I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.

—MOTHER TERESA

On October 27, 2015, $2.2 billion outdoor recreation specialty retailer REI sent a letter to its 5.5 million co-op members: It would be closing its stores on Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year. More than that, the company would give all of its 12,000 employees a paid holiday so they could get outside and enjoy nature, something at the heart of the REI message. Later, as the November 27 national “shop ’til you drop” fiesta grew closer, the company released a national television commercial about the shutdown featuring the Twitter hashtag #OptOutside and launched a website, www.optoutside.rei.com, where users could find trail suggestions and other outdoor recreation ideas.

It was a major doubling down on brand identity and promise . . . and a big risk. Did it pay off? By all accounts, the answer is a resounding “You bet your hiking boots!” Apart from garnering REI enormous press coverage, the Black Friday closure boosted the company’s online sales on November 27 by 26 percent.¹ Over 1,408,000 people joined the campaign on the company’s social media channels.

But more important, REI branded itself as the instigator of a movement and an ongoing conversation about consumerism and recreation. The decision was a full-throated shout of authenticity backing up the co-op’s stated values—bold and trust-building support of REI’s Contract with its customers and employees. Everything began, as it should have, with the employees.

In the eyes of the public, REI went overnight from a much-loved outfitter to one of the rare companies where values and purpose are as important as, if not more important than, short-term profit. It became one of the good guys, real and trustworthy. For years, REI branding and culture had stated “This is who we are. This is what we stand for.” With #OptOutside, REI walked that talk. It fulfilled its Brand Contract.

WHAT IS THE BRAND CONTRACT?

We begin our look at the three subcontracts that make up the heart of what we defined as the Contract with the Brand Contract. It’s the first one your employees come into contact with. How is that possible? Well, think about what the Brand Contract is:

Your Brand Contract is all the implied promises that your brand makes to the people who are exposed to it.

The world operates in an economy where brand is everything. Organizations are always trying to build, enhance, and defend their brands, and they’ll all tell you that the brand represents a set of promises made to the consumer. Apple’s brand promises peerless product design. Tesla’s brand promises to reinvent the car and the car-buying experience. Home Depot promises that you’ll find everything you need under one roof and the expertise to get the job done. But when we began this decades-long love affair with the brand, we forgot that the brand’s promise affects employees, too.

Your Brand Contract consists of everything that your culture, marketing, reputation, media coverage, and the behavior of your people do to create expectations. It’s your public face—the way the world sees your organization. What makes this Contract tricky to manage is that it can (and will) affect employee expectations before employees even become employees.

One of the most critical pieces to understand about the Brand Contract is that it plays a significant role in a potential new hire’s desire to join your organization (or your team). And this is where perks play an important role.

Potential recruits may be enticed by the onsite gym, snack bar, high pay, and your cafeteria, or by the reputation your company has in the community. Is that a bad thing? Certainly not. In fact, perks, benefits, and reputation are essential in remaining competitive in the recruiting market.

Then there’s the customer. If your customer is the young, hip crowd, your brand should reflect a tone that attracts that kind of employee. Perks are one of the many pieces that go into creating that atmosphere. While Nerf gun wars and guitar-playing hippies in cubicles may be exactly what a tech company desires, a medical or law office may look more to perks like opportunities to attend conferences or professional lunches. Your Brand Contract, whether it be a Contract with the entire organization or within your own team, should be in line with the customers you are serving, the people you want to attract, and the type of service or product you hope to deliver.

Your brand may bring people aboard, but it doesn’t mean they will engage, and will likely not keep them from jumping ship if something more appealing comes along. Understand, however, that the brand your organization puts forward—whether positive or negative—often determines whether people will want to be a part of that relationship.

How’s that again? We’ll explain. Say Olivia responds to your online posting for an open position. Before she even comes in for the interview, she’s already Googled your company, read your company’s online reviews, talked to her neighbor, and gone to your website. She likes the idea of working for a firm that values expertise and professionalism, and is impressed by what she sees when she looks into your company. She’s already formed an impression of who you are, how you operate, and what you value, so she already has expectations for her Employee Experience (EX), should she get the job. Making the situation even more slippery is that she might not even realize that she has formed these expectations. But you should. It’s the leader’s role to account for the a priori effect that the brand can have on potential hires so they can:

1. Understand the employer brand as it is perceived both outside and inside the organization.
2. Adjust the message the organization is sending out through its brand and communications to avoid creating unrealistic expectations.
3. Account for this “priming” in the recruitment process and counter any problematic expectations new hires might develop.

