Truth: One of your most important audiences is your employees. You know why—workers today are permanent free agents. Many of them can do their jobs from anywhere in the world and the current job market means companies are less-than-bashful about poaching your talent.
We need to keep team members engaged and productive. That’s led to the beginning of a fusion of HR and marketing.
Let’s be honest—this is not an easy marriage. As one cliché-spewing old colleague would’ve said, “HR is from Mars, marketing is from Venus.” However, playing together is vital for both sides of the equation. To get the best out of your organization, to make it the best company it can be, everyone needs to know the company’s story, believe in that story, and be so enthusiastic that they can’t stop telling it to everyone they meet.
We believe this is important stuff, so we wrote a post about it for Technically Philly, “All Your Employees are Brand Ambassadors. Yup, Even the Unhappy Ones.”
Some of our wisdom:
In the best organizations, everyone on the team believes in the story. They tell it to each other, to customers and to people they meet at cocktail parties.
And in struggling organizations, everyone tells a different story. They say things like, “my boss sucks,” “work is crazy,” or “we have no direction.” You know it. You’ve heard it. You’ve read it on Glassdoor. You may have even been somewhere before where you said it.
These disgruntled employees are brand ambassadors, and the negative messages they carry to their networks can damage your company. They’re carrying the story of your company across social media and throughout the market. When you have the wrong people in the wrong seats, the wrong story is going to get spread far and wide.