Let me start with a definition of sorts.
A good brand tells a powerful story. A great brand gives people powerful stories to tell. And an extraordinary brand – an Apple, a Virgin, a Rolls Royce – IS the story.
That’s not just true of consumer and corporate brands. It’s true of Employer Brands, too
And therein lies a problem.
The reality is that we need to look very hard to find Employer Brands that come anywhere near to good, great or extraordinary.
Why? Because – as this series of articles has contended – too many employer branding practitioners fail to understand that authentic, living and emotionally-resonant employer brands are inextricably rooted in storytelling itself.
We are storytelling animals. Story is the structure that gives meaning and order to our lives – our past, our present, our future. It was central to society long before humans learned to write, and it remains the dominant way we convey our deepest emotions and talk about those things we value the most. It explores who we are and why we matter, tapping into our reason and intellect while simultaneously bonding us to others who share our values and form part of our community.
We are, in a very real sense, constituted in and through story, and it is in this narrative realm that nearly all social, cultural and political movements make their interventions. Yet you will find all too few Employer Branding practitioners inhabiting this realm. And a common reason is that they tend to impose static brand models on organisations before fully engaging with the dynamic and contingent reality of the employees who actually work there. In their increasing focus on hard data and ROI formulas, they often fail to tap into the evolving narrative world inhabited and co-created by employees themselves.
To talk about the power of story is easy. But how exactly can we structure the gathering, formulation, articulation and expression of authentic brand stories in a way that is logical, efficient and relevant to the employer branding goals and objectives of the organisation?
I believe that one of the most overlooked – indeed, ignored – ways of achieving this is to use Appreciative Inquiry, a consensus-based method of organisational change that builds on collective strengths instead of focusing on overcoming problems. Appreciative Inquiry starts by asking employees “What gives life to our organisation when we are at our most inventive and alive?” It identifies the best of ‘what is’ as a platform for exploring what might be and what should be. It moves beyond an analysis of organisational deficiencies to identify those aspects of organisational life which, in the words of Cooperrider, “nourish the human spirit”.
In other words, Appreciative Inquiry is about creating meaning that extends beyond the practical and transactional boundaries of organisational life. It invites us to be part of a grand venture much larger than ourselves, a community of people with a shared vision, shared values, shared purpose and shared sense of what is most important.
In short, Appreciative Inquiry creates the space for us to co-create a story of who we are, why we matter, how we relate to the world and what we aim to achieve in the future.
In all these ways, Appreciative Inquiry fulfils the most basic promise of an employer brand – to differentiate the organisation, not according to its discipline or sector-specific attributes, but according a higher-level narrative meaning that gives voice to consistent and deeply held values, beliefs and aspirations. It offers a shared generative story that shapes its activities, expresses its purpose and engages its workforce at both an emotional and intellectual level.
And all of this is possible because Appreciative Inquiry practitioners start where many of their Employer Branding colleagues don’t – with a structured elicitation and articulation of story.
This is less a problem with practitioners than with the limitations of their conceptual models. The terminology and structure of Employee Value Propositions, for instance, often serve to silence or sabotage the stories we tell in organisations.
The transactional nature of the EVP – “the employment deal that defines what an employer expects from its employees and what it provides in return”, to quote CPA – nudges us ever further away from the transformational and generative power of story. Worse, it implicitly positions employees as passive consumers of meaning rather than its co-creators.
And it is perhaps this constricted EVP formulation that explains why otherwise brilliant storytelling brands often lose the story thread where it matters most – in their recruitment activities.
Take HCA Healthcare, for instance. Its corporate website makes brilliant use of “Bedside Stories” about real patients – their journey through illness, their treatment, their feelings throughout the process, their response to the results of successful treatment, their enormous respect and gratitude for the quality of doctors and nurses who cared for them. But go to the company’s recruitment site and it immediately reverts to pat corporate overviews, staid descriptions of services on offer, and an undistinguished presentation of the working environment.
How is it that an organisation with such a rich and emotionally resonant seam of stories, each of which speaks to the their “why” and elucidates their impact on the lives of patients, can fail to carry the same narrative resources into its recruitment marketing?
It’s partly a failure of imagination, perhaps: but I suspect it has more to do ingrained HR thinking that puts faith in transactional aspects of branding – services, salary, benefits, training and so on – while remaining largely blind to the personal, human, engaging appeal of the work itself. As a result, the work and the roles become largely undifferentiated commodities swimming in a cluttered sea of similar roles in similar organisations.
This EVP was, no doubt, designed with the intention of showing what makes the organisation different. But as Bernadette Jiwa points out in her broader analysis of branding: “They don’t want something different. They want something that creates a difference…What makes a brand unique now is the difference it creates – how it affects people’s lives and becomes part of their story.”
Perfectly expressed, I think.