Confluence

Corporate culture and recruiting: closing the gaps

In a fragile economy like ours, there are scores, even hundreds, of willing applicants for every open position. Hiring organizations can switch their recruiting efforts to autopilot if they choose, pulling in recruits as rapidly as they need them.

If you’re in a position to hire, you may think you’re sitting pretty. But--to paraphrase Lockheed-Martin’s slogan--never forget who you’re working for in your zeal to bring newbies in the door. You are certainly responsible to corporate management to recruit the best qualified candidates, but you’re also responsible to the working culture of your company. You should make sure there’s a good potential fit between your candidate’s predicted work habits and expectations and the authentic attributes of your company's culture. This is not a squishy pie-in-the-sky aspiration. It goes right to productivity and teamwork on the job.

From the employee’s standpoint, corporate culture integrates the organizational with the personal. It’s a stew of corporate mission and shared values, of teamwork, knowhow, and complex relationships both on the job and off. You can’t really quantify it, but visit any workplace and you're likely to walk away with a strong inkling of what its culture is like.

Is your culture formal, hierarchical, and buttoned-up...or casual, collegial, and egalitarian? Is it an email culture? A meetings culture? A culture of solitary production or collective give-and-take? While these categories are far too simplistically antithetical to serve as anything but top-level examples, I think you see where I’m going here.

Whatever you say or put out to candidates while recruiting should align accurately with how your workplace culture really operates. (This is where your Talent Brand comes in.)

If your real-world  culture doesn’t match the expectations that your recruiting efforts have spawned, can you reasonably expect the top performers among your new hires to stick around for long, let alone contribute to the success of the enterprise?

Recruiting in a sputtering economy may be a winning proposition on the surface, but your enterprise loses all around if you don’t integrate recruits productively into your workforce...and into the culture that your workforce--not your management--has created.

Tell a story to supercharge your brand’s appeal

 There’s no question about it: if you expect to succeed, you absolutely have to demonstrate value to your customers, clients, constituents, and admirers. That’s a branding constant--whether you offer a product or service; whether you operate a small or large business, an association or non-profit. So your first impulse on your Web site, or in your printed materials, may be to craft a value proposition that pulsates with unparalleled thought and argumentation: “Here’s precisely why we’re your most logical choice...”

Fair enough. But don’t get too carried away with pristine “left-brain” argumentation, however intellectually dazzling. While it’s true that your circle of prospects, customers, and budding brand adherents may need some structured convincing, most are far more likely to listen up if they can visualize your practical value in concrete, real-world terms.

That’s a big reason why storytelling deserves a place in your branding toolkit. Let your observers experience your value through a case study (or less formal anecdote). The story format is a ready-made platform for demonstrating how you can answer your potential customers’ needs in distinctive ways. If the customer circumstances you describe parallel the challenges your potential customers face, it’s a good bet they’ll respond to your brand on a level that plainspoken logic can't reach. And if your cases prompt them to identify with your circle of clients and customers—your brand community—they’re inclined at the least to listen and, in the best case, to buy in to what your brand promises.

Marketers have used this case study technique since the dawn of human commerce. If you need a time-honored model, you can organize your own cases in three parts:

• The challenge you or your team faced, best stated in terms of the customer’s real-world circumstances.
• The approach you or your team applied to solving the challenge (emphasizing the values that your brand stands for).
• The happy state-of-affairs--i.e., the positive business or strategic results--that your work has created for the customer or client.

Just think about this structure for a quick minute and you’ll realize that it’s a classic story arc. Its progression--from confusion or imbalance to clarity and a new beginning--is as akin to Star Wars or Pride and Prejudice as it is to the thrilling sagas of how Microsoft (or Apple) impacted computing and McDonalds (or Starbucks) changed food service forever.

And maybe that’s why this approach works so well. It appeals to us instinctively. Call it business storytelling or narrative branding...at its core it can grab the attention of your brand community in a reassuring promise of shared experience. At an even deeper (and maybe more mysterious) level, it tickles some archetypal circuit of human responsiveness.

You can easily explore all this for yourself. Now that you know what to look for, you may be surprised by how frequently great examples of case study branding and business storytelling crop up—especially on the Web. You may also find yourself inspired by how adaptible this strain of narrative branding is to your own marketing and engagement strategies. 

So why not put it to good use? It’s worked since forever.

“Is this dog seriously doing this?” Confronting the signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter

For many serious marketers Twitter remains the playground of the frivolous.

