Start Inside
Every company aspires to have a strong workplace culture supported by inspiring values. But truly successful brands take it one important step further. Their culture and values don’t simply play a supporting role in business operations, they are the brand. Those values are used to inform business decisions and employee actions. True cultural change at your company hasn’t occurred until all your employees—top to bottom—are using your values to inform their daily behavior with customers and with each other.
Effective culture building can’t simply be an internal communications effort where your employees are a passive audience expected to buy whatever the leadership is selling.
Culture building must be used to educate your team so they understand what the brand is and why it’s important. This will allow employees to explain what the brand stands for and how it is unique. Only then will they be able to understand their own impact on how the brand is perceived and what is expected of them. If you first capture employees heads and hearts, you will impact their hands and feet. Before people can deliver your brand, they need to know its value in their heads and feel inspired by it in their hearts. If your culture doesn’t stimulate changes in behavior, it hasn’t made a meaningful connection with your people.
Generic corporate initiatives cannot replace engagement. Internalizing your brand requires that you focus on designing the organization and its business model to deliver on the brand values and attributes. You must empower your people with the tools and resources to infuse the brand into their day-to-day decisions and behaviors. In doing so, you will positively impact your employees lives and careers so they see the connection between the company’s destiny and their own.
When people are engaged, they connect with customers more effectively, with each other more fully, and with your brand in a more meaningful way. They are united in a common purpose and recognize their role in delivering it.
The ability to execute on your brand is difficult. Most leaders struggle with the gap between brand strategy and how the strategy is executed. Without strong cultural alignment, it’s easy for talented and hardworking people to produce mediocre results because they have different opinions about what’s on brand and what’s not. When this happens the customer always loses. In order to convert your brand culture into a consistent customer experience you must devote time, attention, and resources toward training and retraining a loyal base of frontline employees and managers.