Your Brand Contract consists of everything that your culture, marketing, reputation, media coverage, and the behavior of your people do to create expectations. It’s your public face—the way the world sees you.

UNANTICIPATED CONSEQUENCES

What makes the Brand Contract as perilous as it is loaded with potential is how little organizational leaders know about it. For one thing, its influence doesn’t stop when someone is hired. An organization’s brand continues to be a force in its internal culture, and that brand continues to exert influence on each person’s perception of what to expect from the future. So it’s not enough to be aware of how your messaging and online presence are impacting your recruiting pool; you must keep tabs on how media coverage and the internal ebb and flow of politics and relationships affect current personnel.

Reflect back on Amazon. The company never promised a heartwarming experience. But it did promise to add heft to the professional experience section of your résumé and put an above-average wage in your pocket. Wrong or right, it stayed true to its promise, even amid a barrage of negative media.

Under most circumstances, when the Contract is agreed to by both parties, the terms are set, and renegotiating them means that the existing Contract must be torn up and a new one worked out in its place. But the Brand Contract is subject to constant renegotiation (this generally doesn’t involve an explicit agreement) based on ongoing experiences, making it unlike any other type of Contract. The Brand Contract has to adapt because it’s based on how the organization evolves in real time.

For example, when a company launches, it might be fast-acting and financially independent, so part of its Brand Contract is that it’s an agile, free-thinking rebel. Once it grows and files an IPO, it’s subject to the laws and scrutiny that affect public corporations, so it can’t be as free and easy. It must become more conservative and safeguard information more carefully. As it adapts, so does its Brand Contract with employees. As long as employees understand why that evolution is taking place, there probably will be few objections.

Another point of interest is that the Brand Contract is subject to influences that are completely out of your control: Twitter, articles in BusinessWeek and Fast Company, conversations at professional conferences or in the local Starbucks, even your brother-in-law’s loudmouth opinion. Your brand is subject to so many outside factors that the forces you can control become all the more important. You may not be able to control what people say or write about your organization, but you can influence it by being transparent and consistent about your values, mission, and behavior—by making sure that your public face syncs up with your private actions.

When Olivia is hired, she is handed an employment Contract (this is the Transactional Contract, which we’ll cover later on) that sets down in detail what she can expect from her job. However, as her employment continues, her expectations and EX gradually hinge less on the details of the written Contract, and more and more on perceptions: how the company is changing, what people are saying, and so on.

Olivia’s Brand Contract began with perceptions carried by the news, industry gossip, social media, and so on, creating a sort of “imaginary” organization that Olivia thinks she would love to work for. Then she’s hired and, over time, facts replace perceptions as she discovers what the organization is really like. We see the same thing on dating websites like Match.com. A photo, description, and a few emails might create an idealized version of a person based on excited expectations. Then you go on a date and—for better or worse—idealism and fantasy becomes reality.

Whether reality supports or contradicts the expectations created by the Brand Contract has a lot to do with what the employee’s experience will be like. It’s easy to see how a public brand that’s severely at odds with the reality of working for an organization might lead to serious disillusionment and disengagement.

THE EMPLOYEE VALUE PROPOSITION

In August 2015, much of the world was tense, due to stock market chaos and the international financial situation. Starbucks chairman and CEO Howard Schultz, in what some called inspired leadership and others called a bizarre move, issued a memo to the chain’s 190,000 “partners” (Starbuck-speak for “employees”). In it, Schultz asked partners to be “very sensitive” to what customers might be feeling. The memo states:

Our company has weathered many different types of storms. But our brand has never been stronger or more relevant. Our pipeline of new products and breakthrough innovation has never been more robust. And our long term commitment to delivering an elevated partner experience is unwavering. I can assure you that we will continue to lead and manage the company through the lens of humanity, doing everything we possibly can to continue to make your families proud of our company and all we stand for. You have my word on this.²

Notice the intentional, careful wording as the firm’s chief barista reiterates the brand: strong, relevant, new products, innovation, robust, long-term commitment, elevated partner experience, unwavering, lead, manage, lens of humanity, families, proud, we stand for, my word. These words were likely not chosen lightly, as they highlight the company’s brand and value proposition.

