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Tag: Culture

The Engine of Productivity: Wellness in the Workplace

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

How we define the workplace has changed radically over the last few years. Offices no longer represent the primary workplace, and remote and hybrid modes of working are becoming the norm rather than the exception. And this has greatly disrupted the way we work. The “office rhythm” is out the door when you’re zooming with people three time zones away one minute, taking a call from the car while you drive your kids to school the next, and collaborating with colleagues face-to-face once or twice a week. It’s hard to connect. Hard to disconnect. And it’s hard to orient yourself in a culture without the daily cues to keep you on track.

All of this leads to wellness issues. The stress of being connected all the time. Or the self-doubt that leads to quiet quitting behaviors. The physical toll of being rooted at your desk all day. The erosion of mentorship in the workplace, and the rise of coaching to fill the gap. HR professionals are on the front lines of a crisis, and they’re responding by paying more attention to wellness than ever before. Employee well-being has emerged as a major focus as organizations replace the free-lunch and foosball-driven ethos with programs aimed at helping people thrive personally so they can thrive professionally.

The data supports this trend: corporate wellness directly influences the emotional and physical health of employees and, by extension, the health of the entire organization. Companies that prioritize wellness not only see an uptick in morale but also in productivity and retention​​​. In fact, 83% of employees report that having a psychologically and emotionally healthy workplace correlates with a significant increase in productivity.​​

Crafting Cultures That Resonate with Employees’ Needs

Leaders in HR play a pivotal role in translating these programs into strategic elements of the company culture. The trend is clear: holistic wellness programs that address the full spectrum of well-being—mental, physical, emotional, and financial—help retain people and attract new talent. They make people more productive, as happier employees take fewer sick days, are more loyal, and bring a higher level of creativity and energy to their roles. And they add to your overall organizational resiliency, which is critical to navigating the ups and downs of today’s volatility.

How to make well-being a strategic element of your employer brand

1. Define a Wellness Philosophy: Have a candid conversation with leadership about why your organization values wellness, and how much you’re willing to invest in it. This is a crucial first step to getting your leadership team aligned on the value that wellness creates for the entire organization. You’ll need to address the holistic equation of well-being—physical, mental, emotional, and financial—and how each dimension drives employee performance and satisfaction.

2. Consistently communicate your POV on Wellness: Use every communication channel to consistently reinforce how wellness is woven into your corporate culture. Share stories that highlight the positive impacts of wellness initiatives on employees, strengthening the perception of your brand as caring and supportive.

3. Align Wellness with Strategic Goals: A key part of your wellness initiatives involves connecting the dots between employees’ well-being and the strategic objectives of the company. For example, link mental health programs like mindfulness sessions to innovation to demonstrate how they result in a more creative and productive workplace.

4. Showcase the Impact: Evidence that wellness works only deepens belief in it as a necessity. Share real-life examples of how wellness programs have improved workplace outcomes. Highlight case studies and testimonials from employees who have benefited from these programs. Create case studies that demonstrate improved productivity, reduced stress levels, and better teamwork.

5. Lead with Wellness: When leaders actively participate in and advocate for wellness programs, it sends a powerful message that no matter where you sit in an organization, you’re still a person with the same needs for support. The more leaders participate and evangelize your wellness programs, the more they become a core part of the company ethos.

6. Offer personalized Wellness Options: There is no one-size-fits all when it comes to well-being. By offering personalized wellness options that can be tailored to individual needs, you underscore your commitment to supporting each employee uniquely. This flexibility makes the programs more effective and highlights your company’s dedication to its workforce.

7. Measure Success and Adapt: As your employees engage with wellness programs, their needs will change. You need to continuously assess and adapt your wellness initiatives to keep the offerings relevant, the energy fresh, and the impact high. By actively managing the portfolio of wellness offerings, you show your workforce that rather than checking a box, the organization is committed to making wellness a foundational element of your employer brand.

Thinking Beyond Wellness Programs

Wellness programs alone can feel like Band-Aids if they’re not connected to the employer brand—the internal expression of your mission, purpose, and values—that drives your organization. As employee well-being emerges as a dynamic force that shapes every aspect of workplace engagement and productivity, employees need to feel that it is part of your organizational DNA.

At Emotive Brand, we specialize in connecting business strategy to culture strategy to develop employer brands that are not just smart—they resonate emotionally. Making sure that employees experience wellness programs as part of a larger narrative around how you value people is essential to delivering the experiences that contribute to an organization being a great place to work.

