When Fortune magazine describes an organisation as “the most innovative company in America” for six years in a row, there’s a good chance it can teach us a thing or two about employer branding.
All the more so, perhaps, when the company in question is a recognised leader in its sector and was using the strap line “Discover the power of WHY” years before Simon Sinek started encouraging the rest of us to find our own ‘Why’ in business and life.
Here’s how the company describes its core values and beliefs:
[We are] a laboratory of innovation. That’s why we employ the best and brightest people. And we believe that every employee can make a difference here.
In everything we do, we operate safely and with concern for the environment. The way we do a job will affect how our children and our neighbors’ children will live in the future. This is a responsibility we take seriously in all the different places around the world where we do business.
We treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves. We do not tolerate abusive or disrespectful treatment. Ruthlessness, callousness, and arrogance don’t belong here.
We work with customers and prospects openly, honestly, and sincerely. When we say we will do something, we will do it; when we say we cannot or will not do something, then we won’t do it.
We are satisfied with nothing less than the very best in everything we do. We will continue to raise the bar for everyone. The great fun here will be for all of us to discover just how good we can really be.
Sounds good to me. The only problem is, these statements come from Enron’s recruitment website about 18 months before the company imploded in one of the biggest financial corruption scandals in history, bringing down with it Arthur Andersen, one of the world’s largest audit and accountancy partnerships.
This example plays to my argument – explored earlier in this series of articles – that much of what passes for Employer Branding, even a decade and a half after Enron’s demise, is still based on flawed assumptions, questionable practices and an overly simplistic understanding of organisational reality.
Some organisations are, of course, simply willing to lie – and Enron was among them. But that’s not generally true of organisations. In most cases, the problem has less to do with dishonest motives than with the limitations of the employer branding models and approaches they use.
The primary limitation, I suggest, is the ‘totalising’ nature of these models. That is, they conflate and confuse different issues, problems and knowledge domains into a single – and highly reductive – analytical framework.
The fact is, employer branding isn’t a management issue, or a process issue, or a reputation issue, or a retention issue, or a motivation issue, or a communications issue, or a behaviour issue, or a trust issue.
It is all of those things, all at the same time.
And any attempt to reduce it to just one element or cluster of elements is doomed to limited success at best and complete failure at worst.
So when an agency salesperson says “We will work with you to define your employer brand using our proprietary 5-step model”, this is a largely nonsensical proposition. The complex interdependence of internal constituencies, resources, strategies, trends and organisational realities will rarely conform to neat boxes on a logical flow chart or circles in a Venn diagram.
The employer brand is, at root, a relationship and a relationship is a verb, not a thing. It moves, evolves, changes, contradicts itself. It has multiple contexts, too – not least a marketplace filled with multiple other competing brands.
And it is on the basis of this more complex, complicated and nuanced understanding of the employer brand as living narrative that I have made a case for the power of authentic storytelling as perhaps the best way to capture, embody, articulate and energise brands – not least by transforming them into living frames of reference rather than static “architectures” or “platforms”.
But effective storytelling – and the development of the authentic storytelling culture needed to sustain it – is more than a corrective to the oversimplification of organisational reality. It is also an effective antidote to the way some branding models oversimplify the process of communication itself.
This simplifying tendency manifests itself in a number of prevalent actions – or omissions – on the part of employer branding practitioners.
For a start, they strip informal communication channels out of the employer brand equation altogether. Ignoring the unofficial corporate ‘grapevine’, for instance, is a huge mistake. As Art Kleiner points out, “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.” It is a testament to the hold of conventional branding models that so many practitioners fail to acknowledge and use this reality.
Worse, they are often deaf and blind to the symbolic power of language and metaphor. This manifests itself at several levels. Organisations very often fail to spot what we might call ‘linguistic leakage’ – that is, things the organisation doesn’t mean to communicate, but does. Consider the lazy assertion found in a large proportion of brand communications that “our people are our greatest asset”. While well-meant, this phrase symbolically reduces human beings to business assets or resources, effectively erasing individual diversity by cramming it into a crude, cold and oddly dehumanised category of meaning.
But such linguistic blindness can have much bigger and more damaging implications for Employer Brands. This is particularly true when it comes to the use of metaphors, which play a vital if sometimes subtle role in framing organisational cultures and the kinds of communication they make possible – or silence.
Enron provides the casebook example.
Academic research into Enron’s dominant use of language and metaphor in its email communications (that is, the real world as opposed to the fantasy world of its expressed Employer Brand) shows that the during its heyday, the company structured everything it did around a cluster of operating metaphors and their attendant vocabularies: machine-like processes (’functionality’, ‘productivity’, ‘input’); the pursuit of profit (’prosperity’ ‘personal wealth’); monetary value (ample references to personal wealth and profits); and sports (sacrifice, hard work, offensive game plans).*
In practice, as we now know, these metaphors gave sustenance and justification to a toxic ‘Enron Way’ working culture replete with bullying, backstabbing, unethical behaviour and financial fraud.
More than that, they sat in direct opposition to Enron’s publicly expressed values of Respect, Integrity, Communication and Excellence.
While Enron turned into a criminal enterprise, my own experience as a branding practitioner suggests that many reputable companies suffer a significant conceptual disconnect between the operating metaphors that shape their working environment and the metaphors and language they use to articulate their employer brand.
This can fairly be laid at the door of research methodologies that simply fail to explore and unearth the all-important unspoken dimensions of organisational culture and the ways they manifest themselves in both metaphor and behaviour.
But it also relates to the fact that current employer branding practice hugely privileges visual identity over verbal identity. If agencies and branding practitioners fail to understand the extraordinary power of language itself to differentiate and energise the brand, if they are blind to the role of language in articulating the lived reality of organisational life in more emotional and engaging ways, they are hardly likely to spend time grappling with the subtleties of linguistics, metaphor, vocabulary and the texture of words themselves.
But they should. Because an employer brand, untethered from its verbal identity, ambiguous in its narrative output and shorn of authentic and truthful storytelling that emerges from the workforce rather than the HR department runs the risk doing the organisation and its employees more harm than good.
Just ask the 4,000 laid-off workers who took Enron’s beautiful and multiple award-winning Employer Brand at face value.
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* Anna Turnage (2103), “Technological Resistance: A Metaphor Analysis of Enron E-Mail Messages”, Communication Quarterly, 61:5, pp. 519-538
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