It’s not hard to see why: the tweet stream can seem dominated by self-absorbed musings from pop culture icons and their fans, not to mention impulsive post-adolescents keeping the other cool kids in the know with moment-to-moment updates on their moods, opinions, and physical locations.

Also swelling the stream are tweets from—let’s give them the benefit of the doubt--otherwise seemly individuals broadcasting 140-character bliplets that fall, by my casual reckoning, into nine loose categories. The examples below are all actual tweets from a 35-minute early morning stream on my feed:   

• the perky-shout greeting: “Happy Monday!”
• the knee-slapper: “Picasso would have said I look lovely this morning”
• the chipper self-mastery nugget: “Make progress toward your dream even if it seems small...”
• the ancestor quote: “Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.“ Benjamin Franklin.   
• the lifestyle tip: “Learn the Bunny Hop…”
• the link to a funny, or painful, or funny-painful video: “Is this dog seriously doing this?...”
• the strike-it-rich revelation: “The Ultimate Manual of profitable ideas! Start Earning from your home Immediately! …”
• the find-your-online-mojo tease: “For one low cost you can put a capture site on your Facebook page. Check it out!!”
• the vital issues poll: “Are Stand-Up Desks the Wave of the Future?”

So what’s the point of sticking a toe in this social media riptide? For me, it’s the incomparable value of Twitter for staying up-to-speed on professional disciplines of interest. For Insight Brand Vistas, this means branding, corporate culture, and content strategies, to name our primary subject matter buckets. Twitter is without parallel in this pursuit because of the collective energy (in our professional disciplines) of thousands of smart and talented people. These voluntary participants in the Twitter community filter value from online sources and point to where it can be found on the web (where it generally crops up in blog posts and news articles).

For serious practitioners in branding, social media, and any strain of communications consulting, Twitter is a  self-organizing viral community, its value fueled by what has come to be termed content “curation”. I’m a little tentative about tossing this new name around because it sounds so pretentious…but it has become the dominant term of art for what Twitter ad hoc knowledge communities do. Their members act as curators, drawing attention to, and often commenting on, valuable web content, often from the far side of beyond in the online universe. In Insight Brand Vistas’ practice this is an indispensable service, and we participate wholeheartedly in this community through our own Twitter contributions.

So remember the old baby-bathwater bromide—as tired and trite as it is--if you’re tempted to dismiss Twitter’s value as a knowledge management tool. It’s a first-class business asset.

You just have to wade through its tiresome, trite, and vastly frustrating storm surge of triviality, self-absorption, and lingering post-adolescent in-crowd arrogance. Other than that…

Story values can make a brand resonate...if they're authentic to the business of the sponsor

If you keep up with our activities and thinking through Insight/Brand Vistas’ Facebook page, you’ll be familiar with the value of telling compelling stories to engage your brand community. Whether you call it narrative branding or business storytelling, it’s the real deal. Why? Because for one thing it  connects on a real-world, human interest level, triggering “right-brain” responses rather than mere rational evaluations on the logical level.

Here’s a compelling video example of what I mean from a Thai bank that you’ve probably never heard of. It’s a five-minute piece, but its story values are so strong that once you start streaming it you’ll have a hard time linking out. Note also that there’s no overt commercial pitch from the video’s sponsor. The viewer is left to conclude that the indomitable spirit and perseverance of this true story’s child-heroes are values that characterize the sponsoring bank as well.

If you liked Rocky or The Karate Kid you’ll love this “bootstrap” sports story about underdogs. Not to stray too far into didactic precincts, but the "plot" of this real-life tale is archetypal. And TMB, the sponsor, boldly co-opts the story's age-old viral energy to push its own brand agenda, and in support of a commercal proposition only tangentially related (if that) to the narrative substance of the video.

This is branded content that walks a fine line when it comes to brand authenticity. The story's value to the bank's brand is substantial--as long as the viewer pays no attention to the man behind the curtain.

[Double click on the video image for a full screen version.]

Where conventional employer branding falls short

If you’ve been following Insight Consulting/Brand Vistas on Twitter, you know that I stand for branding that authentically maps organizational culture to outreach and engagement strategies. This applies in both marketplace and human capital arenas, and it’s a key reason why we summarize Insight/Brand Vistas' work in the latter arena as talent branding. In developing a talent brand we focus first on the native culture of a workforce. To us this is an organization's most authentic and compelling basis for attracting and cultivating talent.

Call it an inside-out approach if you wish. We have used this approach successfully for many companies and organizations--and even for Federal agencies like the EPA, a long-term client. 