If you have thoughts about the role wellness programs play in culture strategy, please add to the conversation below. And if you’re thinking about ways to get your culture better aligned to your business strategy, we are always happy to help you think through how to approach the challenge.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and creative agency that unlocks the power of emotion to propel a brand, culture, or business forward. We are a remote-first agency with a footprint in the San Francisco Bay Area.

How Do You Orient Your Team When Everything Seems Uncertain?

Posted on by Jamey Aiken

The old axiom about uncertainty being the only certainty in business seems quaint given today’s headlines: Historically low unemployment. Hiring shortages one day and hiring freezes the next. Creeping inflation. Shaky markets. Unexpected layoffs. It’s whiplash inducing. And it’s the world we live in.

As the economy shifts and shudders, leaders are challenged to make strategic decisions with increasingly limited foresight. And employees? They’re left feeling disoriented, confused, and vulnerable. It’s a recipe for getting stuck. People become less willing to make mistakes, to stick their necks out for each other, or to take the smart risks necessary to adapt to the changing environment. In a time when flexibility and agility are critical qualities to business success, many organizations find themselves in a state of emotional contraction, unable to zag gracefully forward.

The problem is alignment. Conventional objective-setting tools simply fall short as a way to get everyone on the same page because they’re based on past assumptions rather than the competing signals of the future. Plus, they don’t give employees the right context for seeing themselves in that changing future—much less get them excited about it. For companies to navigate wave after wave of uncertainty, you need a more responsive approach:

Understand how your employees are feeling right now.
Are they cynical or optimistic? Are they barely hanging on or feeling enthused and inspired? Do they understand the vision for where the company is going? Or do they need more evidence and explanation? The more understood and recognized people feel in times of uncertainty, the more opportunities you have to deepen trust and allegiance. If you ask, people will let you know how aligned they are with a vision for the future and the strategy to get there. You can identify what dissonances need to be reconciled. Where the sources of doubt take hold. What fears need to be assuaged before they grow out of proportion. Powerful alignment—the kind required to change and adapt with the business environment—is only possible if you have clear insight into the emotional state of your organization at any given moment.

Address employees’ emotions with a clear story of how you plan to move forward.
While emotional understanding can improve conventional objective-setting by creating deeper connections with people, you still need to establish a clear point of view that will guide your organization toward its future. All businesses have multiple critical initiatives going on at any given moment: corporate strategy, product, go-to-market, brand, people & culture. If the narrative about how they connect is haphazard or unintentional—or confused by external market conditions—people will start quilting their own narratives. The result is multiple, often conflicting stories that lead to different end states. In other words, brand confusion. You must cut through the noise of function-specific goals, objectives, KPIs, and OKRs to make business and brand more emotionally relevant to the people in an organization.

Get employees focused on a future that they are empowered to create.
In times of flux, business leaders face pressure to leap into action—to batten down the hatches, set a course, and prepare teams to brace for the worst. But what employees most need today is leadership that inspires people with purpose and meaning amidst uncertainty. If your organization is feeling trapped by mounting performance pressure and shrinking time horizons, you must give every employee the ability to see, believe, and participate in creating a future that they know is not only possible but necessary. Emotion is the accelerant, the enabler, the multiplier, and the amplifier that connects powerful ideas more deeply and resonantly to the people who need them.

To move your business forward and ultimately grow in times of uncertainty, you need better ways to connect to what employees are feeling. And you need to equip them not with a best guess about the future, but rather with a clear picture of how they’ll create their future. When employees feel they have the agency and ability to control their destiny, they lean into the future with an entirely different spirit. This is how you translate all the ambition that underpins your brand into a coherent set of actions that keep an organization aligned, confident, and positive as it speeds into the uncertain future.

Challenger Brands: B2B Challengers

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Continuing the Challenge

This post is the second in our three-part series on challenger brands. You can read part one, “Challenger Brands: A Primer,” right here.

Previously, we spoke about adopting a challenger mindset. It’s one defined by ambition, agility, and a willingness to take risks. Most importantly, we noted how businesses are no longer competing against each other – they are competing against the category they are in and the expectations of what a customer experience feels like.

At a glance, these personality traits naturally lend themselves to the B2C world. Ask anyone to rattle off a few challenger brands and you’ll invariably get the same answers: Uber, Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb—and it makes sense. When you’re trying to rewire people’s preconceived notions, B2C is, by definition, the shortest path to the customer.

