One of the reasons why I always dig Bud Caddell's stuff is that he's a "culture guy" who comes from business. There's not much "fuzzy-bunny" thinking with him. This article on strategy and culture post-Covid is a longer read, but there are layers to consider. One it can help you see how own business might respond. Two, it might give you ideas on how to embed your brand into your evolving culture. Three, how can you evolve your own employer branding function, treating it like an independent consulting service within your company.

1,200 Post-It Notes to Fix a Broken Culture. Yes, sometimes it takes a lot of work to dig deep and make change.

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).

In case you don't feel prepared, here's HBR's guide to Corporate Social Justice.

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.

Is now the perfect time to form a company book club? Well, I'm a huge fan of getting book clubs together (and I've seen instances of the CEO just mentioning that he/she is reading a certain book lead to informal but impactful culture change), so yes. Do it. Do it now. The trick, as ever, is to pick a good book.

Too much talk around employer engagement is about making people feel a certain way or (worse) hitting some "engagement scores" based purely on surveys. Is that somewhat dismissive? Yes, I'll own that. But I've gotten in trouble for saying things like, "no one comes to work wanting to be disengaged, so I wonder where the issue lies?" A lot of the issue is that we've lowered the bar on what "engaged" means, to the point where it feels like "not actively planning the company's downfall" feels like a win. In reality, engagement means giving a crap about the people, the purpose and organization. It means a level of emotional commitment in outcomes and processes.

I've pointed out that employer brand is the new go-to crisis PR move, but how do you manage your employer brand in a crisis? This article really conflates employer branding with employee engagement a bit, but the notes are still useful.

We have to face it: all "employee experience" conversations HAVE to start with a conversation around "are we doing enough to make our people feel safe?" That's why I thought this article was better than most of the "we need to make people feel valued and appreciated" conversations you get here (Maslow was right with that hierarchy stuff).

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.

More and more businesses are looking to their own brand purpose to create a stronger brand foundation as everything seems to change every second around it. If your company is thinking about purpose (or you’re starting to spark those conversations), it might help to understand how purpose works and how businesses can leverage purpose strategically (also, companies don’t have purpose, people have purpose, and you’re in the people business, remember?).

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.

Sure, working from home, and the increasing likelihood that is it here to stay, might be great (for some of you). As many candidates want remote work, and remote work allows you to hire the best matching candidate from pretty much anyway, its a chance to really level-up your talent. But there’s a downside: management isn’t always comfortable with remote workers and are distrusting of their productivity. When one company proclaims its love of remote work, many people will see that as a red flag, an excuse to install spyware and implement “always on” expectations for remote. So how will you talk about your remote work brand when there isn’t always a lot of trust in the room?

The researchers show that even though chitchat is superficial, “it’s about building culture and collaboration.”

Sometimes, the biggest potential talent source is right under your nose. But how can you foster a culture in internal career mobility? Let us show you!

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).

Three ways leaders can adapt.

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

The new rules of talent management? Well, you have to figure out how to build culture while in isolation, how to convince HR/TA to look for talent outside the standard distances, how to use tech (duh), and how to take advantage of video as the ‘great equalizer.’

I’ve talked before about different attributes that can help define your brand (how does your company approaches personal/professional development, what’s the level of internal transparency, amount of hierarchical structure, etc). Here’s one I hadn’t thought of before: Courage. How does your company reward courage? Can you disagree with your boss? Do you have to do it quietly one on one, or are you allowed to disagree more publicly? What about disagreeing with leadership? Answers to these simple question (assuming leadership and front-line staff agree on the answer), go a long way to defining your own company.

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.

In fact, I think this HBR article is the other side of that coin when it says you should write down the unwritten rules of the company. Aside from pulling assumptions out from behind the curtain given them some sunlight, the exercise is a great way to reveal how you company really reacts to stimulus. I’d take it another step further and say that the unwritten rules of the company are more the culture of your company than what HR says it is, thus making it ripe fodder for employer branding architecture and narrative.

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.

So, if you entitle your article ’7 Ways HR Can Build a Fairer, Data-Informed Culture,’ you are really asking for hurt. You know how I know? Because I have a brother and growing up, we each had a vastly difference sense of what 'fair’ meant. I have to imagine in your average 1,000-person company, you’ll be seeing dozens if not hundreds of definitions of same. It’s a tarpit, one which the article seems to acknowledge before skipping past it.

Second, culture isn’t static. In fact, it often isn’t evident until something unexpected happens. According to analysis of 1.4MM Glassdoor scores, culture weighed heavily on whether ratings went up or down during the first months of COVID. Companies that dictated culture fared worse than companies who were transparent and allowed their culture to inform communication styles and subject. If a company understands that a culture is a function of what staff say it is, they respond better than when its rigid.

Is the culture you talk about the one that exists or the one leadership wants to be true? Yeah, sorry. That was a little blunt for this hour in the morning. Go get some coffee and come back. Good. We all know that in rooms we’re not always invited to, the Venn diagram of “employer brand” and “company culture” is often just a circle. This happens when companies want to be seen as “caring” about a thing when they don’t always understand a thing (see also: “strategy,” “innovation” and “employee engagement” amongst many many others). So they skim that HBR article (the one more concerned with clicks than understanding what we do all day) and say that culture is important and dictate one. Next stop: the power printer. So here’s a little counter-programming. First, over at Reddit, a great article from a leader who wrestled with their company culture as it went from 15 people to 75 people (h/t Recruiting Brainfood).

“The analysis reveals that there is no correlation between the cultural values a company emphasizes in its published statements and how well the company lives up to those values in the eyes of employees. All of the correlations between official and actual values were very weak, and four of the nine — collaboration, customer orientation, execution, and diversity — were negatively correlated.” Ouch.

Three ways to make sure that job aligns with your values.

Our analysis of employee reviews reveals the importance of transparency and communication to corporate culture.