But, you ask, isn't it also important to discover how potential recruits and other stakeholders view a company from the outside in? Of course it is, but in our view refining a talent brand has to start with discovering the authentic motivators that inspire top-performing members of the existing workforce. This is the signature workplace experience, the constellation of factors that keep team members coming back every day, whatever their tenure and degree of experience.

This underscores what we see as a game-changing flaw in conventional employer branding formulas that flutter around recruitment outreach as the primary expression of the brand. Dwelling too obsessively on  what you presume (or even certify) that typical recruits are looking for in an employer is a seductive and slippery slope; it can tempt you to cut corners on what should be a thorough and empathetic discovery initiative throughout all segments of your culture.

In a nutshell, a talent brand should begin with the "native" values that characterize your organization's workplace and its top performers, and extend its embrace through all stages of the employee life cycle and all employee segments. Building your brand to dovetail with what you think are expectations in the talent marketplace may yield high response rates, even quick wins in hiring, but will these team members stick around for long if they discover that the experience doesn't match the promise?

Make no mistake: a talent brand should certainly inspire creative recruiting, but there's more to it than that. Ideally, it should also still supply the value themes and the creative energy for all human capital initiatives, from retention to staff development to inclusive leadership, and so on. For more on this dimension I invite you to check out my article "Rethinking Employer Brands" from the June 2010 issue of The Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.

This focus on culture as brand driver is not a perspective unique to Insight/Brand Vistas. Several commentators and consultants, notably Nicolas Ind and Mary Jo Hatch, have embraced this view for years, and made it the touchstone for a wider-gauge emphasis on corporate branding. It’s interesting that most of their case work is European.

Are practitioners of employer branding in this country too enamored of the market-centered metrics of packaged goods branding to see the strategic role that human capital branding can play in the cultural health and talent environment of an organization? The takeaway here: always consider the external landscape in building a talent brand. Just don't obsess over it.

Five factors mean difficult times for the leaders of our public servants

This commentary covers a pretty narrow topic, but one that is of some interest to the public sector leaders in our Insight Consulting/Brand Vistas community, many of whom are Federal managers and human capital strategists. Today these particular callings have become particularly unenviable, mainly because the government’s ability to acquire and retain top talent, already strained, will be even more severely handicapped in days to come. A number of circumstances are contributing to this perfect storm:

• 1. Forces in Congress are pressing hard to cut back on Federal spending in general and the size of the federal workforce in particular.
• 2. The President has proposed a two-year halt in government hiring and a five-year freeze on budget growth in certain Fed sectors.
• 3. Private industry—particularly in tech, an absolutely essential Federal hiring sector—is emerging from the recession ready-to-hire, intensifying competition with Federal agencies  for new graduates and journeymen—not to mention enticing more experienced Feds to jump ship for private industry.
• 4. The 401Ks of current government employees are gradually recovering the ground they lost over the last several years. As this trend develops, the long-anticipated (and so far unrealized) Federal retirement wave will likely gather steam.  Remember: more than  half of Fed employees will be retirement-eligible by 2015, and how likely is it—given the developing budget situation--that the resulting exodus in know-how and experience can be addressed without critical disruptions to agency operations and mission success?
• 5. According to polls, the widespread public image of the Federal workforce is one of circuitous bureaucracy, bad attitudes, and abysmally low productivity.  This viewpoint—accurate or not-- embodies a severe brand deficiency likely to dissuade many motivated and talented job seekers from looking into government service.

To come: fierce inter-agency competition for talent. Faced with a shrinking or inexperienced workforce unable to answer mission requirements, what agency wouldn’t turn to the nearest available source of experience and talent—specifically, seasoned workers in other agencies? My point: if you’re a government human capital planner, hunker down to fend off forays from other agencies bent on pirating your critical talent. And unless you’re blissfully above the fray, grit your teeth and prepare to do some pirating of your own.

Am I painting a picture that’s a bit too post-apocalyptic for you? In practice, you really don’t have to get down and dirty to succeed in this evolving competitive environment. One approach is to direct a renewed emphasis at retention, focusing on enriching your organizational culture and boosting the morale of your agency workforce. In some ways this is a departure from established Federal human capital practice, where one team handles recruiting, another retention, still another internal communications, and so on. But this kind of inter-team integration makes for the most efficient strategy given emerging circumstances. In concert, you can address one central human capital goal:  enriching organizational culture, with an eye on building general job satisfaction and hanging on to potential expats who may be on the fence for one reason or another.