But it is by no means the only path. The worlds of B2B and B2B2C are being transformed by challenger brands. Just look at ZipRecruiter, Zoom, Slack, or even Salesforce. If you can’t see it on the surface, it’s most likely occurring behind the scenes in their business strategy.

B2B Challengers

Founder of 500 Startups, Dave McClure, notes that 

“The next bubble is not in tech where innovation and capital are never in short supply. Rather, the real bubble is in far-too-generous P/E multiples and valuations of global public companies, whose business models are being obliterated by startups and improved by orders of magnitude. As more Fortune 500 CEOs recognize and admit their vulnerability to disruption, expect them to hedge their own public valuations by buying the very same unicorns that keep up awake at night.”

Many legacy B2B companies end up following a similar lifecycle. They start off small and hungry, build a legacy off of their early innovations, ride the wave for as long as possible, then go out and acquire innovation when they start to stagnate. The daily churn of operating a business makes it very difficult to ignite the same innovation that got you started. So, you import. To be clear, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But it’s a strategy that ultimately puts your future in the hands of other creators.

Homegrown Innovation

Regardless of size, if B2B brands want to truly adopt a challenger mindset, they need to take active steps to continually foster their own innovation. Famously, Google has a 20% rule. Implemented by Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 2004, it’s designed to give employees one full day per week to work on a Google-related passion project of their choosing or creation. It’s the same strategy that created Gmail, Google Maps, Google Talk, Google News, AdSense, and many others.

The point being, words like agile and innovative don’t have to be words that are only synonymous with startups. B2B companies can instill a challenger’s sense of agility through the behaviors and culture they nurture. If you’re wondering how a B2B brand knows if it should adopt a challenger mindset, there’s a wonderful diagram created by Michael Hay, a business leader with fifteen years at IKEA, that can help. Outlining four essentials for driving a successful change of strategy, it acts as a checklist for recognizing and delivering change.

need for change

Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal

At the end of the day, there are many lessons that B2B brands can steal from the challenger world. Are you leading with a strong story that unequivocally answers the question, “Why do you do what you do?” More than meet a singular need, are you meeting the needs of today and tomorrow better than anyone else? Are you talking with lead adopters at the front of the innovation curve and making them evangelists for your brand?

Perhaps the most important lesson that B2B brands can glean is in how they hire. As Adam Morgan writes,

“Employees at challenger brands require different qualities. They need to be mission-driven. They need to know why they get out of bed and go to work every morning and they need to be passionate about the problems the company is trying to solve. Being a maverick is also of far greater importance at a challenger, the opposite of at a larger organization where dissent is considered a flaw. Employees need to ask the provocative questions and not just take risks themselves, but also to be tolerant of risks that others might take.”

To learn more about how your B2B brand can benefit from adopting a challenger mindset, contact Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

To finish reading our three-part challenger series, check out: Part Three—Challenger Brands: Design that Disrupts

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California

Challenger Brands: A Primer

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Are you up to the challenge?

Starting today, we’re launching a three-part series on challenger brands—who they are, how they behave, and why your brand could benefit from adopting their disruptive mindset. As this is the first blog in the series, let’s start with the basics. The beginning, as they say, is always a good place to start.

What is a challenger brand?

“A challenger brand is defined, primarily, by a mindset—it has business ambitions bigger than its conventional resources, and is prepared to do something bold, usually against the existing conventions or codes of the category, to break through.” —The Challenger Project, by eatbigfish.

Even if you’re not familiar with the term “challenger brand,” you’ve certainly experienced its narrative cousin: the underdog story.  It’s David and Goliath. It’s Rocky. That oft-romanticized vision of a plucky innovator running a business out of their garage and taking down the big guys. Think of Ben & Jerry’s vs. Haagen-Daz, Sam Adams vs. Budweiser, or Apple vs. Microsoft.

Category is the new challenge

While in the beginning being a challenger brand often meant slaying one particular dragon—Pepsi vs. Coke—modern challenger brands are more focused on what they are disrupting instead of who. It’s not about me versus you; it’s about me versus the category, the industry, and the expectations of what a customer experience feels like.

From Airbnb to Blue Apron to Warby Parker, challenger brands are redefining the ways we travel, eat, shop, and more. As Adam Morgan says, “Being a challenger brand today is less about business enmity, and more about an often mission-driven desire to progress the category.”

Criteria for challenger brands

To be clear, there are no rules set in stone about what makes a challenger brand. By definition, it’s a fluid position. You might start out a challenger and be so successful at taking out the competition that you become the next target on top of the hill. It’s a Shakespearean cycle of ascension and dethronement that leaves only the most innovative companies standing.

