Want more evidence that ignoring your employer brand's impact on corporate sentiment is costing your business sales? I thought you might. It's good stuff to keep in your back pocket when someone forces you to justify your existence.

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).

I love how Forbes wrote a whole article about the power of employer brand when marketers and leadership gets involved, and then had the gall to suggest that employer brand was “territorial” about their part of the brand and didn’t want to let marketing play their game. I’ve talked with dozens (if not a hundred) EB owners and they all, to a person, would have loved for marketing to acknowledge their existence, let alone combine forces and/or resources.

Bookmark this: Gallup, the research company, makes a pretty compelling case to your leadership on the power of employer brand. The overall focus is on how the employer brand makes a clear impact on your corporate brand (remember, businesses only speak three languages: make money, save money, extend the brand), which would be something you might want to slide under the virtual door of leadership.

If you want to build trust, if you want leadership to be seen as trustworthy, if you are building your values into a platform on which any number of concepts and initiatives will live, it starts by defining fair. Is it fair that some workers make minimum wage and the CEO makes… sightly more? Is it fair that your company only extends the legal minimum of family leave to staff? Is it fair that there are no people of color or women in your executive suite? These are prickly conversations, all of which can be made simpler by defining what we all mean by 'fair’ (and baking it into our brand).