Do your employees really live your values?

Chapter 3, Part 3 - Corporate Brand Personality

BRAND TRAINING EXPERIENCE

As we’ve looked at already in this chapter, employee branding initiatives often fall short of the desired results, because they don’t get to the hearts and minds of the individuals within your organization. To differentiate your brand from your competitors and drive customer loyalty, it is critical that you get to this level of engagement and most importantly provide them with tools that work and help them to internalize the brand messages such that they can deliver on these consistently. They will only do this if it is meaningful and authentic to them. In order to achieve this you need to give them an experience of what branding means in people terms, rather than the same old training programmes that fail to hit the mark.

?Here are some key elements to consider when creating your brand training initiatives:

·?????? Avoid only providing the traditional and packaged customer-service training programmes.

·?????? Consider what it is your customers need from their experience with your brand and focus your training programmes around that.

·?????? Involve your client-facing staff in the design of the programmes – they are the ones that really know what is expected and appreciated by clients.

·?????? Your training must address the ‘what’s in for me’ factor and get to the hearts and minds of the individual in order for them to fully understand how to project this brand experience with every interaction.? Personal branding tools and techniques can achieve this – more on these techniques in Chapter 5.

·?????? Ensure your managers are involved in the design and are supportive of the process and objectives. They are responsible for the success of the brand experience for customers in their stores, hotels, site locations and branches. Their leadership brand and style is critical to getting the results.?

·?????? Empower your employees (not necessarily just managers), to make intuitive decisions for clients and customers. Support them in this. I refer you back to the Langham Hotel Ginger Beer story in Chapter 2.

·?????? Include ways in which to maintain momentum and keep focus. Introducing a reward scheme for delivering great brand experience should be considered.

We worked with JW Marriott Grosvenor House London , to design and deliver a programme that was to improve the levels of employee engagement and guest satisfaction. Within Marriott Hotels, various training modules are delivered internally each year to align associates with the brand messaging and embed the strong value-set of their company. This works very well of course, however, the General Manager felt that focusing on this area would benefit The Grosvenor House Hotel, by getting to the absolute heart of the associate. Bringing them to a level where they felt empowered to be themselves along with a deep understanding and appreciation for the prestigious hotel that they work for. The intention being that they could understand their personal brand, and then what they specifically bring to the overall service experience for the guest.

In order to achieve this we needed to gain buy-in of the executive team first.? We worked with them as a group and then individually, in order to immerse them in the personal branding process, so they could connect with the power of the training first-hand. This way it would filter down to associates more effectively.? We needed to gain absolute clarity of The Grosvenor House Hotel brand to start with. We then drilled down to each of the team members’ personal brands, using feedback and tools to define the brand statements for each. We then worked on ways in which they could project their brands authentically, build visibility and profile, and effectively communicate with their teams in a way that was in alignment with their natural style, but also in a manner that reinforced the hotel brand.

Over a period of five months every single member of staff (500+) attended a Walking TALL session, covering The Grosvenor House Hotel’s unique brand, on a level that they could connect with, and that meant something to them. However most importantly we were able to make them feel that they each contributed something exceptional by tapping into their value set and their personal brand, and giving them tools to project this every day, with every communication they had internally and with guests.

The results were incredibly positive.? The Grosvenor House Hotel’s employee engagement survey reported an increase of 5 per cent in the first year and a further 2 per cent in the following year. In addition, they reported an unprecedented 15.9 per cent increase in staff behaviours in their measurement of being ‘warm and hospitable to guests.’? Guest satisfaction overall increased from 78 per cent to 80 per cent. This was attributed to the Walking TALL programmes that we implemented.? General manager, Stuart Bowery , added that the initiative most importantly ‘gave each individual employee the tools and inspiration to take their personal brand into their own hands, strengthen it and deliver a better experience for our guests as a result.’? It is when we get to this level of engagement that behaviours start to change.

The task after any training programme or engagement initiative is to keep the momentum going, not just for existing staff but for new people joining the organization. For The Grosvenor House Hotel, we provided them with a licence for their trainers to deliver the Walking TALL principles in-house whenever needed, to keep the messages alive and at the forefront of their everyday work, at all levels. When you’re next in London, go and experience it yourself!

