortunately it tends to be a rather less expensive ingredient. The most effective engagement tool is active audience participation and involvement. Employee involvement need not require a major event. Some of the most powerful engagement techniques involve relatively simple exercises that can be conducted in relatively small briefing sessions. As any experienced facilitator will tell you, the trick in getting people to both think and engage is not to provide all the answers but to ask the right questions. As Nicholas Ind puts it in his useful guide to Living the Brand: ‘The real challenge here is to change a manager's mindset away from an approach that focuses on selling an idea to others in the organization to a more organic method, which following the planting of a seed of an idea, grows through the involvement and enthusiasm of others’.⁴

(c) Employee commitment and behaviour change

There is a simple, well known phrase that every business leader should take to heart in making internal brand promises: ‘Actions speak louder than words’. There is one very important difference between emotional engagement and commitment in the context of internal communication. Engagement can be bought with brand promises, but longer term commitment and behaviour change can only be earned by ensuring that those promises are substantiated. Substantiating employer brand promises is much harder graft than making them. It sometimes appears that senior management teams think that the job is done when the brand message has been delivered and received, as though the organization will suddenly transform itself having seen the light. But people will only believe the brand messages and begin to change their behaviours if they begin to see tangible evidence from the top that the brand proposition and values are being hard wired into the fabric of the organization, changing the way in which processes are run and important decisions are taken. In Chapter 18 I return to this kind of substantiation in terms of key people management ‘touch-points’ (the organizational processes and practices that shape the brand experience).

Brand trust is generally based on brand consistency. Substantiation of the brand promises plays a key role in this, but it is also important to keep the brand message consistent. There is a tendency for internal programmes of brand engagement to be treated as a discrete stream of communication, unconnected to other subjects and sources of management information. If you take an employer brand perspective this does not hold up to close inspection. From the employee's perspective, all your internal communication has the potential to reinforce or undermine how people feel about the company. This means you're unlikely to build trust and credibility in your employer brand unless you deliver a degree of consistency across all of your communications.

Another key area of focus is the consistency between internal and external communications. Don't forget that your external communication (including both recruitment and consumer advertising) can also send powerful messages to your employees about the kind of company you are, or claim to be. You need to make sure your employees feel these external promises are credible before you over-promise to customers or new recruits.

The final point on consistent communication is maintaining continuity over time. How do you continue to reinforce the same underlying messages while keeping it relevant and fresh? This is a major issue within brand management. Brand communication requires constant creative attention to find new ways of dramatizing brand messages. This should not mean changing the core messages, but finding fresh ways of expressing them and building the story through your content marketing and other forms of more experiential engagement. It's like the difference between launching a movie and launching a TV series. If you launch your Employer Brand like it's a movie, with lots of fanfare and a big event, it can feel like all the excitement is over once you leave. ‘Well I've seen that movie what's next?’ If you think of it more like a TV series, the dynamics are different. You establish the dramatic context, introduce the key characters, develop some interest and then you build.

Rather than thinking of the internal communication of your employer brand as a launch initiative, it's more effective to think of it as a cycle of activities that build involvement and momentum over time (Figure 17.2).

(d) Employee generated content (EGC)

One of the most exciting aspects of mobile personal technology like smartphones and tablets is the way in which they enable employees to contribute their own communication content. This presents organizations with the opportunity to amplify employee participation in the kind of positive cycle of engagement described above, by stimulating, curating and sharing employee generated images, videos and points of view. In addition to supporting internal engagement, this also has the potential to provide the rich flow of authentic, social content that is becoming so increasingly vital to external recruitment marketing.

P&G are planning to introduce more employee generated content in their employer brand communication. They see it as a valuable counterpoint to the more tightly prescribed advertising templates and digital design styles that will continue to frame their employer brand marketing.

As Scott Read, P&G's Associate Director, Global Talent Supply, explains:

‘We made a conscious choice to create a framework in place to drive a consistent look and feel and a consistent voice everywhere in the world, but we've always recognized the need to retain a degree of local flexibility. We've conducted a lot of local country visits recently and what we've heard from students directly is they want to see what it's like to work here through their own eyes. They don't want us to tell them. They want to discover it for themselves and this is where social media plays a big role. The tone has to change. It can't be us saying “this is the way it is,” it has to be “come see for yourself. ” The big shift we're starting to embrace is to be as real time and authentic in our communications as we can, and really get the full engagement of the everyday P&G employee. With this participation we're going to get the authenticity through whatever the employees are saying about their workday. This is also where the flexibility will come in and where the localization will take place.’

There are still significant challenges to be overcome in most companies to generate and sustain this level of active engagement, to overcome some of the potential legal issues, and to convince senior managers that the benefits outweigh the potential risks. Nevertheless there is a clear external demand for this kind of authentic real-time communication. Smartphones and smart internal communication apps like ‘beem’ are making content generation and sharing easier than ever before. And most importantly of all, employees are increasingly happy to create and share their views on the world of work. Where the likes of P&G are going, many are sure to follow.