How do conventional Employer Branding models fare when faced with organisational complexity? Not very well…
Do you recall the game of croquet in Alice in Wonderland? In this story, live flamingos are used as mallets, live hedgehogs are used as balls, and some rather sullen soldiers stand on their hands and feet to make the hoops.
The only problem is, none of these actors does what’s expected of them.
Alice’s flamingo refuses to cooperate, the soldiers keep walking to other parts of the ground and the hedgehogs deliberately steer themselves through the hoops to please the Queen of Tarts.
Welcome to the world of organisational complexity, emergent behaviour and the unpredictability that lays waste to many an Employer Branding exercise.
Most current employer branding models are based on notions of predictability and control. They assume that the employer brand can be designed using a combination of managerial insight and market research. They suggest that the brand can be defined, articulated and then implemented to deliver clear outcomes and key performance indicators. And, of course, they now universally argue for the development an Employee Value Proposition that spells out, in largely transactional terms, what Towers Watson calls “the employment deal that defines what an employer expects from its employees and what it offers in return.”
All very structured. All very straightforward. And all, I suggest, very inadequate.
This conventional and broadly procedural approach to Employer Branding has brought us to where we are today. That is, to a world full to overflowing with aggressively promoted employer brands constructed around loudly proclaimed ‘value propositions’ and set within rigorously policed frameworks of ‘brand guidelines’. Many of these now bore us in the way that mission statements bored us back in the last century. Worse, most of them are becoming ineffective at differentiating their own organisations from all the others.
This stems in part from the excessive reliance on focus group research in developing employer branding strategies. Such research tends to generate numbingly predictable conclusions. How else can a multi-million dollar global Employer Brand development exercise by Coca Cola Hellenic, for example, end up with the banal core positioning statement “Passion for Excellence” supported by the four equally predictable key attributes “Making a Difference”, “Part of a Winning Team”, “Realizing Your Full Potential” and “An Enjoyment Business”?
The fact is, we live in a world full of similar companies, inhabiting similar sectors, employing similar people, often coming up with broadly similar ideas, products and services. Put them through focus groups or related proprietary research formats and, not surprisingly, you get similar branding propositions.
This is compounded by a tendency to see Employer Branding as primarily a communications issue. It isn’t. While branding is about the coherent orchestration of visual, verbal and positional elements, it is also about behaviour. The way you treat your staff, the way they treat each other, the way you all treat your customers – these are the nodes around which your brand credibility is structured.
These elements are not only in perpetual motion; they are in dialogue with the wider society as well as each other. The result is a relational dynamic that forces us to look at the brand, not as a stable entity with clear edges, but as a centre of gravity around which revolve continuously changing environmental, cultural, economic and political forces.
All this runs counter to the comfortable simplifications of much current Employer Branding practice, based as it is on a somewhat attenuated understanding of organisational complexity.
An organisation – as anyone who has ever worked in one knows – is a fluid and dynamic ecosystem. It is shaped by competition, cooperation, conflict, collaboration and communication, all mediated through the subjective and collective experience of multiple individuals within the organisation and – thanks to burgeoning social media networks – people and interest groups way beyond the organisation as well.
Clearly, those who inhabit organisations are not passive cogs in a machine. Like Lewis Carroll’s flamingos and hedgehogs, they are inherently complex, emotional and unpredictable beings driven – as Daniel Pink memorably outlines in his recent book, Drive– by the search for autonomy, mastery and purpose.
And that entirely changes the way Employer Branding specialists should look at organisations and the process of branding itself.
Like the people in them, organisations are complicated, non-linear, contextually-dependent and continuously evolving entities largely immune to Taylorist pretensions of tick-box measurement and control. As complex adaptive systems, moreover, they can’t be neatly contained within strategies, plans and formal brand architectures. They create their own meaning through relationships, dialogue, conversations and ongoing adaptation to new ideas and circumstances – all on the go, all in real time.
And there is no better way to navigate this complex terrain – and give both coherence, substance and form to your Employer Brand – than through storytelling.
Storytelling has rightly been called “the sense-making currency of organizations” because it allows individuals, groups and communities to construct shared meaning and collectively promote, focus on and behave in ways that validate and reinforce that meaning. Some practitioners – Ken Baskin, for instance – go further than this in suggesting (rightly, I believe) that the human drive to tell stories is not simply to make sense out of the world but “to help us discover the actions we must take in order to survive.” In other words, stories are generative engines of meaning that enable people to transform information into the knowledge they need to survive and thrive in a changing world.
Such stories draw much of their their power from their ability to engage both the intellect and emotions of the listener – a critical and necessary factor in capturing their interest and influencing their decisions, as the research of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio and others has convincingly demonstrated.
But that’s just the beginning. Through storytelling, we can:
- Improve our ability to navigate ambiguity, uncertainty and change.
- Better capture organisational wisdom and learning.
- Make critical and productive connections between people,actions, ideas, values and events.
- Understand the specific meaning of particular Brand values, principles and behaviours – and why they matter in practice.
- Demonstrate which qualities and actions are most valued within the organisation.
- Speak to people’s aspirations, experiences and emotions.
- Get a clear, practical, ‘lived’ understanding of corporate culture.
- Align people behind a common purpose or vision.
Articulated and expressed through the medium and practice of storytelling, then, the Employer Brand can provide a flexible organising framework for analysis, behaviour and decision-making. It can embody – with emotional and intellectual resonance – what needs to be done, how to do it and why it matters. And it can cut through homogenised brand formulations to highlight the three things about the organisation that most employees and potential employees want to know:
Here’s where we’re going. Here’s how we’re going to get there. Here’s why you should come along.
Croquet, anyone?