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?

I think there’s a better way. A way that includes changing the defaults.

• When someone answers that question, write down the answer in full. Explore it if it isn’t clear enough by discussing it with them.
• If they get the job, give it to their manager before they start, as a reminder.
• Brief the local L&D team that this is where they want to be in five years.
• Organise a skills assessment that can sit above their resume as a current state analysis.
• Find someone who’s at that point now and approach them about starting a mentoring relationship.
• Find people with similar goals and create networking opportunities for those people to meet and share ideas.
• Look at succession planning and see what schedule of upskilling and project/task exposure is needed to achieve the milestones involved in that goal.
• Include the goal in dialogue discussions and reviews
• Make it process. Make it part of their everyday experience. Send the message that you’re thinking about how you can give them what they want, besides just paying for their time.

If every employee feels like the business cares about their dreams, and is actively monitoring their progress, then there’s something to come to work for besides a paycheck. There’s a future they have a say in.

(I’ll preface this by pointing out that I am a gamer, albeit casually. So my insights into gaming as a subculture are driven largely by my own participation in gaming. )

Where gaming becomes essentially a tribe (by which I mean a subculture with a communal interest, language and standard of value) is when shared exposure to a particular experience becomes a unifying factor. Gamers become members of factions within their tribe that revolve around genres, platforms, styles, social connections and more. There’s occasionally some tribal warfare among these smaller groups (PC vs console, X360 vs PS3, etc) but they are still all gamers. Their membership to a self-selected class of people becomes part of their identity. They actively seek out discussion on their areas of interest. They recognise each other through a shared cultural language and, occasionally, uniform.

How do gamers get wins? Achievement. Achievement over universal expectation, set by the industry. Beating a game universally acknowledged as difficult creates prestige and personal value. Winning a gaming competition against skilled players builds reputation. The community defines its own champions against the standard set by programmers and the average experience curve. In short, the continued standard of value grows organically, as more games, more gamers and a constantly shifting standard of ‘average’ skill contribute to an overall perception.

Tribal values are community driven. They are set by adherence to a shared evaluation of what constitutes average. So creating wins is about having a communal set expectation of ‘ordinary’ so that ‘extraordinary’ is easily recognisable. You can’t overstep the mark without knowing where the mark is, and you can’t add value without knowing the difference between what is extra and what’s just service. So setting the average expectation is key.

Encouraging wins from a community perspective is the other side of the coin. Enhancing a culture which celebrates individual achievement against an accepted norm creates competition, not against each other, but against the standard. In golf, this is referred to as ‘playing against the course’. Set a ‘par’ performance on a particular task (which is essentially average expectation) and people will try to beat it for a self-perceived pay-off. If you have a culture which celebrates wins, and confers an objective, external benefit which supplements the individual’s sense of achievement, you create two connections. You connect achievement with external recognition, and you connect individual standard of value with recognised norms.

Stimulating tribal values allows us to create a framework to evaluate success. Connecting individual perception of above-average performance with recognisable reward builds community. The epic win pays off; in higher engagement with the community, in improved performance against the average, and in emotional reinvestment from the employee.

How can you change your culture to encourage epic wins?

Pretending to be a nice guy will only get you so far. (Frank Fontaine, BioShock)

In BioShock, the historical story tells you of Frank Fontaine, a man who came to the fictional city of Rapture, Rapture, built on Ayn Rand’s principles of objective realist capitalism, was a city with no religion or socialist agenda. Fontaine established himself as God-fearing and concerned with the workers, which earned him points with the general population. Fontaine eventually revealed himself as a conman and sadist, so eager for control that he led his followers in a war against the status quo, sacrificing them for his personal glory. Even as the city lay empty, dying and filled with the insane, domination was more important than the thing he was dominating. His lust for control overcame the reason the thing he wanted to control existed, and quickly changed a vibrant metropolis into a dormant, dysfunctional dystopia.

If (like Frank Fontaine) your goal is personal glory, have the courage to admit it outright. Pretending your goals are corporate altruism or team play when they aren’t doesn’t just make you a liar. Eventually, it makes you unemployed.

Teams of Different Skills Can Be Hugely Effective Against Contingencies (X-Men, Warcraft, Command & Conquer, Overlord, etc)

Games that employ more than one potential protagonist are built around the premise of ‘specific skill for specific challenge’. Archers are good against footsoldiers, cavalry good against archers, etc. These games, while teaching us that each sub-set of your overall force has a specialty, also teach us how best to combine those specialities into a dynamic effort. Particularly when the problem you thought you were attacking turns out to be something else entirely. Teams with different skill sets offer different perspectives and advantages, but also give us quick resources when the game changes. They teach us that analysing your challenges and strategies isn’t as much about finding the right tool for the job as it is about finding the right tools for solving the problems around the job as well. It’s one thing to plan for when things go right, but another to have the right people on the team if something unforeseen happens.

