Why your brand isn’t working for your employees
Seven casually dressed people stand, facing us, with their arms around each other
Just recently, we’ve had a couple of employee comms jobs with instructions in the brief that came waving red flags. The first was ‘feel free to go off-brand’ and the second was ‘make it non-corporate’.
Unless we’re creating your brand or tone of voice (we’d love to BTW!), we’re working to your brand guidelines. Asking us to go off-brand means ‘design us a new brand that we’re not paying for’. And we’ll only make something look or sound ‘corporate’ if that’s what your brand demands.
So, why did these teams ask us to do this? Because the brand wasn’t working for their employees.
When your brand guidelines were created, they were (hopefully) designed to speak to your customers but, probably, no one considered your employees as an audience.
The relationship you have with your employees is usually very different from the one you have with your customers. You’re selling to your customers, you’re on a team with your employees.
For some companies, your external brand will be able to meet your needs internally. But if your brand is fairly traditional or serious, you’ll probably want to talk to your employees in a different tone, using different imagery, perhaps using different communication channels. And, even if your brand is fun and loud, that’s not going to work for that message about employee lay-offs.
So, next time you’re briefing an agency to work on your brand (visual and language), make sure your employees are considered. Include a section in your guidelines that talks about:
who your employees are
the various ways you communicate with them (stand-ups, all-hands, Slack messages, 60-second iphone videos, intranet articles)
examples of what these communications look like, and
the tone of voice you should use
It shouldn’t be a completely different version of your brand, but it should show how your brand translates to your employee comms.
Want help thinking through how your brand can work for your team? Get in touch as we’d love to help.
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