1) It's all got to come back to performance

How Employer Brand, Culture and Engagement all fit together is complex. One affects and reinforces, or damages, the other.

For instance, the better that culture is understood in the workforce, the more likely that workforce is to be engaged - and page 7 of this study gives good evidence for that. But engagement isn’t just cultural understanding. And the level of engagement will influence the current and continuing strength of the culture. There are overlaps, crossovers and inter-relationships. That complexity fuels books, studies, models, articles, new definitions; and sometimes that can leave all of us with a bit more knowledge, but maybe a bit less understanding.

There’s an important place for all of that. It advises my thinking, along with my experiences and other articles, discussions and blogs. But in the mud and oomska of working life – and most of all when as HR, agency, consultant, you’re pitching your big idea - simplicity is all. To my mind, simplicity sells, and that’s what I’m aiming for in these blogs.

So here's the simplest principle of all: whatever you do, it always has to come back to business performance. If your big idea isn’t going to affect productivity, costs, time to market, quality of service, consistency, or whatever, then it’s academic, or worse – and I hope these words make your blood run as cold as mine - just an HR initiative.

There’s some powerful statistics about the effect on performance that great people strategies can have. Where to start? Well, here’s the first in a series of hypotheses: You can’t get good performance without customer and employee expectations being aligned. So an Apple employee knows that user-experience is all. A McDonald’s employee understands that uniformity of product is a customer priority. On the other hand, you’re not going to feel like anything other than a route to a profit at the bank, and you’re not going to get a speedy response from the council, until their employees understand that’s what you expect. Without that alignment, you cannot sustainably succeed, and you certainly won’t improve performance. You may get “better”, but only in a way that isn’t relevant to your customer.

So lining up those expectations feels like a simple place to start. That is then about a shared understanding of purpose, culture and look-I-get-all-of-this-but-actually-what’s-in-it-for-me? And that’s what I’ll expand on next time…