“A challenger brand can take many forms; it’s more of a mindset than a specific set of rules,” says Kohlben Vodden, founder of StoryScience. “These brands tell stories that by proxy make us feel empowered. They tell us real success lies in breaking away from the pressure of social norms, challenging authority, and being disagreeable. These brands represent character strengths that we humans universally hold up as positive and admirable qualities—bravery, perseverance, fairness.”

In essence, to be a challenger your brand needs to:

  • Be somewhere in the middle of the market. You’re not first, but you’re not last. You have enough experience and validity to get in the ring and start punching above your weight.
  • Have an insatiable hunger and big ambitions that go beyond hitting your numbers. You and your employees need to share a fundamental belief that you are unlike any other company on the planet.
  • Understand what it takes to close the gap between good and great. When you talk about something as aspirational as a company’s vision for the future, you should never limit yourself to making something merely good. This isn’t a task to work on; it’s a shared vision to work toward.

Culture is the lifeblood of challenger brands

All things considered, this is as much about emotion and personality as it is about strategic priorities. If there’s a straight line through challenger brands, it’s the infectious culture they cultivate and maintain through the ups and downs. And how do you shape culture? Through your mission, vision, beliefs, and behaviors. “Clarity around what a business believes in, and what change it’s trying to bring about, acts as both inspiration and filter for the kinds of disruption it will pursue,” says Mark Barden. “Without that clarity, disruption becomes chaos pretty quickly.”

To continue reading our three-part challenger series, check out: Part two—Challenger Brands: B2B Challengers & Part three—Challenger Brands: Design that Disrupts

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California

The Meaningful Workplace: Employee Engagement for the 21st Century

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The meaningful workplace is an idea which seeks to address many of the pain points businesses are feeling as they try to get their enterprises fit for the future.

This white paper will set out the advantages of building a purposeful, values-driven workplace with a meaningful culture that better balances the needs of both the employer and the employee. 

It will explore how businesses can reach out to their employees on a new and more engaging human level that reduces the static inherent in typical company/employee interactions. 

It will argue that when senior management seeks more meaningful outcomes from their employee engagement activities, they not only achieve their traditional objectives, but also something of great and enduring value: a new, higher-order and meaningful alliance with their employees.

This paper will suggest that the traditional notions of “purpose”, “values” and “culture” need to be rethought in light of the changing attitudes, expectations and aspirations of both current and prospective employees. It presents the alternative ideas of “ambition”, “feelings” and “behavior”, which are better aligned to the needs of the modern, meaning-seeking employee.

It will detail what composes the ideal master plan for a meaningful workplace and how that master plan can be used to fuel a range of plans designed to engender meaning at the corporate, workplace and individual levels. 

Finally, this paper will point out the need to rethink how to engage employees who are seeking meaning and urges businesses to think beyond mere “internal messaging” programs.

While this series challenges a number of established employee engagement “principles and practices”, it demonstrates how the “meaningful workplace” concept addresses the same business objectives of improved morale and increased productivity and engagement – albeit from a more compelling human perspective. 

Here’s what you can look forward to in the Meaningful Workplace

  1. Context: the workplace in crisis
  2. Understanding what makes something “meaningful”
  3. Toward the meaningful workplace
  4. Employees respond positively to a meaningful workplace
  5. Why people are looking for meaningful workplaces
  6. Why workplaces aren’t meaningful now
  7. Making your workplace more meaningful
  8. “Ambition” is the new “purpose”
  9. “Feelings” are the “values”
  10. “Behavior” are the new “culture”
  11. Making it happen
  12. Going beyond “messages”
  13. A process of self-discovery and self-identification

If you or someone you know is challenged by a workforce in which employees aren’t engaged, productivity is down and morale is low, download this paper. It is a must read for any business today.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

When Your Values Aren’t Really Values

Posted on by Chris Ames

Beware of Generic Values

In the inboxes and Slack channels at Emotive Brand, there is a video that often gets shared before we embark on a brand video. It’s called “This Is a Generic Brand Video, by Dissolve,” and it’s a hilarious satire of when you try to make your brand stand for everything, it ends up standing for nothing. “Equality, innovation, honesty, and advancement,” the narrator says, in a salt-of-the-earth grumble, “are all words we chose from a list.”

Company values not only shape the external identity of your organization, they act as an internal compass for your current and prospective employees. When done properly, values can be the engine of a thriving work culture, attracting and retaining top talent. On the other hand, when a list of generic, vaguely positive words are selected from a hat, your culture greatly suffers.