Every organization has a customer value proposition. Schultz identifies a piece of it later in the memo by describing a “unique in-store experience” and “highly relevant coffee and tea innovation and differentiatied customer-facing digital technologies.” Organizations make brand promises to their customer base—the highest standard of cancer care, 98 percent job placement after graduation, the longest-lasting minty flavor, the juiciest burger, and so on. Consumers make their purchases based on how well the value proposition aligns with their interests and expectations. When Expectation Alignment (EA) occurs (what I want and expect as a consumer aligns with what you propose you will provide), you get an expanding customer base and repeat business.

Since your brand impacts your employees as well, there is also an Employee Value Proposition (EVP). Just as the customer has expectations around a firm’s brand, so does an employee. While the Customer Value Proposition defines the value of a firm’s products or services to the consumer, the Employee Value Proposition (a subset of your Brand Contract) is the value—tangible, intangible, and reputational—that an employee receives from an organization in exchange for his or her work.

When we work with organizations around their employee engagement initiatives, we often conduct what we refer to as “engagement summits.” During these summits, we review the results of the company’s employee engagement surveys, discuss recommendations for improvement, and develop action plans. One of the key components of these summits is to discuss the organization’s EVP.

We start by asking leaders “Why would someone choose to work for you?” All but the most in-touch organizations come back with reponses like “We pay above market,” “We were just voted an employer of choice,” “We have a recognizable name,” or simply “Because we have a lot of open positions.” Others simply look at each other, laugh uncomfortably, and say “We have no idea.” Regardless, few are able to look through the employee lens to describe their EVP in any level of detail. Those who can articulate their EVP find they are able to take advantage of their Brand Contract in both recruiting and retention.

We worked with two restaurant companies, one a 400-location fast food chain and the other a 150-location upscale chain. The fast food employees, as we learned through surveys and focus groups, found the greatest value in flexible schedules (which allowed them to meet family, school, and social obligations), the ability to associate with friends while on the job, and getting 50 percent off of one-per-week lunches (a perk that cost about 78 cents per week per employee). The upscale restaurant workers, in contrast, were engaged by completely different factors: opportunities for growth, development, and advancement; the trust of their managers; community support; and satisfied customers.

The leaders at the fast food chain, understanding their EVP, also understood that most of their workers were young and mobile-device savvy. In order to facilitate scheduling (one of the key drivers of their value proposition), they went to an app-based scheduling system their employees could access from home. They implemented a recruiting referral program that paid employees $100 per referral hired and had networks of friends and family working together in the same locations. They expanded their discounted food program to include one meal per four-hour shift. Employee engagement and retention increased significantly.

The upscale food chain also looked at its EVP and discovered that the value proposition varied across job descriptions. For example, we discovered that a large percentage of the chain’s servers (who made up a significant portion of the population) fit into one of two categories: students and single parents. For them, flexible schedules with sufficient working hours to pay the bills was extremely important. The restaurants accommodated. Restaurant managers and assistant managers, however, valued the opportunity for career development, training, and advancement. The organization put in place a comprehensive leadership training program that addressed these expectations—a great example of seeing things through the leader lens.

Understanding your EVP helps you answer the following two-part questions:

1. What is our organization’s brand?
   • So, what are the outcomes of having that brand?
2. Why would someone choose to join this organization (what is the value we propose to future employees)?
   • So, what would it take to attract that person?
3. Why would an employee choose to stay at this organization?
   • So, what would it take to keep that person?
4. Do we have Expectation Gaps or Expectation Alignment in our Brand Contract?
   • So, what would it take to close any gaps?

Back to Starbucks. In his memo, Schultz also states the chain is “making a profound social impact in the communities we serve.” The memo goes on to say:

The experience we deliver in our stores, the strength and equity of our brand, and the primary reason for our current and future success is because of all of YOU. I believe in you and have never been prouder to be your partner.

For those whose values and expectations align with this brand, they are likely to find Starbucks the perfect environment, whether they’re digging the java or just buzzed about their jobs.

The Employee Value Proposition is the value an employee receives from an organization in exchange for the employee’s work.

WHAT DEFINES THE BRAND CONTRACT

The Brand Contract is your organizational weather. It rains or shines on your customers and their needs, as well as on your EVP. It doesn’t determine everything that happens from day to day, but it does set the underlying conditions and prepares the ground. In a way, the Brand Contract decides what you can’t do as much as what you can. For instance, let’s say that for the first five years of your tech company’s existence, you have cultivated a brand that’s painted you as a bold, creative, rule-breaking innovator. Creative geniuses flock to your door. But that’s not working; you’re losing money, and the future is in doubt.

