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Building A Brand From The Inside Out

Are your employees capable of delivering on your brand story, promises and values? Are they motivated to? Without employee buy-in and engagement, your brand’s success will always be marginalized. Because every great brand is built from the inside out. Full on brand building requires an internal brand culture – developed, designed, nurtured – that is aligned with business and marketing goals.

Brand/Culture Alignment

With a corporate culture that embodies your brand promises and values, employees will not only believe in your brand, but they’ll advocate for it whenever they can. The word-of-mouth marketing that employees can drive is valuable, vast and exponential.

Likely your external-focused marketing plan process runs like clockwork – and plans are locked and loaded the beginning of the year. But what’s the state of your Internal Engagement Marketing Plan? What are your goals, strategies, tactics and timelines for internal brand building – which time and again have been shown to directly impact business performance.

Brand Building Requires Promises Being Kept

At the end of the day, brand is a promise. Regardless of whether that promise equates to faster, smarter, more inspiring, more rewarding, more trustworthy – it’s a promise that is either fulfilled or not.

And regardless of whether that promise is fulfilled through a computer screen, a mobile phone or a person-to-person interaction – it still comes down to individuals (employees) designing and fulfilling the experience.

But it’s not just any experience we’re talking about. It’s an experience that needs to rise above others. One that’s uniquely yours, genuine to your organization and valuable and rewarding for your audiences. An experience that is not only fulfilled, but felt.

These are experiences that can make lives easier, healthier, safer, more productive and rewarding. Experiences like Amazon, Etsy, Harry’s, Peloton, Trader Joe’s and Warby Parker, to name just a few. Common across all these experiences – they start with your employees.

The Multiplier Effect of Employee Engagement

A great employee experience begets better customer experiences, higher productivity and greater profitability.

Here are five things to know about Employee Engagement, based on Forrester principal analyst David Johnson’s research piece – Improve Employee Experience to Better Your Business Performance:

1. Defining Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is a scientific term, so it has a very precise definition and means of measurement. At the same time, there are ways to describe it in terms that non-scientists can easily understand and apply to their organizations. In scientific terms, it is a measure of three things:

1. An employee’s vigor or energy for their work

2. The dedication they feel toward their company and work

3. How absorbed in their work they

Taken together, these three things form a score or measurement of engagement. When employees feel engaged, they can often reach a state known as Flow, which is a pleasurable experience where their sense of time is distorted and they’re performing their work at peak levels of concentration and focus, and likely to be highly productive as a result – as much as 150% more productive than peers.

2. Quantifiable Impact Of A Fully Engaged Workforce

Field studies conducted over the past 20 years, conclusively link employee engagement to business outcomes, including:

• 37% lower absenteeism
• 25% lower turnover (in high-turnover organizations)
• 65% lower turnover (in low-turnover organizations)
• between 10% and 85% higher customer satisfaction (depending on industry)
• 22% higher profitability
• Source: Harter et al., 2013

3. Predictors of Employee Engagement

Here are the top 10 predictors of engagement from Forrester’s most recently published research:

• Recent opportunities to advance at work: 61%
• Sufficient autonomy: 50%
• Recent recognition or praise from their manager: 49%
• Company provides a productive environment: 48%
• How their work contributes to company success: 47%
• Believes in the core mission and values of the company: 44%
• Can easily provide feedback to leadership: 44%
• Knows what’s expected of them at work: 42%
• Company helps employees live its core values: 42%
• Company is forward-looking and innovative: 40%

4. How To Find Opportunities To Bolster Engagement

Full employee engagement is unlikely because it’s almost impossible to have every employee feel fully engaged in their work. But quantitatively, it is possible to achieve engagement scores in the low- to mid-90% range.

Qualitatively, according to Forrester’s study, engagement at this level looks like:

• Nearly everyone having high energy levels toward their work
• Very low employee turnover rates relative to your competitors
• For knowledge workers, at least, spending most of their time and energy on “deep work” (requiring a lot of concentration and focus to complete) and spending comparatively little time in meetings or on “busy work” such as expense reporting and paperwork

5. How Can Companies Approach Employee Engagement From A Capabilities Perspective To Be Most Effective

From speaking with EX leaders and practitioners at approximately 30 organizations around the world to specifically understand what capabilities they’re building to increase employee engagement, Forrester’s EX Capabilities Model includes six “pillars” to grow Enablement and Culture:

• Listening and data literacy
• Strategy
• Design
• Science
• Operations
• Communication and Execution

Building A Brand That Employees Love and Believe In

As competition gets fiercer across the health and wellness industry, you rely on your brand to give you a competitive advantage. To leverage its full power – to fuel growth, create value and grow ROI – it needs to be baked into the business. Which means embedding it into your culture.

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Since 1999, our hybrid brand consultancy / creative agency has partnered with clients across the health and wellness continuum to grow stronger brand-led businesses. Reach out for a no-obligation consultation.