If Everyone Is Innovating, No One Is

A research group at MIT conducted a survey of more than 1,000 firms in the Great Places to Work database. Eighty-five percent of the S&P 500 companies have a section—sometimes even two—dedicated to what they call “corporate culture.” Above all else, the most common value is innovation (mentioned by 80% of them), followed by integrity and respect (70%).

“When we try to correlate the frequency and prominence of these values to measures of short and long-term performance,” the study says, “we fail to find any significant correlation. Thus, advertised values do not seem to be very important, possibly because it is easy to claim them, so everybody does.”

So, what does this all add up to? In short, there are two types of values for a company: universal and particular. Both are important in building a thriving company culture, but in terms of what you advertise and how you use these tools, the approaches differ widely.

The Universal and the Particular

Universal values are the table stakes to get a prospective employee in the door. Is there really anyone that doesn’t want to work at a place that values equality, respect, honesty, teamwork, or innovation? How you deliver and bring these values to life is incredibly important, but it’s something that can be elaborated on in an employee handbook, workshop, or leadership training.

At the end of the day, the only place that universal values really need to live is in the actions of your people. Your website is some of the most valuable real estate for your brand. Writing the word “INNOVATION” in all caps is not going to persuade a senior engineer to apply for a job. Do you know what will? Your technology portfolio.

In contrast, particular values are the principles that could only be held by your company. They should be written in a tone and manner that feels authentic to who you are. Here’s how Brian Chesky, Founder and CEO of Airbnb, explained it in a lecture at Stanford.

“Integrity, honesty — those aren’t core values. Those are values that everyone should have. But there has to be like three, five, six things that are unique to you. And you can probably think about this in your own life. What is different about you, that every single other person, if you could only tell them three or four things, that you would want them to know about you?”

So, let’s look at Airbnb and see if it passes the test. Here is the first value from their career page:

Be a Host. Care for others and make them feel like they belong. Encourage others to participate to their fullest. Listen, communicate openly, and set clear expectations.

First of all, notice the language. Being a host, of course, is integral to Airbnb’s platform. It embodies a sense of empathy while, most importantly, being particular to the company. It’s not that no other company in the world could value these things—caring, belonging, encouraging others—it’s that no other company in the world could have written it exactly this way. Think of how easy it would have been for them to just write the word integrity. Instead, they drilled down into the emotive core of their service and discovered something real.

Core Values Act as a Lighthouse

That’s the beautiful thing about well-written, emotive values. Once they are set, they act as a lighthouse for recruiting like-minded people. As Jim Collins writes, “you cannot ‘set’ organizational values, you can only discover them. Executives often ask me, ‘How do we get people to share our core values?’ You don’t. Instead, the task is to find people who are already predisposed to sharing your core values. You must attract and then retain these people and let those who aren’t predisposed to sharing your core values go elsewhere.”

So, next time you sit down to write or refresh your company’s values, please resist the urge to paint with broad strokes. Ask yourself, what do we truly believe in? What do we do better than anyone else? What are the real, grounded ways that we are impacting the world? What changes are we looking to make and how do we want to get there? Paradoxically, the more specific you get, the wider net you’ll cast. Or as James Joyce put it, “In the particular is contained the universal.”

If you’re looking to make your brand values act as a guiding light for recruiting and retaining top talent, contact Founding Partner Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm in San Francisco.

Five Ways a Meaningful “Why” Creates a Compelling Workplace Experience

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Our experience shows that many brands have been crafted with only the customer in mind and that the resulting “customer experience” does not in any way parallel the “workplace experience.” As a result, the brand – as it is now articulated – is relatively meaningless internally.

We believe every brand has a meaningful “Why” hidden within.

This hidden “why” is powerful because it can do as much internally as it can externally. Our job is to dig that out and shed new light on it, all with the ambition of delivering these five benefits.

1. Increase Motivation

When your employees believe in your brand, there’s a natural increase in morale and productivity. If employees feel good about the company they work for, the brand their efforts support, and the work they do, those positive feelings translate directly to a positive impact on your company overall.

What makes people “feel good” about their employer and the work they do? We think it’s when they see what they do as meaningful. What makes work meaningful to an employee? When there’s a personally relevant reason why it’s being done (i.e. the company has a compelling reason for being).