You try to make a radical shift and adopt a more conservative, fiscally prudent, slow-growth business model. But you can’t, at least not with the people you have. Your Brand Contract has attracted recruits who fit your wild-and-crazy identity and encourages them to throw caution to the wind after being hired. Your team values that type of free-spirit environment. But you can’t keep going down this path. Wacky, off-the-wall ideas are great, but you’re having a tough time getting any of these ideas to market.

You don’t have any conservative financial minds or operations strategists on board. So, you just go on a hiring binge, right? Not so fast. Remember your EVP? Remember why this group of rebels joined your organization in the first place? Following after the Brand Contract is a brand wake, a time lag that, like the wake from a passing ship, continues to influence beliefs and expectations, even after you’ve turned your organization in a new direction. So you might post job listings and get the word out that your company is now a cautious, customer-focused operation. (You’ve changed your EVP.) But as far as everyone knows, including your employees, you’re still the same wild child that gave out a monthly Best Tattoo award. No matter how fast you turn the ship, that wake is still influencing your value proposition, how people see your company, who applies for open positions, and whether your current employees feel comfortable staying or not.

Your EVP and the length of time your organization has been traveling in that direction determine how strong and long your brand wake is. Beliefs change slowly. But your EVP is only one of the forces that defines your Brand Contract. Others might include:

• Reputation. What do the news media, your peers, your neighbor, and the person on the street say about your organization?
• Organizational communication. Every bit of content you put out, from your website to your press releases to your employee handbook, shapes beliefs and expectations.
• Values. Is there a set of publicly proclaimed values that guide how your organization is run? What are they, and do you follow them consistently or only when it’s convenient?
• Leadership personas. The CEO, senior executives, and other managers are the face of the organization in the media and at professional events. How do they conduct themselves publicly? What message do they send with their words, appearance, behavior, and body language? This applies at the team or department level as well. What reputation does your team have? What reputation do you have as a manager?
• Culture. What does working in your organization feel like? That’s culture in a nutshell. The nature of your culture (fun, intense, rebellious, high-tech, high performing), whether it feels intentional or accidental, and how well it serves its main goal—helping your employees engage fully and perform at their best—has a lot to do with your Brand Contract.
• Authenticity. Does what the organization says and does feel forced and artificial, or like the work of real people?
• Openness. Do you respond to customers on social media, encourage candid feedback from employees, and deal in truth, not spin?
• Customers. Who receives your services or buys your products? Changing from a private school known for STEM education to a charter school aimed at fine arts dramatically changes your customer base. Is this what you want?

We know that’s an impossibly long list of factors to track and manage, but don’t panic. The organizations that have been the most successful at building a solid Brand Contract—one that reinforces the beliefs and expectations they want—have done it by focusing on being authentic, driven by deep values, open and honest with their people, and consistent in what they do and say to everyone. In other words, they’ve been good human beings first, good leaders second.

Which brings up an important point. It’s not just the organization that has a brand. Each individual manager location, and even departments and functions have their own brands, which may or may not line up with the organization’s brand.

It’s quite possible that your organization has a stellar brand and has honored that Contract to the letter. Yet your best employee in the customer care department sees her boss toss the organization’s Brand Contract aside. “Great company,” she thinks, “but this guy’s a real jerk.” Although we won’t spend much time on this fact, it’s important to understand a manager’s individual role in brand creation and protection. Just be warned: In a situation like this, your number-one customer care team member will probably go elsewhere.

WHAT THE BRAND CONTRACT DOES

For more than 30 years, Patagonia, a Ventura, California–based outdoor clothing company, has built its brand as much on environmental responsibility as on quality products and service. In 2011, the company startled the world and shook the apparel industry by running an ad campaign that encouraged its customers not to buy its clothing and to recycle their old Patagonia items to reduce their overall environmental footprint. Crazy? Maybe, but leading with their corporate values paid off for the progressive, family-oriented, privately held Patagonia. In 2012, the year after it began its “cause marketing” campaign, sales jumped by nearly a third, to $543 million.³

Patagonia has led with its heart and environmental commitment ever since founder Yvon Chouinard launched the company in 1973. The company engages in practices that might make other clothing companies go pale.