Admittedly this approach is just one of several that can help in this necessary initiative. I will discuss this and other approaches—all of them equally applicable to government cultures and beyond—in detail in future posts. But the bottom line is this: if you’re a Federal human capital leader or planner, be prepared for new realities --and new imperatives—in the realm of talent management.

2011 heralds a new era in how we engage customers and brand communities

The practice of branding is evolving rapidly today, with much of the impetus stemming from emerging communication platforms and the American public’s eagerness to adopt smart phones, tablet computers, and social media interactivity as essential personal resources.  Consumers are driving the bus here, with B2B marketing and corporate branding gliding along dependably in the slipstream.

From my perspective, three enablers are swept up in this trend. I think we’ll see significant influence on B2B branding and engagement practice from each of the following through 2011 and beyond:

• Tablet computing will inspire a fresh convergence of old and new media.
• The online center of gravity for companies, today anchored solidly in web sites, will tip increasingly toward social media platforms.
• Leading organizations will double down on their use of branded content.

Over the next weeks and months, I’ll be commenting in more detail on each of these trends, particularly about how they figure in our work at Insight Consulting. For now, let me leave you with a few quick notes about each factor.

Tablet computing and the new convergence. Credit the iPad for this emerging wrinkle and for inspiring the frenetic rollout of capable imitators, notably those on Android platforms. The kind of convergence I’m predicting may surprise you: I think we’ll see that stodgiest of old media—namely print--infused with renewed energy as tablet form factors and market penetration open the door to…

-          a merger of old-school print layout principles with the best practices of online design

-          the ability to integrate rich media, video,  and full customer interactivity (especially in the         marketing arena) into print-influenced tablet screen layouts.

We’re already hearing about a potential of tablets and e-readers to spur a game-saving resurgence in magazine and newspaper publishing. Whether this actually comes to pass is still uncertain, but there’s surely real promise in the far reaches of the traditional publishing universe, specifically for textbooks and glossy brochure-ware like glitzy annual reports and “prestige” long-form booklets (think colleges attempting to attract students).

The potential ROI here is as persuasive for these old-school publishers as the promise of an emerging hybrid "neo-print" aesthetic is for traditionalists. And before we move on, let’s take note of two other factors that will also throw their substantial weight into the print-online-usability convergence heralded by the tablet: 4G mobile networks and “TV everywhere” technologies. Connect the dots here yourself.

The corporate drift to social media platforms. Although some commentators are predicting the imminent demise of enterprise web sites in favor of corporate Facebook, Linked-In, and YouTube pages, the full fruition of this migration, if it does occur, is probably beyond our event horizon. Still, there are persistent advance indicators of this shift, notably among consumer goods and lifestyle companies.

In years to come, look for corporate websites to fade progressively into new “engagement architectures” that grant co-equal importance to Web, mobile, tablet/e-reader, and social media tools. The discipline of branding is about to enter a multi-platform era that enlists a balance of diverse and complementary channels to create a truly interactive environment for enterprise-customer relationships.

A surge in “content marketing”. The availability and accuracy of online information sources has exiled shrill hard-sell approaches to increasingly irrelevant ‘push’ realms like direct marketing and paid TV programming. Smart practitioners of brand-centered marketing have turned to building and educating inclusive communities of brand adherents. Key to the education side of this approach is honest communication about the comprehensive and authentic context of an enterprise, including its values, commercial offerings, stories, employees, customers, and so on.

If this sounds to you like enterprise-based journalism, you’re not far wrong.  This year, watch for leading organizations to move decisively into this arena, stepping up their reliance on white papers, case studies, and profiles of partners, employees, and projects, not to mention feature-style coverage of their industries. YouTube, blogs, and Twitter–in their corporate colorations—will fall neatly in this context, and in the best cases provide responsive and flexible touchstones for open customer interaction with the brand and with each other.

The Wearin' of the Green Beer

 According to a survey conducted every year since 2004 by the National Retail Federation (NRF),  122 million Americans plan to celebrate St. Patrick’s day this year. Their planned activities range widely--from wearing green, to decorating their homes or offices, to going out to a bar or restaurant. This is the highest level of participation ever: more than 52% of our nation’s population.

Though I really can’t imagine this leprechaunish level of enthusiasm for wearin’ o’ the green in, say, Alabama or Wyoming, let’s grant the general accuracy of these numbers. I think this phenomenon points to a central truth about pop culture and the not-so-subtle pull it can exert on the social “motor” that can help a brand catch fire.