2. Increase Personal Accountability

If employees understand the brand promise that they work to support and how their efforts directly affect the brand’s success and fulfill consumer wants and needs, they’ll develop a stronger sense of personal accountability. In other words, they’ll take greater pride in their work and they’ll want to deliver better results. In a nutshell, they’ll care.

People care when they feel cared for. And this is not just about holding hands. It’s about caring about what people care about. People care when there’s a direct link between what they’re asked to do and their personal needs, values, interests, and aspirations.

3. Increase Word-of-Mouth Marketing

If your employees believe in your brand, they’ll be more likely to talk about it to friends, family, and anyone who will listen. They’ll advocate the brand online and offline to anyone who will listen, and they’ll guard it against naysayers. You can’t buy that kind of dedication, support, and positive publicity.

A solid “why” becomes a “social object,” or something that can be shared, talked about, and celebrated. It becomes “what” people talk and tweet about. At its best, the mere act of sharing and talking about a meaningful “why” reinforces its personal relevance and emotional importance to all parties.

4. Increase Communication

When employees feel like they have an important place in the brand’s success and they’re truly part of something greater than themselves (i.e. meeting consumer wants and needs), they’re more confident in sharing their thoughts and ideas. This increased level of open communication can lead to fantastic new innovations and opportunities for your company. It can also help to raise potential red flags before they turn into disasters.

We like to think of a brand’s “why” as the launchpad for all sorts of conversations and collaborative actions. It not only focuses thinking on what to do but also helps people vet ideas that go against the brand’s meaningful ambition.

5. Increase Talent Recruitment and Retention

Who doesn’t want to work for a company where the employees are motivated and happy? When your employees speak highly and openly about your brand, your company has a better chance of increasing retention rates and attracting new talent.

What could be more powerful than employees who believe in, and express, the why of your brand to the colleagues, family, and friends? When the endorsement of a workplace is heartfelt and genuine, it communicates far more to people seeking work. It not only helps draw the right people to the workplace, but it also means they’ll more readily become welcomed and productive members of the team.

For further reading on creating a more compelling workplace experience, download our Meaningful Workplace White Paper.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

A Mid-Year Check-Up Across Business, Brand, and Culture

Posted on by Chris Ames

The half-way point of the year is always ripe for reflection. We all survived Q1, the budget isn’t completely spent yet, and with any luck, we’ll live to see Q3. It’s a perfect time to kick the tires of your business, brand, and culture. What’s working? What’s failing? How can you fail better? How can you push things forward and end the year on a meteoric rise instead of a trickle?

Let’s run a brief diagnostic check.

1. How is your brand positioning? Are you top of mind? Is it clear, competitive, differentiated? Maybe your sales have declined, your targeted audience has shifted, or your product roadmap has evolved. Either way, positioning your business correctly helps separate your brand from its competitors. It’s one of the best return on investments for driving growth, fostering alignment, and situating your business and brand to thrive in even the most crowded landscapes.

2. Do your people have the tools they need? At its best, brand language is a tool people know how to wield with gusto. Your elevator pitch, your boilerplate, your corporate narrative – these are ways of clearly defining the purpose of your company and your unique role in bringing it to life. Anyone who’s been to a cocktail party knows the feeling of getting trapped in a sprawling 20-minute conversation from simply asking, “So, what do you do?” Get your story straight, concise, and attention-grabbing.

3. How are you expressing those insights externally? If you’ve got your story down, it would be a crime to keep it locked up. Blogs, podcasts, and thought leadership not only crystalize your vision, but they also build a community around your content. Readers can be coworkers, prospective clients, future employees, event organizers, or even the lowest of the low, other blog writers! It sounds simple, but brands with something to say should say something.

4. What’s the look and feel of those big ideas? A weird thing about business is that often the most important tools – pitch decks, sales playbooks, and conference presentations – are the ugliest. Forget stock photography. Instead, spend some design love on the tools that you will be using over and over to grow your business and tell your story.

5. How do all of these design elements ladder up? If your sales team is routinely Frankenstein-ing their own decks, if you’ve acquired multiple products that shift how people perceive you, or if you’re simply ready to ditch that chat bubble logo that stands for “community and conversation,” it might be time for a rebrand. Your visual identity is how the world understands you. Why leave any room for misunderstanding?

6. Do you have the right culture and values to bring these elements to life? We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: culture is everything. It’s the foundation, the spark, the catalyst, the magic that turns a job into a calling.