The company pioneered onsite day care for its employees. It has made its supply chain public by using an online map to show every farm, textile mill, and factory it uses in sourcing its materials and manufacturing its products. It’s one of the founding organizations behind the One Percent for the Planet initiative, in which participating companies donate 1 percent of their total sales to environmental causes. It offers its people “environmental internships” that allow them two months of leave with full pay and benefits to work at an environmental nonprofit of their choice. And famously, its coastal headquarters often shuts down on days when the Ventura surf is inviting.

As you might expect, this unbelievably employee-friendly, values-first culture breeds not only ferocious employee loyalty and microscopic turnover but a Brand Contract whose values align perfectly with the company’s EVP. That’s what happens when you honor expectations. When you violate the Brand Contract, though, employees conclude that the organization’s promises are little more than window dressing designed to attract customers. It’s a few short steps from there to being perceived as hypocritical, and hypocrisy does not earn loyalty. In short:

Honoring the Brand Contract = Commitment

Violating the Brand Contract = Disloyalty

A MECHANISM FOR EXPECTATION ALIGNMENT

Take a look through the employee lens. Think about how regularly and radically circumstances can change in any organization and how severely some changes can affect what employees perceive as the promises made to them.

A nonprofit might lose a major donor and have to cut its budget. A hospital might be subject to a massive class action lawsuit. A university could face budget problems and be forced to let some nontenured faculty go. Or a new supervisor could simply come into a department, dislike the fast-and-loose way things have been done, and institute a system designed to restore order at the expense of fun. Change can have a thousand faces, and most of them are disruptive, even if they are positive.

Even positive changes can disturb expectations in negative ways. At Gravity Payments, Wal-Mart, and other companies, employees have quit after across-the-board raises were announced.⁴ Why? These employees didn’t like the idea that less senior people were receiving raises they didn’t deserve. Change is hard under the best of circumstances, and even beneficial changes in an organization can make employees feel that the rules are being ignored or the ground is shifting under their feet.

Through all this, the Brand Contract can serve as the anchor for employee expectations and keep EA relatively high. Sure, we said earlier that the Brand Contract is subject to change, but in circumstances only. The Brand Contract must have three anchors:

1. The values that have personal meaning to those in leadership roles—integrity, helping the less fortunate, wellness, or whatever those values might be.
2. The sense of mission behind the organization—what you’re trying to accomplish in the world.
3. Authentically caring about people, starting with your employees.

As long as these three pieces of the Brand Contract are explicit and don’t change, the rest of the organization can grow quickly, shift direction, or go into survival mode, and most employees will feel like they still have some solid ground to rest their feet on. They will still believe that the organization and its leaders are meeting (or planning to meet) their expectations.

Take cloud computing firm Salesforce. A new employee at Salesforce may find himself working at a public park, rather than in the office, on his first day at work. That’s because one of the firm’s stated goals is “giving back.” It’s part of the Salesforce brand. During the orientation period for each new hire, he or she will provide a certain amount of volunteer service, including picking out produce for a local food bank, working at a school or shelter, or rebuilding wildlife habitat. And these opportunities for service continue throughout an employee’s tenure at the company.

Salesforce takes a “1–1–1” approach to philanthropy and volunteerism. It gives 1 percent of its products, 1 percent of its equity, and 1 percent of employees’ time to local nonprofits.⁵ Ebony Frelix, who has headed up the firm’s philanthropy and employee engagement efforts, claims, “It’s part of our corporate DNA. It’s why employees choose Salesforce, because we have that volunteer component.”⁶

A day out of the office isn’t a perk. It’s a reflection of the organization’s values. It’s written into the Brand Contract. While the manner in which Salesforce exemplifies these values may change, and the way the company does business may change, it has built volunteerism and giving back into its EVP. They’re values, and they represent a commitment to employees: No matter what else changes, these values will remain the same.

A well-managed Brand Contract maximizes Expectation Alignment by keeping the underlying fabric of the organization consistent while circumstances change.

HOW THE BRAND CONTRACT AFFECTS EX

We’re not suggesting that organizational leaders and employees join hands and sing hymns. We are suggesting that leaders respect their people enough to level with them, trust them to handle challenging circumstances, and have a good explanation why if the firm can’t keep a promise. “Walking the walk” should be considered the minimum requirement for a solid Brand Contract. But how do you know if your Brand Contract is solid? With the Brand Contract influenced by so many outside forces, can you keep your finger on its pulse and hope to feel anything like an accurate heartbeat?