This whole St. Patrick’s Day thing is a giant “meme”, a contagious notion that’s taken on a viral life of its own. Folks buy into this national observance for any number of reasons: heartfelt national pride; the warm fuzzy of belonging to a group (or a nationwide virtual flash-mob); the opportunity to slip into a lighthearted pretend identity; or just a convenient moment to let loose and party.

In the aggregate it doesn’t really matter. Like Halloween (another Irish-derived observance), Valentine’s Day, and even the 4^th of July, “St Paddy’s” is an annual case study in the viral power of a concept that’s shed its ritual, ceremonial, or memorial associations and is running (wild?) on vestigial social impulses.

In this space we pretty regularly harp on (ouch) the need for authenticity behind a contagious brand. There’s no authenticity--in the sense in which we usually mean it--here. So go figure.  

It’s undeniable: the driving social energy behind this quasi-holiday has inspired marketers to latch on and promote their products since the ‘50s. Take this vintage (1980) ad from McDonald’s…

Please share your thoughts on this phenomenon. Help us understand its viral power.

Even among strange bedfellows...branded content partnerships can open new markets…or recharge familiar ones

It should be no surprise that Lexus, like Buick, is wooing a younger demographic. While courting the under-35 demo may not be as critical to this Japanese luxury brand’s survival as it is for Buick, one aspect of Lexus’ brand strategy rates at least a bemused ‘Go figure’ smile.

It turns out that Lexus has teamed with the MOG Music Network to put up a microsite focusing on Indie Rock bands. Fans can learn about emerging groups, check their tour dates, and view some of the bands’ music videos. In keeping with the unspoken ground rules for branded content, overt promotional material for Lexus is pushed to the margins and downplayed—though perhaps not so much here as in other less commercially obtrusive branded content sites.

As most of our readers know well, the branded content trend nudges companies into a role shift--from marketplace vendor of products or services to above-the-fray publisher. The brand surrenders hard-sell for the perceived halo of serving up important or entertaining material for its current or would-be customers, as well as for its community of brand adherents.

 Check out Huggies’ Enjoy the Ride site for an example of what I mean. Here the visitor— in Huggies’ ideal view, a new parent--can access helpful info covering virtually every milestone in the journey from conception through toilet training. As potential publisher, this is Huggies’ sweet spot. ‘Curating’ this content effectively gives the brand a promotion from vendor of essential baby care products to essential source of baby care guidance, a far more valued brand persona. Carried off with the right touch of informed personality, this approach can move the brand gracefully to the center of a loyal brand community.

Building a community of loyal adherents is the core objective of my third--and favorite--branded content example, Tuna the Wonderfish. This site reflects the collaborative support of three commercial competitors: Bumblebee, StarKist, and Chicken of the Sea, brands that are hyper-familiar to all Americans through decades of mass media exposure. But this site is not about Charley the Tuna. or mermaids, or bees. It promotes the benefits of the three companies’ underlying product with no commercial coloration, and with a good measure of humor, personality, and helpful information. Here’s a sample of the microsite’s video content:

{Double-click on the video image for full-frame viewing.]

We will be following this trend in this blog in the weeks and months to come. You can also keep up with our activity and commentary on Insight Brand Vistas' corporate Facebook page. 

What are the hallmarks of a culture of inclusion?

I want to follow up on previous posts on the role of inclusion and other inside-out values in how Insight Consulting and Brand Vistas build resonant and authentic brands. Over the years, we’ve developed a few benchmarks to help decision-makers get a handle on what we mean by an authentically inclusive culture, and also to help them assess the progress their organizations are making toward this admirable goal.

In a nutshell, building an inclusion culture means creating a workplace where all individual perspectives and contributions are treated with respect and honesty. This seems straightforward enough as an uplifting objective, but getting there in the real world? Maybe not so simple.

So how do you know when you’re getting close?

…when talent and initiative are prized and rewarded without regard to gender, ethnicity, lifestyle, physical ability, or religious preference

… when all members of your workforce, top to bottom, share a felt sense of personal inclusion in shaping the organization’s future.

... when all your team members are encouraged to share in –and help refine—company-wide inclusion efforts.

… when the collective cultural know-how of your workforce aligns productively with all aspects of corporate strategy AND your organization’s marketplace or outreach initiatives.

… when everyone in the company, institution, or agency is invited to help recruit and retain outstanding talent among the diversity and disability segments from which you have not historically drawn a high proportion of team members.

This is not rocket science. But don’t doubt for a moment that it demands unsparing, and often painful, self-assessment on both a corporate and personal level.