Another reason that the desired level of engagement is sometimes not achieved, is that there is too great a degree of distance between the executive level where the brand values have been established, often along with a brand agency, and the individual person attempting to project these. Bringing it down to a team level, by creating a team brand can aid this process and gain greater results, as it becomes more localized and meaningful to the individual. We will cover more about team branding later in the chapter.?

Many companies will say that their success is down to their employees, but a much lesser number actually put in the required effort and investment relative to the stated importance of their people. Southwest Airlines do it very well and use it to gain competitive advantage.

At Southwest Airlines they appear to get three major things right in particular with their employee branding. Firstly they recruit the right people who have ‘fun’ in their DNA. Then they remain true to their value of people being at the very heart of what they do, whether that’s their 46,000+ employees or their customers; and then because of how they do things they have their customers singing their praises too. Their employees are involved in their branding decisions and feel valued as a result. We often hear stories of how Southwest and their employees have gone the ‘extra mile’ to help customers and as a consequence they have become known for their extraordinary customer service.

OVER-PLAYING IT

Care has to be taken not to over-engineer the employee brand initiatives. Of course it makes sense to have behaviour guidelines in customer service for example, but ‘over-scripting’ in terms of customer interaction can lead to a falseness and unauthentic brand image being projected. Remember for example, the famous ‘Have a nice day’ statement that all McDonalds employees were told to say at the end of every transaction. Not only did it not work well in the United Kingdom and perhaps other countries outside of North America, it was rarely delivered from the heart of the individual, was meaningless and quite possibly had a negative or laughable effect. Would it not have been better to give employees the guidelines to start and end the transaction on a high, positive note, but in their own individual way? This is where an attempt at employee branding can go badly wrong.

No company can hope to, or should plan to create employees that are ‘moulded’ from the corporate brand to the level that they lose their own self, their own creativity and authenticity. With Generation Z coming through now into the corporate world, this is certainly a dangerous path to go down.? No organization should be seen to influence the behaviour of an individual in a way that is not congruent to that individual’s brand. Hence the need to ensure you are recruiting the right people in the first place, with strong and accurate employer branding strategies and recruitment processes, but also that everybody is given the tools and guidelines to interpret the corporate values and reinforce them in their authentic way. Not only is this right and moral, it’s significantly more effective from the employee and external stakeholder viewpoint.

Creative thought and innovation can also be hindered if an organization is not nurturing individual brands and encouraging them to be used. Companies today need individuality in their people in order to differentiate themselves against their competition. This can be achieved in a structured way, under the umbrella of the corporate brand, if some of the techniques in this book are implemented. We’ll be covering the specifics on personal branding in Chapter 5.

Several years ago I was working as a consultant and coach with a large accountancy firm on their partner track, high performance programme. I was invited to sit in on and observe several masterclass sessions where the delegates were asked to debate and discuss a specific topic, present individually and in groups, and manage one-to-one client meetings. I then had to produce a report on each person covering their impact, their brand image and executive presence and then coach them all individually.? Not long into the coaching programme, I began to realize that they had received so much feedback and training as part of this talent programme that they had ‘lost’ themselves and consequently were trying to be somebody they were not. They just didn’t know how to manage the feedback effectively, as nobody coached them through this, and therefore they were going from one level of behaviour to the exact opposite to compensate. So for example, an apparent need to play down confidence could result in an individual going to the other extreme and holding back in meetings, not speaking their true thoughts and ideas, and therefore not necessarily being their authentic self. The myriad of negative effects of this is obvious. Working with them all on a tailored, individual coaching programme that focused on their true authentic brand and how they wanted to be seen, created an almost visible sigh of relief that they could start to be who they really are and manage this in a consistent positive way.? Managing the feedback they received in alignment with their brand gave them a clearer personal development plan that made sense and gave the company what they actually wanted from their high performers.

The lesson here is to examine how exactly you are deploying your employee brand strategy - or even if you are - and is it giving your employees what they really need in order to live the corporate values in their own way. Are you potentially giving too much feedback to individuals in your talent programmes for example, and not enough know-how and tools to manage the feedback effectively? In which case you could risk losing valuable personality and authenticity in your brand.? If not, you are in danger of diluting your brand investment and at worst losing valuable talent from your organization. This will only become even more of a challenge in the future with Generation Z filtering through into your organization – more on this later on in this Chapter.

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Copyright Lesley Everett 2024

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