7. Are you attracting and retaining the right talent to deliver on your mission? Top talent is a lot like falling in love. Great partners tend to seek you out when you’re living your best life, as opposed to desperately posting online. When your brand is strategically aligned and beautifully designed, you become a magnet for brilliant minds. In a way, everything you do for your brand ends up improving your employer brand, because who doesn’t want to be involved in something great?

8. Are you getting out there in the real world? In 2019, it’s never been easier to hide behind the computer. We cannot stress enough the value of physical events in the real world: conferences, experiential product launches, even inviting companies for lunch-and-learns. Get your brand in front of real people, because that’s where insights happen. You need to see the excitement in people’s faces when you solve a problem they care about. And you need to be gut-checked by people outside your bubble with good bs detectors.

9. Are you giving people time to think beyond daily cycles? Here’s a slightly counter idea: productive people need time to get bored. When you have alignment at the top and everything is firing like it’s supposed to, the best gift you can give creatives is freedom – because that’s how innovation happens. It’s Google’s 20 percent rule. Clarity of purpose leads to clarity of action. Give your employees the general direction they need to delight you with a left-turn.

10. Are you building a brand that you actually want to engage with? It’s a bit of a cliché, but it’s like that Toni Morrison quote. “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” There is so much sameness out there. Ditch the crowd and build the crazy company you wish you could have looked up to when you first started. Are you passionate, fired-up, energized about what you’re building and the story you’re telling? Because that’s the fuel that keeps you going in times of uncertainty. You can’t control the market, but you can control your brand and the feelings it evokes.

When it comes to the strength of your business, brand, and culture, there are one million things to worry about. The good news is that you don’t have to do it alone. If any of these topics are illuminating your “check engine” light, we’d love to chat with you.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

Unifying Vision, Mission, Strategy, Brand, and Culture

Posted on by Chris Ames

It’s very difficult to work hard when you don’t understand what you’re working toward. We’re all capable of putting our heads down and grinding it out – but that behavior generally leads to burnout, apathy, and updating your LinkedIn.

A recent study from Reward Gateway, a global employee engagement company, which surveyed 1,500 workers and 750 senior decision-makers across the U.K., U.S., and Australia has revealed that only 25% of employees feel completely informed about their employer’s corporate mission and only 32% of employees feel completely informed about the values of the organization they work for.

When you compare that to the fact that 89% of employers say it’s absolutely critical to the success of their business that employees understand their mission, vision, and values, it’s clear there’s a major disconnect here. So, where is the divide and how can we close it?

The False Divide

In hiring and HR, we often talk about the difference between hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills are the concrete, measurable skills that make you a great fit for a specific position: coding, budgeting, IT. Soft skills are harder to measure – they’re the interpersonal skills like communication, empathy, and leadership that would make you a great fit anywhere.

Some companies make the mistake of dividing their work into these rigid categories. They think, “Hard skills drive real growth: our business strategy, our R&D and M&A roadmaps, our sales playbooks. Soft skills are merely nice-to-haves: our culture, our brand, our employee engagement.”

The truth is, a company divided cannot stand for long. Vision, mission, strategy, brand, and culture are inextricably connected, and all parts must work in concert to drive growth for your business. These strategic pieces must be thought of as one moving piece. Sales needs strategy to sell, marketing needs brand to have an impact, culture is the bedrock upon which all strategy lives or dies, mission keeps us grounded, and vision keeps us inspired. Beyond paying the bills, people need to understand why they get up every morning to come to work. There’s nothing soft about soft skills.

The numbers speak for themselves. A strong, well-defined, and positive culture increases employee engagement, job satisfaction, and well-being. A Business 2 Community report stated that companies with engaged employees outperform those without by 202 percent. Yet, only about 25% of employees said their organization has a strong culture based on core values and a similar amount said they trust their leadership at the executive level.

Unite Your Communications

On a very basic level, employees need a singular and regularly updated “space” to access communications about mission, vision, and the future of their company. That could be an intranet, a newsletter, or an in-person town hall. Ideally, this is a place where they can also voice their opinions and contribute to the shared meaning of the company.

Whatever the medium, the key is consistency in timing and aesthetic. Too often, employees are bombarded with irregular and disparate communications from different departments. Because they receive the communications in a silo, they think about them in a silo. There’s real power in bringing everything together in an integrated, holistic way.

Taglines vs. Tools

The fun thing about marketing is that everyone hates it – unless it’s really good. The distance between a mission or vision statement that feels like a “useless tagline” vs. a “useful tool” is a deadly gulf. There’s no surefire formula for bringing strategy to life in a meaningful way, but there are a few best practices that any company can glean:

Keep things human. If the goal is for every employee to be able to see themselves in the mission, then it needs to be written in a simple way. For example, the mission of TED is refreshing in its purity. It’s simply: spread ideas. It’s a perfect demonstration of how they serve, and their vision elevates this through the belief that ideas change attitudes, lives, and the world at large.

