Brands are built from within. They’re not about promises made by the marketing department. They’re about promises met by employees.
When staff choose industrial action, it signals a fundamental disconnection between your employees and your brand. Employee engagement has broken down. It’s rebuildable, but only if everyone involved remembers that communication is more about listening than it is about pushing messages.
Strikes are usually simplified in the media as clashes of intransigent polar extremes: management versus workers; greed versus survival. But they’re a lot more complicated than the caricatures of greasy pinstripes versus blue-collar table-bashers suggest.
Consider the Royal Mail dispute. On the face of it, this can be seen as the once irresistible force of new Labour’s spin-doctors meeting the once immovable object of trade unionism. But talk to the ordinary postie or even the customer in the street (or behind the letterbox) and you’ll find that this dispute is about so much more. It’s about a fight for identity by employees who are emotionally connected with a brand that they and their customers see as a national institution (see Buckingham; Brand Engagement).
It’s about culture, “the way things get done around here” and workers resisting the march of automation, which experience tells us may improve the bottom line but does not guarantee better customer service or an improved quality of life (anyone remember the days of the second post?). In short, it’s a brand battleground that reflects a range of hot social topics, including culture, values and identity.
As someone who specialises in helping organisations to manage brands, I’ve been asked to help avert three strikes in the past five years. Two were in the retail sector in the run-up to Christmas and the most recent one was at a college where the staff were actively dissuading students from enrolling.
In each case the core issue was not about pay and rations but about fundamental communication. Disengaged staff felt their managers were no longer connected with the values that they believed their brand represented. In all three cases, catastrophe was averted by re-opening communication channels, fostering respect and implementing active listening.
People care more than you might think about the brands they work for. Culture – the way people do things in the organisations that support those brands – is probably the most important determinant of brand performance.
It’s worth spending some time understanding the true DNA of your brand. If you don’t know what brand engagement is worth, especially in these lean times, can you risk employees deserting their posts – or, even worse, disengaged staff continuing to represent your brand?