Yes, but indirectly. You assess the health of your Brand Contract by putting on the leader lens, assessing EA, and looking at these indicators of your overall EX:

• Investment in culture. At its heart, a strong Brand Contract makes employees feel they are being rewarded for having the wisdom to place their trust in you. They feel safe. (That’s why broken Contracts can become so toxic; they are a betrayal.) If your Brand Contract is sound, you will find that employees invest in your culture: participating in events, leading committees, and getting involved.
• Defense of the organization. It’s easy to write something positive about any organization. What’s more revealing is when a current employee—or a past one—comes to its defense on social media or on a review service like Yelp or Glassdoor. When you see this happening, your brand is evoking real loyalty.
• Challenging the status quo. We’re not encouraging you to let employees defy directives. But in an environment where they feel safe and respected, employees should feel that they can challenge conventional thinking, ask their superiors tough questions, and expect substantive answers. If that’s happening, smile.
• Risk taking. The same qualities—safety and respect—come into play in regard to risk taking. Strong, consistent culture and care for employees gives them the freedom to test boundaries and innovate without fear.

Note that these have nothing to do with perks or compensation. No company ever won hearts and minds with raises or pinball machines. The currency being traded is trust, communication, authenticity, and mutual respect—a Brand Contract that welcomes high expectations and meets them. Your employees become the rising tide that lifts all boats.

The phrase “this changes everything” is overused, but it’s appropriate here. The power of the Brand Contract inverts the dynamic between employers and the employed. Traditionally, employers have demanded absolute loyalty from their employees without being expected to reciprocate. The EX was what the employer said it was.

No more. In the Age of the Employee, employers who want loyalty have to earn it by being worthy of trust and backing up their stated values with action.

Now, here’s the catch. Contracts work both ways. If your employees aren’t living up to their end of the Brand Contract, exemplifying your Brand in what they do, they might not belong in your organization or on your team.

A CANARY IN YOUR COAL MINE

Let’s say you’re not taking your cues from the Salesforces of the world. You’re letting your Brand Contract mutate and change accidentally without thought for how this affects your EX. It’s surprisingly easy for the Brand Contract to become an afterthought. It’s so fluid, changeable, and subtle that it can’t be worth all the attention and time it takes to manage it, right?

Wrong. It’s the foundation of every other Contract you have with your people. It determines the value you propose to your team. So monitoring the health of your Brand Contract is crucial. It’s like the canary in your organization’s coal mine: If you see your Brand Contract starting to gasp for air, you can be sure that expectations are slipping out of alignment, the EX is suffering, and your Transactional and Psychological Contracts are hurting as well.

When your culture, values, or behavior start to differ from what your brand has promised employees in the past, you have a problem. Watch for these warning signs:

• Degradation of your “recruiting brand.” Strong, clear brand and culture make recruitment more productive by making it easier to attract people who are well suited to your organization. When attracting them stops being easy, you may have a disconnect between brand promise and brand reality. You might start seeing messages like some of our favorites (courtesy of our Prospective Team Member Surveys) from applicants:
  • “The application process was a mess. The woman at the staffing agency told me your recruiting was disorganized, but I think she understated how crazy it would be.”
  • “I was disappointed by [name]’s professionalism in the interview process. He told me twice that he would get back to me, then had his secretary send me a rejection notice after four weeks. I’ve had bad dates give me more considerate rejections. If this is the way you work with your clients, I was lucky not to be hired.”
  • “I would like to withdraw my application. After seeing the stunts your company just pulled in the media, I have no desire to be a part of that.”
  • “Your customer service manager told me I probably wouldn’t get the job, then proceeded to try and recruit me for his own multilevel healthcare marketing scheme. Not only would I not work for your firm, I will go out of my way to tell people not to do business with your credit union.”
  • “Which company is this again?”

    You don’t need to see such ugly messages to have a broken recruitment brand. If you are seeing a slowdown in the number of applicants for open positions, if people are accepting jobs and then backing out before starting work, if your quality of new hires seems lower, or if your level of “fit” seems to be declining, you may have a damaged Brand Contract that’s promising one thing but delivering another.