It’s Not Your Competition You’re Up Against. It’s Expectation. (Every racing game with a time trial mode. Ever)

In a lot of racing games from the early to mid nineties, the goal was just to win. Complete a course in the fastest time and avoid crashing, and you’re in line for champagne and enormous crockery. As console gaming started getting smarter, the idea that it was your opponent you were racing started to change. It isn’t. It’s the best possible outcome that you’re trying to beat, or at least match. Other competitors crash in the same way you do – they miss turns, take bad corners, hit rails and (occasionally) pile into fences too. It’s the ghost time you’re trying to beat –the best possible application of skill on a particular challenge. Beating someone else who is as fallible as you are might have been enough when being better than the others was a good marketing strategy. These days, it’s about beating expectation, about beating the perceived ideal. And that’s a lot harder.

Move or die. (Frogger, and the million variations thereon)

Frogger is one of the all time greatest games for simple entertainment. The goal is simple – move, or die. There are a million threats waiting to take you down as you navigate from the bottom to the top, again and again. And in fact, the game isn’t about making it to the end, because you have to do it over again and again. Frogger is about making small moves in the right direction, sometimes lateral, sometimes forward, to get where you’re going. And the only sure way to die is to stand still when you need to make a move.

If It’s Easy, It’s Not Going To Be Satisfying (Ninja Gaiden, G-Police, Battletoads, Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins, Contra)

Videogames can induce swearing on an unprecedented scale. Also controller throwing, TV breakages and serious psychological meltdowns. Why? Because they’re TOUGH! Games like those listed above were games that required every ounce of skill, focus and determination to get through. You fought the same challenges over and over again because, if you got through one level (ONE LEVEL!!!) of these games, you were proud. The first gamer reputations began when people would crowd around arcade machines to watch the best players finish a game previously thought unfinishable. They were gods.

If it’s not challenging to beat, it’s almost certainly not going to be satisfying for you. If you’re not having trouble completing a challenge, it’s time to step it up a notch. Good management involves (at least to some extent) pushing the envelope of your skills. If you are doing something that’s unsatisfying, you need to up the difficulty level. Sure, you’re out of your comfort zone. The reward for flourishing there is so much stronger than fighting a battle you know you can win with one hand.

Reward is important (Mario Bros)

Every time you finish a mammoth trial in the original Mario Bros franchise, you heard the same old thing. “Sorry – our princess is in another castle.” Effectively – ‘Thanks for all the effort you put in. You’ll get a reward next time, I promise. Now, back to work!”

I don’t think this needs to be spelled out, do you? (Also, for Portal fans – the cake is a lie. Don’t promise me something I’m not going to get.)

Innovations are gateways to new opportunity. (Half Life 2, Portal)

In both the games above, plus hundreds more, devices change the way you interact with the world. Technology changes your focus, from seeing things as background, unnecessary items to potential weapons, different ways of navigating obstacles, and even an extra dimension to a story. In these two games particularly, the new technology adds an extra dimension to the game, and changes the way the player sees opportunity. As we interact more through technology, publish more and connect more with each other, embracing technology isn’t just keeping up with the pack – it’s about leading them, and finding new ways to challenge traditional thinking. I’m not done – just done for now.

Your EVP and your employer brand are ideally connected to the employee experience. Not just as the result of it (which you gained through research and focus groups and surveys and such) but a continual cause-and-effect. Your brand is at its most effective when it is used to influence how employees feel about working for you, and how they connect with you. For many companies, this is about internal reinforcement – you told us you work here for X, so we’re going to provide more of X. X is great! Hooray for X, which we provide!

However, I think there’s a more active way to do this. Every interaction your employees have with your business (and particularly your HR department) is an interaction with the experience they’ve chosen to invest in as employees. When you’re doing performance reviews, when you’re communicating changes to the corporate structure, when you’re getting employees to fill out timesheets – all of these are aspects of the product that is the employment experience. It’s the product that you as a company deliver to your employees. It’s what they get because they’ve choosing to work for you.

So why not make these interactions more meaningful? Why not apply the principles of better user experience to employment? Look at whether processes add value. Look at whether interactions (via technology or otherwise) sit alongside the brand principles you have. Talk to staff and ask “How could we make doing this task a better experience for you?” Build processes and product experiences that are meaningful – that empower employees, and that tie in with their emotional connection to the business.

I’ll give you an example. There’s a company that does an internal survey every two years, asking employees a range of questions about the business; where it’s heading, what they need to do more of, manager behaviour – it’s a comprehensive survey. And moreover, it can precipitate real change in the business as a result of the feedback. In preparation for the next survey, it’s previously been their tradition to put out a simple list of the things which have changed as a result of the last survey, in an all-staff email, to be read (or ignored) by staff, before the next survey comes along.