Be as transparent as possible. Mission and vision statements tend to be crafted by a small executive committee – and that makes sense. But even if all employees can’t actively participate in the shaping of the strategy, providing transparency into the decision process creates emotional buy-in for the end result. People are curious. They want to know the driving forces behind decisions and how they ladder up into something bigger. If you hand them a new mission statement with no context or transparency, it doesn’t mean anything.

Reward and model good behavior. If you’re asking people to make shifts in how they think and act at work, there should be systems in place to encourage those behaviors. Everyone wants their team to be more innovative and think beyond daily cycles – but nobody wants to allot the free time it would take to make that a reality. Some of Google’s most iconic products started off as side projects, a fact realized by their 20 percent rule, which states that employees should be able to devote one day of their work week to any project they like. Everyone wants their employees to engage more with internal communications – but it’s difficult to produce fresh and engaging content on a scheduled basis. After all, you can’t fault employees for not being up to date if things are regularly updated.

Vision, mission, strategy, brand, and culture are different blocks of the same blueprint. Creating the perfect house to hold these elements together can be difficult, but it’s critical if you want to drive growth home.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm in Oakland, California.

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Embracing an Agile Workflow to Yield an Agile Brand

Posted on by Giovanna Blackston Keren

A lot of branding firms talk about the importance of incorporating agility into their clients’ brands. The best brands have to stand for something distinct and meaningful – and at the same time, be ready to acknowledge what is happening out in the marketplace so they can adapt and adjust to maintain their edge.

There is less discussion about the process of branding and the need to imbue it with a degree of agility as well. Speed is a given – we’ve all been schooled on how clients no longer have time for long, drawn-out branding processes that will yield a new brand in the market within 12-18 months. But speed is not the same as agility. Agility means finding ways to utilize existing knowledge, assets, and insights to leapfrog into new territory.

Leading in Partnership

This notion comes at odds with how branding firms do things. Most branding firms have their “proprietary method,” often used to claim some sort of ascendancy or advantage over other firms. But in an effort to demonstrate expertise, there can be arrogance to lording one’s “method” over a client, especially if the method favors doing everything from scratch instead of looking for and accommodating existing intellectual capital. By ignoring the previous work a brand has cultivated, you may be sacrificing integrity for agility.

To truly imbue the branding process with agility, branding firms must exercise a degree of humility, respect for work that has been done, and a commitment to finding the foundational nuggets worth building upon. In a sense, this process is akin to inspecting a house before starting renovations – an architect worth his or her salt will identify the load-bearing walls and build upon and around them rather than tearing them down for no reason. This constitutes a stance that we call leading in partnership – taking the best of what exists and providing a path forward.

Bolstering a Strong Foundation

A client we worked with recently had conducted a tremendous amount of work identifying customer insights and pain points for each of the decision makers in all of the lines of business they sold to. Instead of recommending new research, either to validate these insights or uncover new ones, we took them as fairly gospel and used them as the foundation for building out their brand idea. When we brought back our thinking, clearly connected to the knowledge that they had uncovered, it was easier for our client to understand how we were laddering up to the brand idea. It validated the work they had done internally and made for a much easier sell-in. All in all, considerably more agile.

That is not to say that there isn’t room for additional validation of existing intellectual capital, especially if there is a suspicion that it may have been developed in an internal vacuum. But questioning what we believe to be true in an effort to reach a greater unknown can often be conducted in parallel path with brand execution, so that things keep moving forward. Again, agility.

Be an Agile Listener

Even for startups and small businesses without a robust legacy to build upon, we believe that approaching a project with a sense of humility will ultimately lead to a better partnership and increased agility. Branding firms should be able to say “So, you’re a startup – maybe you don’t know everything about your category yet, but you’ve created this idea and you possess enough strength of conviction to know that it is an idea worthy of the market. Let’s build something that feels like a natural extension of your brand.”

We will always have a rich library of proven methodologies to pull from, based on decades of expertise and hundreds of case studies. But if we’ve learned anything from our long-lasting relationships with clients, it’s that being an agile listener gets you much further than being the loudest person in the room.

To learn more about how your brand can adopt an agile workflow, contact Founding Partner Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm in San Francisco.