Sometimes it’s the stories you don’t hear that matter most…
I recall presenting some draft graduate brochure copy to the HR manager of a major multinational in the cosmetics sector. “It’s great, ” he said. “It covers everything we need to say about the company, its values and its working environment.”
Short pause.
“Of course, it’s all crap.”
The point is, if he knew it was all crap, so did everyone else in the organisation. And when such crap emerges into daylight, the appropriate response isn’t to call in the PR team or commission an advertising agency makeover, but to address the real problems behind the crap – whether it’s in the processes, the management style, the compensation policy or the wider social impact of the company’s activities.
From an employer branding point of view, telling inaccurate and inauthentic stories about the organisation is an entirely counterproductive tactic – the equivalent of slapping a new coat of paint on a rickety shed in the hope that no one will notice the wood rot. That may fool some people looking at it from the outside – at least for a time – but to people within the shed, your employees, the ploy will be noticed and resented.
And whether you like it or not, they will talk about it among themselves.
As I argued in an earlier article, effective employer branding articulated through authentic storytelling must not only be based on truth but also on a recognition that organisations have complex communications ecosystems beyond the reach of reductive typologies favoured by some employer branding practitioners.
And there’s one element of this ecosystem that most employer branding practitioners simply ignore.
The ‘grapevine’.
Look beneath the official narratives in any organisation and you will always find the dreaded grapevine. It is more than an informal information channel. It is an entire internal world of Chinese whispers, a word-of-mouth repository of people’s fears, a conduit for their apprehensions, an outlet for rumours, a space for imagination, and a route for the unofficial transmission of information down corridors, around water coolers, in canteens and wherever employees gather in groups.
In one sense, the grapevine is the unloved twin of social media. We are still getting our collective heads around the impact and possibilities of social media, but we broadly acknowledge that it marks a fundamental shift from one-way organisational communication towards a radically transparent and interactive model of communication. We also know that, thanks to social media, anyone – including our employees – can communicate about anything with anyone, anywhere in the world. Not for nothing has social media been described as “word of mouth on steroids”.
But what about the word of mouth that operates within organisations? Where does internal word of mouth fit into our neat Employer Branding models?
The grapevine is, at root, a form of collective if often highly segmented storytelling – admittedly operating below the radar, and occasionally destructive in both its intent and impact – but storytelling nonetheless. It consists of real employees telling real stories about their experiences, whether good, bad or indifferent. Like other forms of storytelling, it is a way of sharing knowledge, of making sense of things, of seeing oneself in relation to others, of conducting conversations.
All of this has massive implications for your employer branding initiatives. Just as conversations between consumers about your brand will be far more influential than any advertisement can be, so conversations between employees will have a greater impact on your employer brand than any other form of communication.
This comes down once again to the importance of trust. Most of us trust recommendations made by people we know. So having a trustworthy brand narrative, whether it is articulated on your website or through your organisational grapevine, is vital to success both as a business and an employer. As Art Kleiner put it so memorably:
“The form and substance of talk in an organisation is as palpably influential on performance as a magnetic field is on a cluster of iron filings.”
Indeed, word of mouth can serve as a powerful diagnostic tool and cultural bellwether. By engaging with it and listening carefully, you can instantly tap into the organisational zeitgeist to discover what people are talking about, worried about, excited about. And it is only by getting involved in conversations and storytelling at both the visible and the subterranean level that organisations can work to establish a coherent narrative of organisational reality.
Fortunately, the most effective the bridge between formal and informal communication networks is storytelling itself – the kind of storytelling based on what the organisation really believes, values, celebrates, strives for and practices every day. The brute truth is that achieving congruence between the formal and informal channels requires organisations to become storydoers as well as storytellers. That is, they must act on and live by their authentic stories and fulfil their brand promises in actions, not just words.
We should know by now that Employer Branding is an ongoing conversation, not a neatly formulated entity with clear boundaries and edges. And conversations – or stories – are about what we really care about: why we are here, why we matter, how we can become the best at what we do.
Word of mouth – in the form of the corporate grapevine – is a quintessential part of that ongoing conversation. It cannot be controlled, true, but it can be cultivated and given direction. And it can most certainly be seeded, to continue the horticultural metaphor, with coherent, inspiring, engaging stories that articulate and embody your organisational culture and give authentic emotional sustenance to your employee value proposition.
But always remember, the most influential stories of all may be the ones you haven’t yet heard on the grapevine…