What are we saying about us?

How employees talk about your business is imporant. Make sure you give them something to say.

I know about employee branding – in theory anyway. That is how employees engage with the brand.

I was considering my own business and realised that although I know what business we are in, we have been recruiting and bringing people on board at a rapid rate and I wondered about their perceptions: how they were describing RedBalloon to their family, friends and people that they meet?

So yesterday in the team meeting, apart from doing some “speed networking”, I got the team (40 people) into pairs – to share back and forth answering the question: what does RedBalloon do? Then it was really interesting to have the person A describe what person B had said to the whole group.

I know what business we are in, I know to describe what we do in a way that is all about the customer. But what the team came back with was inconsistent and not very interesting. There were a few gems in the group.

This is about verbal branding; how we talk about the business is just as important. It is up to us to make sure that we give people something worth saying.

We cannot influence what they say – in the sense that if they do not like the organisation or people that they work with they’re hardly going to say something inspiring.

They’re more likely to say positive things the higher they are in the organisation, according to a survey of 3000 people done late last year.

The resulting report, There are no limits – what keeps employees engaged with their workplace, found that senior people are more likely to think they work for a great company, while almost one in three at general staff level did not believe that the company they work for is great.

That is a lot of people not saying good things about a business …