Employer Brand Headlines Newsletter

In Noise, a professorial supergroup explains the causes and consequences of the inherent variability in professional judgment.

When attracting talent, a collective mission is more important than job descriptions and compensation packages.

From climate change to voting rights, Patagonia has been willing to risk backlash by taking positions on contentious social issues. It's a risk that has paid off.

CMOs are increasingly recognizing that human issues are political issues.

New research shows that people of all ranks look to low-level peers for information about organizational social norms.

If you've got the time (and the outrage), here is the big article on the internal comms and culture of Away. Why is this worth your time? It is an amazing example of how tools and processes (Slack! Value-driven culture!) that were launched to help us change work, can still be used to badger, belittle and abuse staff (someone in a forum called it "weaponizing values" and I can't get that out of my head). There's are a million quotes I could use, but I suggest you watch to see how "open communication" can be used to instill fear, how "embracing values" can be corrupted to build a cult of personality.

The assumption is that culture creates the brand, and I think that's true to an extent. Your brand is the intentional and judicious selection of traits and ideas that highlight your culture. But can you go the other way? That is, can you use the brand to change the culture? Great article on the chicken/egg situation and some great ideas on how you can make an impact on the culture.

Prediction: we've reached "peak inspiration" with our brand messaging. We needed that sense of hope to get through the initial freak-out, and some companies did a great job with it. But leaning too much on inspiration can feel like eating too much of that chocolate bunny. Beyond peak-inspiration? Getting the work done. Where we get back to the pleasures of doing good work.

Friend of the newsletter Alex Her pulled together some good examples of how companies are pivoting their employer brand communications now that it seems the “new normal” is here to stay.

Tim Sackett asks a pretty controversial question over on his blog: Should companies disclose their political leanings? Tim makes good points that just because a business might lean liberal or conservative, that doesn’t mean everyone does, or even that it’s a critical component to the employer brand. My take is simple: if it matters to leadership and staff what the political identify of an organization is, and it’s not exclusive of talent from other perspectives, there’s no reason not to talk about it. But in this day and age, where “wearing a mask” is seen as somehow “political,” the return from such a position is likely very very weak (if not completely counter-productive).

In the similar vein, you can be helping your people not just “survive” things, but finding ways to get better because of the crisis.

It heartens me to see how even Recruiter is connecting the dots around how who you bring into your company is how you build a culture (turns out making posters doesn’t do much). This might make for some nice light reading when your culture team meets to talk about the next (virtual) picnic.

Want to show that you “get it” when it comes to the new world of work? Stop treating working parents like an aberration and build team culture around them. This isn’t just being cool when a kid needs a snack in the middle of the zoom meeting, but assuming flexible schedules are the norm, that maybe meetings can be a little shorter with built-in break between them (instead of back-to-back-to-back) and that there’s value in not looking at a screen for.a few minutes every hour. These ideas might be designed for working parents, but I can’t imagine childless workers wouldn’t find these changes incredibly welcome, too.