What would you miss if you left tomorrow?

// August 18th, 2010 // Employment Branding

Imagine your organisation closes its doors tomorrow. The people disperse, the product disappears from the market. Teams are divided off to competitors, the brand vanishes.

What would the world be missing out on?

What would you, as an employee, miss out on?

The answer to the first question is the reason your company exists.

The answer to the second is your employer brand.

The reason any employee works at a company can be seen as an overlap between the company’s ‘generic’ employer brand (ie, the value proposition constructed from the points which the majority of employees agree are part of the employment experience) and the employee’s personal brand affiliation. Let’s call this an overlapping synergy. The larger the synergy, the more likely you’ll be a culture fit, and the more likely you’ll enjoy the role.

Mapped in two dimensions, this is a simple Venn diagram. Larger overlap, more points of common perceived benefit (between you and the ‘brand’ average) means a picture of more engagement. (and as a side note, look at those values and try and construct a person out of them. Even a fictional person makes it very easy to start drawing comparisons. This is what I call a ‘brand mannequin’ – looks like a person but isn’t, but good for measuring people against)

However, the two-dimensional synergy (and indeed the brand mannequin) doesn’t take into account the power of beliefs. Sharp spikes in the strength of those values can create different synergies. That extra dimension makes a substantial shift in the nature of engagement.

For example – Carl works for a company which has ten core values at the heart of the EVP. He doesn’t care about six of them, and two of the remaining four are things he agrees with at a reasonable level. The remaining two are Carl’s defining passions – they drive his career goals and his desires. In a two dimensional argument (yes/no) along the brand agreement, Carl scores 4/10. Not a high score on the employee engagement scale.

However, ask Carl what he’ll miss if he can no longer work for the company, and his answer will probably, amidst the social data, suggest that the company was aligned to his values. Maybe not all of them, but certainly the ones that mattered.

Overlapping synergy between the brand values is the first goal of an EVP – find out what we stand for and why people work here, and align the workforce, through education or ongoing recruitment, to build an overlapping synergy between the company and the individual value positions. Understanding the passions, and how huge a difference they can make to brand loyalty, to engagement and to a personal investment in your own professional development, comes once an organisation’s value proposition becomes part of the performance and career dialogue.

If you had to leave tomorrow, what would you miss? And is that really the reason you go to work every day? And if it is, what are you doing to get more of that, or keep it more secure?