People not employees, lifestyle not work-life balance, “heartcount”, not headcount

A new era is dawning for corporations. Keeping people together in the effervescent and lucrative social glue that transcends even the togetherness of the office becomes the most provocative task for management worldwide. Employer branding through brand engagement sessions might become the most effective tool a managerial team has in its hands to collate durably the employer’s brand to that of each and every employee.

Employees are not resources and they do not need management. This is a quite recent discovery in the science of management that itself needs recalibration.

Employees are the most intimate fabric of a holistic system that can only work if each piece acknowledges its value in the whole and is granted enough freedom to influence the whole. They do not need to be “managed”, conducted, but informed, inspired, and let to be as persons. The rest will come naturally. Self determination well nurtured and rather gently guided seems to be the key.

In this context, brand engagement sessions, well rooted in the deepest organizational truths, have the energy to provoke a reset, be it for a corporation or an entrepreneurial endeavor. The decision to invest in them belongs usually to visionary leaders, as per the story below:

CFO:” what if we invest now in these training sessions and people leave?”

CEO: “what if we don’t invest and they stay?”

How can we obtain the so much praised intrinsic motivation, and how come it became the inside job …of the employer? Isn’t it absurd? The capacity to accommodate meaning within the object of work should happen on the employee side. As an employer might put it: “if I have to motivate you, maybe I shouldn’t have hired you in the first place”…

When things go well and performance goes as predicted, top management is not pushed towards reshuffling vision or adopting any preventive behavior. To prevent what? When the going gets tough instead, usually it is hard to pinpoint the real cause as it is already buried in effects. A general state of demotivation installs, with more or less explicit tension axes, toxicity that is suddenly revealed, anxieties or simply disorientation shows that something is boiling down under. But what is cooking?

People boil because something rather important is getting displaced: their trust. The trust in the integrity of that invisible spider net that holds people together in an office around whatever they have to do. The trust that each of them matters in the big picture is replaced gradually by the cynical air of “nobody is irreplaceable”. The common spirit gets thinner and thinner, unwritten laws are ignored and people resume dryly to whatever is explicit on email. Explicitness replaces tacit acknowledgments. Taken by the flow of how to reach monthly objectives, companies forget to adjust lenses to seize something further than the half-year assessment. And more importantly, they forget to nurture the togetherness that an honest and empathetic “How are you, really” addressed to people can bring in. The emotional link between the company and every employee is lost and it gets translated in a sad trade-off regulated at the end of each month.

Anthropologically speaking, we are gregarious beings and belonging together is what makes us human at the end of the day. We need to look in the same direction with peers, we need freedom but we thrive under the cozy shelter of a group. Is there any solution that employers can activate to grow togetherness and belonging?

As a branding specialist, I frequently had the opportunity to deliver brand engagement sessions towards corporate or entrepreneurial companies. These sessions are very atypical in the classical landscape of trainings as they are at the crossroad of three main axes: branding, organizational culture and personal development. The liaison between these three axes is stronger than it might seem and highly relevant in self motivational context – “self” is key here.

They are usually the last step of a rebranding process or in any change management framework where strategic shift needs to be internalized at all levels. Or even when there are too many things that remained unspoken during an accelerated growth process. Whenever there are strategic decisions to be communicated that bear consequences upon employees, these decisions have to be communicated with the right dose of transparency but also seduction. Employer – employee is a “transactional space” almost like a theater of operations – in the most pacifist sense of the expression – where goals and objectives need alignment.

Such sessions of symbolic “engagement” with the organizational values lead to personal and intimate little revelations that employees have at a very personal level about the umbilical link between the employer’s brand and their own personal brand.