Why I Believe A Solely Values Driven Employer Brand to be Flawed (contrary to popular opinion)

Mapping and scaling the emotional fitness of our people, to create a highly functioning cohesive business

Challenging the traditional approach to employer brand.

The following philosophy has been developed after years of learning from a multitude of different disciplines and areas of ‘external’ influence include neuroscience, behavioral psychology, management consultancy and marketing communications. It challenges traditional thinking and industry assumption, which I hope you’ll agree to be a positive thing whatever your own opinion.

I believe it would be na?ve to think it’s possible to build an organization with people who have 100% of the same values as everyone else in the team – it’s just not possible. Each one of us is unique based on our biology, our life experiences and all of the ingredients that make up our identity as an individual. We can’t build a business from people with exactly the same values. It doesn’t scale, it’s not realistic and it certainly isn’t inclusive or diversity friendly.

Therefore, if you accept that, I would ask you to consider the concept of approaching employer brand with a sole focus centered around shared values to be flawed because adopting an organizations’ values in order to standardize or rationalize a group behavior would be asking someone to change their physiology.

You can of course build a business that is centered around a sense of shared values. Values that chime and ring true with the majority of people in a well functioning team. We do recognize the importance of including the shared values within the employer brand design process, but it’s not the whole deal, we believe it’s not even close.

Concrete values are nothing more than an [important] aspirational end goal that will never be achieved – just like a company vision. A vision is designed to focus and guide a business, yet never be achieved (achievement means the vision wasn’t big enough).

What’s the alternative approach?

The emotional fitness of a person measures the capability to choose how we think and feel. Being able to develop our emotional fitness empowers us to make better conscious choices in life and strive to towards our goals with clarity and balance.

Imagine if we did the same for our collective business culture.

The ability to choose involves a partnership between the rational and emotional parts of our brain and this partnership can become a battle when our instinctive needs are not satisfied.

Our six human instincts drive our behaviors and alert us to our needs using emotions to guide us towards or away from things in order to satisfy those needs.

Therefore, when they are in balance, each of our six instincts are satisfied and the resulting behavior becomes more predictable.

Doesn’t it make sense, therefore to have a greater awareness and understanding of how to satisfy the instinct needs of our people and shape our culture based on the alignment of those individual needs and the needs of the collective organization?

If we define the collective behaviors we need to attain our goals, we can design the environment to satisfy each of the six instincts required to cultivate those very behaviors too.

If we ignore these considerations, we risk misaligning and driving behaviors that steer us further away from our end goals, even if we have a reasonable overlap of shared values.

Because defined values do not equal predictable behavior.

So what’s the answer?

Our approach to employer branding is based on the premise that the foundations of an organizational culture must start with understanding and designing the emotional fitness of a business to match the desired outcomes.

We believe we have to align our research, insights and designs with basic human instinct. After all, businesses are nothing more than a collective of people trying to achieve a common goal.

How it works

To get started, we listen and probe a collective of people with the right balance of emotional and rational questions from both a quantitive and qualitative perspective as well as ensure a well round representation of seniority, geography, departmental division and any other important anomalies of a business.

Then we can begin to understand the emotions behind the messages, strengths and gaps of the current culture and the instincts that are being served or under served.

Once we establish a benchmark, we can move forward towards a plan to cultivate a more effective, productive and synergized business. If we think of it as designing the emotional fitness of an individual, we can apply the same rules and logic to the collective people within any business.

The good news is we have designed a means of mapping and scaling up the needs of an individual to the needs of an organization, using our simple framework.

With a framework that is setup to support all of our basic instincts we can begin to purposely promote the positive behaviors we would like to see personify our new culture (because instincts drive behaviors).

With a conscious understanding of the instincts and behaviors that are driving an organizations culture, we can then apply our tools to either close any gaps between reality and aspiration, or champion the strengths with consistency.

The logic of our framework can be followed in 4 simple steps;

1. Instincts drive behavior (using emotions).
2. Behavior drives culture.
3. Culture determines the success or failure of a business.
4. Therefore, the foundation of our employer brand framework is designed to organize all of our human instincts.

Our framework can be simplified down to the following table;

The difference between consciously designing a culture around our basic human instincts or not can be the difference between a highly functional organization versus a highly dysfunctional organization (with or without shared values).

Once the master emotional intelligence layer is complete for the employer brand, only then can the EVP be designed with confidence and any persona based layers applied from there.

Here’s a table illustrating the emotional affects of embracing the six basic human instincts.

This table demonstrates how you can begin to ensure the employer brand suitably covers all bases and also provides a very simple framework to map values to as well as.

With this approach, I find it helps us avoid any disproportionate bias when designing an employer brand by checking what instincts are being supported by each pillar or theme you introduce. It's also a good way to predict what behaviours you are likely to encourage by the areas you're focusing on most.

As always, I'd love here any feedback.