This year, said company chose to do something different. They built a game, a game of Spot The Difference, between two images. Image one was the office two years ago. Image two was the same image, with all the improvements made as a result of the last survey. More desks. More training. Environmental awareness measures. When you clicked on the difference in the second shot, a little blurb came up detailing the change, and the effect it had on the company as a whole. As an incentive, they held a competition for three iPhones. All you had to do to enter was find the ten differences they’d included in the game, and register your email address on the internal server, and you‘re were in the draw.

The response was brilliant. Not just from a numbers perspective, but also from qualitative feedback. Everyone who entered the competition said that they enjoyed this – because it made the changes recognisable, and because it gave them a challenge: to see what had changed in their time as an employee. The team who built the game designed the experience so that, when it came time to do the survey, those who had played the game had thought about what changes would come from their answers. And the percentage of completed surveys jumped about 15% as a result.

When you’re looking at communicating to employees, or implementing a new process, or engaging new hires on induction – think beyond what the company wants to say, and focus on how it makes your audience interact with the company and feel about the brand. Every positive experience, every meaningful experience, contributes to a stronger emotional investment. And that leads to better retention of the right people, and more discretionary effort. And those are never bad things.

Traditional sourcing methods are still delivering good candidates, everyone’s talking about social media and its “potential” as a sourcing tool, newspaper ads (like the newspapers themselves) are dwindling, and more and more people are looking at referrals, alumni programs and human-contact sourcing as viable, cost effective alternatives.

As the talent pool shrinks, there are seemingly two schools of thought about how to tackle the market: (a) talent as an acquired commercial asset and (b) talent as an investment in human potential. Each has its strengths and ROI, and each is viable as a resourcing business model. One recognises contribution to the bottom line, and one is more about contribution to the business culture.

There’s something we tend to forget about people when we look at them as resources, or candidates, or applicants, or generations. They’re people. They’re individuals in possession of souls and dreams and passions, fears, doubts and their own little peccadilloes. And if we did more to understand those passions and motivations, we’d make better hiring decisions, find better mentors and build better careers for our people. We’d also build an employer brand that doesn’t just focus on people, but maximises their potential and their humanity at the same time.

A lot of people talk about social media as a way to get candidates, but very few people (by comparison to the average) talk about using online social tools to build communities. Some of this is fear – fear of empowering employees to speak for the company, fear of backlash, fear of negative commentary. Some of it is a resourcing issue – monitoring and continuously engaging with a talent community is not free; it takes time, knowledge and skills that are still pretty scarce in the recruiting world. And some of it is ignorance – ignorance of why people like communities, of how communities can help the bottom line, of how a community transforms an individual’s passion and interest into something approaching a cause.

Your community is a massive part of your brand, because it’s the organically grown experience of all your people. That community has a massive influence, and tremendous power to motivate, inspire, revive and foster its members. It’s your culture that lives your values and promotes additional work from the right people. It’s your culture that makes the people who don’t fit in, stand out, and eventually self-select to go elsewhere.  Go inside any company and you’ll find acolytes of the corporate culture who seem overly passionate about the culture by any scale. Those people define the culture, and are advocates for you beyond all expectation. So why not let them interface with the people who want to work for you?

It ties back into building a one-to-one relationship between the business and every employee (or potential employee). The business isn’t bigger than the sum of the people who make up the staff. Your people are literally the company, and from an employment standpoint, are the biggest part of being an employee. The company is a smaller part of the equation than the culture. People rarely love companies because of the task – they love companies because of the team. And that’s fundamental to attracting, and retaining, the best people for you.

Plenty of companies built pretty employer brands – slick ads, nice careers pages, a nice tagline and a level of consistency and visual compliance only dreamed of by dictators around the world. For many, it was an attraction strategy – better ads get better candidates, right? Well, no. Honest ads get better candidates, because the people you want might not care about the design, or read all the beautifully phrased copy, or be inspired by your imagery. That might not be what your people want, whatever your agency says. In the war for share of mind with time-poor talent, meaningful trumps pretty, every day.

Your brand isn’t a marketing exercise. It’s your soul, the distillation of the experience of all your people. It’s the emotional experience you want like-minded people in the market to catch, and hunger for. It isn’t the marketing – it’s the attitude. The execution is your branding, but not your brand. And all the marketing in the world won’t help you create an experience as powerful as one human connecting with another about a passion or a belief. Let your people communicate to the market, and the talent, the people who fit what you’re about – they’ll find you. And when they do, and they’re welcomed in with open arms, they’ll start to love you. And isn’t that what you want?

As the market switches from recruiting to redeployment, many experts are saying that your brand still needs to be a fundamental part of your argument. This is absolutely true – you don’t stop having a brand just because you aren’t actively promoting it. Your brand is who you are, your fundamental personality. There is a scramble within market to turn brands inward, to focus on key staff retention and keeping talent, rather than attracting it.

