Three common mistakes to avoid.

Three data-backed techniques to ensure your emails get opened and read by employees. Have you ever had to send an email so important that you reviewed and re-wrote the email 10 times and paced around your home before pressing the send button? That’s how many communicators felt during the pandemic as many had to send […]

The prospect of change can make many employees shut down and look for reasons not to do something. Here’s how to shift that dynamic.

Knock, knock..

A survey of Fortune 1000 executives sheds light on the cultural barriers to change.

It's not always obvious to see when you're making an impact, but knowing what you're trying to measure is a good start.

This week's long read comes to us from strategy+business. This is a great primer on what you can do to create culture change in your organization. Sure, as employer brand people, you may grapple with the business of when you need to accept an aspect of the culture and when you should try to change it (especially when you likely have no formal power to do so), but this article may help you see ways to nudge the change into occurring.

I used to have a boss who used the phrase, "one man invading China" as shorthand for the person she tasked with a project that really should have gotten a LOT more resources. Of course, that could describe every employer brand person I've ever met, so I always love to see stories of how one person can make a difference in even large organizations.

I can usually count on the HBR to take the safe road in any given situation, so seeing an article that embraces some very contrarian ideas is always worth a note. But this article on the three things most people get wrong about organizational change was pretty great. Things like "Share Your Failures" rather that "Follow Best Practices" make my heart warm on many levels. Also note the example of "Kill Our Company" (also known as Red Team exercises) where people try to figure out how to destroy their own company in order to shore up their own strategic weaknesses.

By now, you're as sick as I am of the glut of "how to manage a culture virtually" articles that have come out over the last two months. But this conversation with Jane Garza of NOBL was absolutely fascinating. Bursty work, bicameral work hours (6-10 and 2-6 instead of 9-5), and the reminder that we don't need to take all our calls on Zoom (set up more meetings on the phone so you can walk and talk).

Are you sick of me saying how you need to start thinking about your employer brand beyond the funnel? Too bad! This article talks about all the ways professional systems will be changing in light of everything, and this is my chance to remind you that you need to make friends with the development team. What the company offers to learn is one thing, but connecting to to why they want to learn, to develop a story pipeline system about the people who embrace the development culture and what they get out of it is totally in your jurisdiction.

If you don’t have time to read Robert Greene’s book on the 48 laws of power, here are the seven kinds of power one can have in the workplace. Know where you as the EB pro have power, and when you need to lean on a different kind of power from somewhere else.

We don’t talk much about “business model” here on the newsletter, and really, it’s because we aren’t treating brand management as a business. But business model thinking and brand architecture have a lot of similarities, and the fact that you need to sell your brand to business leaders who think in business models suggests that there might be something interesting in the intersection here. It’s not just how you make money, it’s how you use everything in your ecosystem and how you differentiate yourself (sound familiar?). Anyway, here’s the formula for business model innovation.

Brands take time to fine-tune their position, to develop enough validating and confirming evidence to even be taken seriously. But all too often, employer branders have built something more flimsy than a true “brand,” find an “issue” and try to re-brand. So ask yourself: why are you re-branding?

"If this is how we consume content in our busy, daily lives, why would we behave differently in our even busier work lives?"

"When you think about your brand values, firstly have it clear in your mind that values for your brand will be as integral as they would be for a human being."

Employer branding is a game of fast and slow: jumping on the latest channel or talking point, but also in making sure the long-term strategy is yielding results. Of course, we always talk about the fast stuff (it’s a weekly newsletter, after all), but here is a case for remembering to be slow.

The ease with which consumers have adapted to rapid change signals a future of more disruption.

Employer branding is the act of getting everyone at your company who doesn't have to listen to you to change how they think about their employer. Yay! So anything that helps arm you to create change in an org is useful to know.