Employee Engagement = Brand Alignment

[Bay Jordan]

“The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get from it, but what they become by it.” John Ruskin

A modern day cynic might well scoff at these words and the idealism behind them and rebut them with Richard Nelson Bolles’ description of the American workforce from his 1970 book, ‘What Colour is Your Parachute’, "There is a vast world of work out there in this country, where at least 111 million people are employed in this country alone--many of whom are bored out of their minds. All day long. Not for nothing is their motto TGIF -- 'Thank God It's Friday.' They live for the weekends, when they can go do what they really want to do." Yet the dichotomy between the two sums up employee disengagement in a nutshell.

The fact is that we have turned work into a need. As Ellen Goodman so aptly and humorously described it, “Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.” Or as Margaret Fuller more succinctly put it, “Men, for the sake of getting a living, forget to live.” And that, alas, is the true cause of employee disengagement, because, despite this self-imposed infliction and whether we recognise it or not, we all aspire to Ruskin’s ideal and greater self-fulfilment.

The fact is that everyone ultimately works for themselves. Whether one is employed or self-employed, our work is ultimately a matter of personal choice. So too is selling our own lives short by compromising a possibly fulfilling, satisfying career for the kind of ‘TGIF experience’ Bolles described. This, however, is an attitude that makes management accountability for employee engagement seem absurd, because it is always going to be a no-win battle.

On the other hand management owes it to everyone – themselves, the rest of their colleagues, shareholders and owners, and all the other stakeholders – to maximise the organisation’s economic efficiency (regardless of whether it is a profit or non-profit, private or public sector organisation.) Since no organisation can operate at optimum efficiency with disengaged employees, such an attitude is intolerable. This, of course, alters the dynamics and makes management responsible for identifying and eliminating it, which, as a natural corollary, means creating a culture where everyone has the opportunity to become engaged, or otherwise leave.

To achieve this, management has to recognise that, in working for themselves, everyone is effectively their own brand. Consequently, the paramount need is to create an environment in which the development of the employee brand and the organisation brand are congruous. In other words, there has to be alignment between the employee brand and the employer brand in order to create effective, employee engagement. Only then will it be possible to have an efficient, effective organisation with an engaged team of people delivering superior performance and bottom-line results.

[Ian Buckingham]

I'm not sure I agree with the provocative title Bay as I just don't buy onto the notion that human beings are truly capable of being fully aligned behind anything. However, reading on, it's clear that your treatise that employee engagement is central to brand management is music to my ears. One of the more worrying aspects of the mess the FS bosses have left the world economy in, however, is that it will invariably force the employee engagement agenda back down Maslow's hierarchy as people worry more about their mortgages than self-actualisation. As a former Interbrand Director, this is a territory I'm passionate about. Take a look at Brand Engagement www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?PID=281268, I think you'll enjoy the provocative approach and we advocates of bringing brands to life from the inside should stick together!

[Bay Jordan]

Thanks Maryanna! It is all ultimately about reaching the upper echelons of Maslow's hierarchy; the bottom ones are not enough to make life worthwhile!

[Maryanna Kontaratos]

I agree with you, Bay. Well put.

In this day and age, it's the match up of an employee's authentic self (and people are looking for 'Something More') with an authentic brand, vision, purpose in his/her organization that makes an employee truly engaged.