If your brand is built on an honest reflection of the actual employee experience, this shouldn’t be too hard. Brands which attracted by overselling the company and building an idealistic view will struggle.Companies guilty of ‘oversell’ will start to see real problems when the false retention that the current crisis has induced begins to wear off.

When the recruitment requirements of companies begin to thaw, the employment brand of a copany will be a strong determinant in attracting key staff. More importantly, it will play a huge part in your ability as a business to hold onto the key performers you need, when the downturn ends. Your brand needs to be robust enough to attract and retain with equal measure – getting them in the door is only a small aprt of finding and engaging the staff you need to succeed.

Imagine you’re at a coffee shop on your own on Saturday morning. You’re in a relationship that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. You don’t feel that you’re ready to break up and leave the relationship yet, but you’re keeping a weather eye out, just in case. You’re enjoying some alone time.

While reading the paper, you see an ad that describes you as the person who is perfect for the author. The ad makes them sound attractive, rewarding and fun. Like your partner used to be. You’re intrigued. You want to know more.

You recognize the name from somewhere. Maybe someone you know has had a relationship with them before. Maybe one of your friends knows them. You know there’s a connection somewhere.

Do you:

1. Call the number on the ad and talk to them, knowing that they’re on the market and possibly desperate?
2. Look them up on Facebook, Twitter, wikipedia, or the web, to try and find out about them quietly?
3. Ask your friends if anyone knows them and whether it’s a good opportunity?
4. Wait and hope that one of your friends will introduce the two of you out of the blue?
5. Call a dating agency to see if they can introduce you?

The way you address this is no different to the ways you can look at engaging a company to find a job. There’s no right way – there are only different levels of directness. When you identify an opportunity, you have the control over how you approach the company. And in fact, a company that is closely aligned with you spiritually will have made itself contactable in your preferred method deliberately. They’ll have done this for two reasons – to put you at ease, and prove they can speak your language.

If you’re an employer, part of your employer brand includes where you choose to be seen, and how to be contacted. Your brand isn’t just about broadcasting a message. It’s also about designing mechanisms for conversation that make your target market feel comfortable to engage in. Understanding how your employees want to get in contact with you, and preparing a response or strategy for enhancing this first contact is crucial to beginning engagement.

Five questions worth asking of your brand conversation strategy are;

1. How do the bulk of candidates respond to an advertised opportunity?
2. Can your current contact plan ensure a consistent, brand-rich experience across all your contact mediums?
3. Where could your brand currently be that candidates would be looking for you? Note – this isn’t an excuse to leap onto Twitter, LinkedIn or any other social platforms. Research first, action second.
4. What isn’t working? Where are the holes in the process? What could you re-engineer to make more representative of your brand?
5. What is in place to ensure consistency? What guidelines are there about brand-rich communication for new staff, external recruitment agencies and your successors?

Just like the phone call after a first date, the immediate contact you have with someone who is interested in you as an employer is key. Make it brand-rich, honest and meaningful, and you drastically improve your chances of getting the right people on board.

I compare the process to love letters. If you’ve ever been in a situation where you’ve received love letters, you know there’s a tremendous personality that’s part of them. Hand-written, full of protestations of affection, written to make you feel valuable and loved. You can put fifty of them from the same author side by side, and see a pattern.

Now imagine your true lover started typing them on a computer, printing them on plain white paper and started writing from the head, not the heart. You’d be worried. You’d feel it was a formality, something carried on simply because it had been done before. You’d be put off by the change of pattern, and I suspect part of you would start questioning the relationship. You’d almost be waiting for the Dear John letter, wouldn’t you?

That psychological change comes because the original love letters made you feel special. They felt and sounded like the person you were in love with. They were a reaffirmation of your emotional contract, and they made you reinvest in the relationship.When the communication style changes, becomes more impersonal, and more functional, your emotional contract begins to weaken. You’re seeing no evidence of the person you’re in love with. You’re just being given messages with no emotion, no transference of care.

This is exactly the same for internal communications. Communication has become about the delivery of data, which lacks emotional input, and denies us the ability to connect author and reader. The word we use for the delivery of emotion is story-telling, and even that’s evasive. Every message, no matter how small or dry, can be imbued with some personality, some sense of single-voice authorship. It can be imbued, for want of a better term, with love.

A good employer brand lives on the continual transfer of emotion, the ongoing renewal of that psychological contract. If your communications with employees feel more like impersonal manuals and less like messages from one person to another, you’re alienating employees from the brand they identify with. And there’s no faster way to make people fall out of love with an idea than assuming that you only have to fall in love with it once. The best employer brand does something to make people renew their emotional commitment at every encounter, no matter how small.