What happens when your employees get politically active? This week, more than 360 Amazon employees signed a public petition demanding the corporation take action on climate change. The company responded by threatening to fire them. Last year, Google saw a mass walkout. Between Greta, a US presidential election and Brexit, the political and social landscape is getting very tricky. And yes, your employer brand plays a role. If you've established values and pillars around being green or being socially responsible, what happens when staff act on that? And do you know how leadership will respond?

Here's a nice short article reminding us that employer brand folks are there to help manage perceptions in other people's minds. It seems obvious, but it feels like we forget very quickly when things get busy.

Branding Magazine says people see brands as people. For use, our brands ARE people. Which means that we need to be thinking psychologically about how our prospects see us.

There are a lot of little tidbits of concepts in this article around brand perception (neuron mirroring, framing, cognition, etc), so don't expect a deep dive. But taken together, it felt like there were a lot of good ideas around identifying your brand perception issues might be, and how you might be able to solve for them.

The danger of building your brand around your stated values is that what you say your values are and how you live them are often very different. Proof? MIT Sloan’s study of 700 large companies found ZERO correlation between what a company says its values are and what it’s work culture actually is.