?Branding Your CW Program?

One of the worst parts of being an adult (so far) is when you realize that the thing you’ve been complaining about is actually up to you to fix. This thought occurred to me a few months ago when I was getting a little…hmmm…worked up about lack of alignment internally about what was and was not Contingent Workforce.

“Someone needs to write this down and get it into people’s heads.”

[Sips coffee, looks off into the distance]

“Oh, that’s my job. Hey Google, play Anti Hero by Taylor Swift.”

Well, I did promise in the first article I wrote that this would be a human examination of what we do, and it turns out that the first human I needed to get right with in this process was myself. How could I expect to get my business partners on the right track when I had nothing to drive back to, nothing to reinforce, nothing to sell them on?

After a morning of some mad searching, I came across this article from SIA regarding the importance of program branding. This passage stood out to me: “A successful program will drive adoption and program expansion, which is critical. Successful adoption strategies will also help to create your program’s brand perceptions and perceived value. But creating the brand tends to be an afterthought, lost in the shuffle behind all the other moving parts of program implementation — technology, integrations, change management (training and project communication), cost and timeline. So how do you do it?”

It was all interconnected. Program adoption and how we sell the program to internal folks are a revolving circle. I was struggling to sell the program because there, again, wasn't something to drive back to, something that could be sold as a service. And in the mad rush of implementation, we had left that creative piece behind. We had the tools to operate our program but what exactly were we operating for?

With that in mind, I created a brand package of three key elements I could “sell”: a program name, a mission statement, and operating definitions.

Program Name

Branding your program with a name can be a thinker, but you can always keep it simple if being cheeky isn't your style. For Twitter, the team decided on Twitter Contingent Workforce, or TCW. We took it a step further and branded our staff augmentation population as #FlexFlock, creating a contractor community. (More on that in a later article) And since my creativity knows no limits, I branded Zendesk’s CW program as Zendesk Contingent Workforce, or ZCW. Not flashy, but easy to remember and easy to write in an email or Slack.

Feeling uninspired? It may be fun to run an internal contest with your contingent workers to see who can come up with the best program name. Prizes can be anything from company swag to bragging rights. If nothing else, it’s a fun first step toward creating a contractor community that’s carved out for just them.? Another idea that has stuck with me: an unnamed industry contact of mine shared that they were able to come up with their program name by using ChatGPT.

Mission Statement

The best way that I’ve found to get traction for internal alignment on your internal CW program is with a mission statement. A well written mission statement provides you with a clear elevator pitch to the business about what your team does, who you do it for and how you do it. That’s it, it can be just that easy. I always plug my mission statement in on slide 2 or 3 of a deck when I am dealing with leadership or new stakeholders. Repetition is key to retention.

Other things to consider when writing your mission statement:

• Where does your CW program sit? Are you in TA or do you sit in Procurement? What matters to stakeholders in these areas?
• What are your company’s biggest operating priorities? How can you reflect those in your mission statement?
• What values do you, as a program leader, want to infuse into your program?

I’ll break this down for you using the mission statement I wrote when I joined Zendesk a few months ago:

“The Zendesk Contingent Workforce program serves the business by efficiently providing the best-fit category of talent at the appropriate cost. We serve contingent talent by ensuring an inclusive and supportive working environment. We are champions of the Contingent Workforce.”

Okay, let’s slow that one down and replay it…

The Zendesk Contingent Workforce program serves the business by efficiently providing the best-fit category of talent at the appropriate cost. - Our opening line identifies that our priority is to serve the talent needs (what we do) of our business stakeholders (who we do it for) with an eye on appropriate cost (how we do it). Because we sit in Procurement, cost will always be a dominant factor in how we work, so we explicitly state this for impact and retention.

We serve contingent talent by ensuring an inclusive and supportive working environment. - We can’t forget the folks we are actually asking to do work on behalf of our organization. This is a value statement for me and how I prioritize contractor experience as key element of what my program will do. Our mission statement explicitly names our CWs to highlight how key they are (who we do it for) and highlight that our main goal for serving them is an inclusive and supportive work environment (what we do, how we do it). Zendesk is a company that is highly focused on impactful DE&I, which is something that I also value as a program leader. I have baked into our mission statement to ensure that we always keep inclusion of all types at the top of mind for the folks we bring into our organization.

We are champions of the Contingent Workforce. Zendesk’s company motto is “Champions of Customer Service”, so this is me infusing a little Zendesk culture and being a bit cheeky. I honestly can’t help myself sometimes.

Operating Definitions

Operating definitions provide additional alignment and clarity for cross-functional stakeholders. Spend any amount of time talking to the business and you’ll likely hear at least 4 different words for contractors used interchangeably. Not only is this confusing for everyone involved, it can also lead to misclassification of work/workers and poor talent experience. (Not convinced this impacts talent experience? Have you ever tried to put someone who thinks they're an IC on a W2 because a manager just says “contractor” over and over? You’ll learn, baby, you’ll learn.)

Observe a few meetings with some of your biggest or most problematic stakeholders. Do you hear a lot of the same words being used (or misunderstood) over and over? What problems keep bubbling up, making you want to pull your hair out at least once a week? Those are likely the key words you want to write down and define, then disseminate to the business.

For example, as I have implemented Gen 1 MSP programs I observed the amount of churn the word “Contingent Worker” would cause in meetings. I had never heard so many people from all across the business say “Well, that’s not really a contingent worker…” in my life. What they meant was “that’s not a staff augmentation contractor, it’s an outsourced vendor”, or something similar, but they didn't have the language to draw the distinction and ask for what they really needed.? This is why the definition of a contingent worker is always the slide right after my CW mission statement slide. We’re all on the same page less than 5 minutes into a meeting.

My tried and true list of operating definitions:

Contingent Worker: Any non-employees who performs work on behalf of your company.

VMS: The Vendor Management System (VMS) is the tool we use to streamline and manage our relationship with all parts of the contingent labor ecosystem.

MSP: A Managed Service Provider (MSP) is? a third party company that specializes in the management of contingent labor.

Staff Augmentation Contractor: a? worker employed by an outside agency to perform duties similar to that of an FTE and generally billed on an hourly basis. Time is tracked and approved daily/weekly.

Independent Contractor: a self employed individual or small business with a special skill set that is contracted to complete a project or set of tasks without supervision. Typically done under an SOW with various payment terms: Hourly, daily, monthly, retainer and milestone.

Your mileage may vary on these definitions, especially outside of the US, but these basic definitions should get you started.

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I’ve only been working with this particular set of branding elements for a few months, so the results are not yet in on effectiveness, but I have anecdotally seen more agreement on terms and more folks coming to me with questions or with new projects. It’s been a pretty rewarding exercise for a somewhat minimal amount of effort.

Your Turn: What struggles have you seen in program adoption and cohesion? How did you solve them? What are some CW program brands you’ve seen that have left an impression on you, either good or bad?