Engaging employees in your brand and values; there’s a fine art to it. You could follow Don Draper with whiskey rewards and the encouragement of regular naps. Or, you could go with a more, shall we say, effective strategy.
Brand is one of the most valuable assets and differentiators a company has. Not only are employees your best brand advocates, it’s key they understand their role in your company’s success since they decide how your brand is delivered with every action they make.
When employees are engaged with your culture, vision and values they think and act positively. It’s simple. The happier your employee the happier your customer. Investment in employee engagement pays off.
Successful brand engagement is a complex formula and the considerations endless; a well thought through employee value proposition, considered work life balance, engagement in social media, the list goes on. All of the above ensure your brand values are incorporated into every aspect of work life, delivering a seamless and consistent employee experience. However, we feel there’s one sure fire way to influence your employee’s everyday; through their working environment.
We’re not talking about a logo on a wall, but rather carefully considered workspaces with sensitively designed finishes and graphics to influence culture, working relationships, productivity and satisfaction.
Our work focuses on understanding and delivering key brand messages, objectives and goals within the working environment. Each client has a different brief and we ensure we delve under the surface and fully immerse ourselves in an organisation’s brand, culture, vision and values to deliver the best possible solution.
To create a successful strategy we engage at all levels within our projects, because buy in across the board is key. From key stakeholder workshops, to questionnaires and interviews with staff across all business functions, every opinion is vital in understanding a brand’s DNA.
John Lewis asked Integrity to help them create a closer connection between their head-office purchasing team, the products they were buying, and the customers to whom the products would be sold. They also wanted to give individual teams their own unique identities and better internal recognition of these. The aspiration was realised through an elegant and sensitively designed graphic and signage scheme.
Argos had different priorities, with a desire to create staff break-out spaces which were as advanced as their new retail spaces. Here we delivered bold yet warm spaces with a zoned strategy. This gave employees choice - to decide how they wanted to spend their breaks. Catch-up on emails? A moment of peace and quiet? Cup of tea and a chat? The positive staff response was overwhelming and as a result the design is being rolled out across the country.
As we touched on earlier, this is complex stuff. A seamless process can require brand inductions, brand toolkits, engagement workshops, brand presentations, and sometimes fully-fledged cultural change programs.
Our work with Virgin Care aimed to engage employees transitioning from the NHS to Virgin, two organisations culturally worlds apart. We created an engagement process to empower staff at every phase, from workshops and presentations to gift bags for day one of the switch over.
Employee engagement cannot be a quick fix. Like any work of art it takes time, practise and dedication. However, putting down the first brush stroke can be easy and creating a unique and engaging environment to motivate and energise staff has got to be a great place to start.
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