How engaged are your employees with your brand, products, and services?
Most senior executives would answer very engaged; however, the reality may be much different from the desired level of engagement, which may directly result from your work culture.
I recently led a webinar on global employee engagement. The majority of the questions focused on whether company culture impacts brand perception. And the answer is: absolutely. A positive culture equates to engaged and passionate employees who are respected, trusted, and encouraged to share ideas. An antagonistic culture is a polar opposite – with a culture of fear, suspicion, and devaluing of ideas.
Here are several tips for changing your work culture to help inspire your employees to engage with your brand and become ambassadors for it.
- Recognize employees for their accomplishments, publicly and individually in person.
- Align expectations between employees and management. Employees must know that the projects they are working on and their objectives align with management’s expectations and goals.
- Proactively address and develop solutions or incentives for performance improvements.
- Eliminate cliques and favoritism by encouraging social interactions with others and ranking inclusiveness in performance reviews.
- Open a consistently used communications channel between senior executives and employees. One tool to consider is Pigeonhole, featured in the Global Communications Podcast episode on Change Communications. Pigeonhole is an integrated platform for crowdsourcing questions, brainstorming ideas, voting on decisions, and collecting feedback.
Next, ensure your company is clear on its purpose, values, and behaviors.
- Define your company’s purpose. Why do you exist? What do you hope to solve?
- Survey your staff and customers on the values they identify with your purpose. You will often see the result of this defined in a tagline (“Fly the Friendly Skies,” “Think Different,” “We Try Harder”).
- Describe the behaviors which reflect those values in action. How can you live the purpose of your brand?
- Establish an employee engagement pilot program to help you define purpose, values, and behaviors and embody those characteristics in their daily interactions at work, internal and external.
- Hire for culture first, skills second. Ensure your new hires demonstrate and believe in your values through group interviews and problem-solving exercises.