• Reduced engagement. Every organization should be conducting engagement surveys of its people, both formally and informally. If you do, and you see marked negative changes in engagement indicators from one survey to the next, and the next, that’s a red flag that you may have issues with your Brand Contract. True, it can also be a harbinger of other problems, but lower engagement scores should get you looking critically at what your brand is saying to employees.

  Through our employee engagement surveys, we ask employees to rate the statement: “I would recommend this company to others as a great place to work.” We find that for every six promoters (those responding “strongly agree” or “agree”), there is an average of one detractor (those responding with a “strongly disagree”)—a 6:1 ratio.

  Research in the Customer Experience (CX) world parallels what we find in the EX world: Both promoters and detractors spread the word. This means that, on average, for every six ambassadors you have employed in your company, there is one employee doing what he or she can to tear your brand apart.

• Increased focus on pay, benefits, and perks. It’s been proven time and again: When employees feel part of a larger purpose and that their employer shares their values, they care less about compensation, perks, and other “hygiene factors” (if you’re unfamiliar with this term, be patient—we’ll address it later). That’s not to say those things aren’t important. They are. But if concern for those factors rises—if you see an increasing number of employees asking about raises or grousing that a competitor has a better benefits package, for example—that might be a sign that your brand is no longer communicating a purpose or set of values that resonates with them. When that happens, you need to revisit your EVP.
• Cynicism. Cynicism is cancer to any organization. It starts small, spreads quickly, and can be deadly. Employees grow cynical when they become convinced that the organization cannot be trusted to keep its promises. For instance, you’ll hear them complaining that a new management initiative is “more of the same.” This is a Brand Contract emergency and needs to be addressed ASAP.
• Fear of change. As we said earlier, a consistent, strong brand and culture give employees a sense of safety that keeps them feeling confident, even when the organization is changing. If your people are exhibiting a greater fear of change—even positive changes like expansion or advancement opportunities—then you may have a problem with your Brand Contract.

PREVENTING BRAND DAMAGE

The Brand Contract is the bedrock of the EX. The stronger, clearer, and more consistent your brand message is to your employees, the better their expectations will align and the more deeply they will trust the organization. However, once the brand is damaged and trust is broken, it’s extremely hard, and sometimes impossible, to repair. Better to prevent damage before it occurs by monitoring and managing your Brand Contract from both ends: what your employees perceive and what management is telling them.

Impacted by branding and other social pressures, our brains take into account a range of input—often more than logical evidence and data—when they invent, create, and evaluate our experiences.

Start with mindfulness. Simply being mindful and aware that you have a Brand Contract and that it’s important is a great place to begin. Know your EVP. Make sure you and everyone else in your organization’s leadership is aware of how their actions and the decisions of the organization impact what employees believe they have been promised. As Meghan M. Biro writes in Forbes:

Make sure the stories align well and accurately reflect your current brand and the overall mission. Then look at the employee experience—what employees do every day, the actions they take, and how they perceive the actions of their managers and top management.⁸

Next, communicate. Talk with your people at every level often and candidly. Ask them how they feel about their leaders and the direction of the organization. Do they feel that they are being treated respectfully and told the truth? What do they expect from their experience, and how does their EX line up with those expectations? Try to get a peek through their lenses. Be as straight with employees as you can about finances, possible layoffs, changes in policy, or anything else that might make them feel uneasy or that the organization has gone back on its word.

George Bernard Shaw said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” If your goal is to keep the Brand Contract working for you, not against you, make communication constant, clear, and two way.

Finally, question your personal values, priorities, and actions as they relate to those of the organization or department. Are they in line with what you tell your employees and customers? Are your decisions, and those of the organization, being driven by the values that the majority of your people care about, or are you doing one thing and professing to believe another? The kind of employees who will make your organization successful are also the kind of employees who care that their employer is moral, ethical, and operates according to a set of unchanging values.

If you are wavering in your values, or if there are no clear values behind the things your organization’s leaders say and do, it’s time to get clarity. You cannot and will not have a Brand Contract that leads to a positive, empowering EX until you know what you stand for, from the CEO’s office down to the loading dock or retail storefront.

CHAPTER 5. THE BRAND CONTRACT: THE CHAPTER EXPERIENCE

• Your Brand Contract is all the implied promises that your brand identity—what you profess to be and what you stand for as an organization—makes to the people who are exposed to it.
• Your culture, marketing, reputation, media coverage, and the behavior of your people create expectations for the future, and impacts the Brand Contract.
• Through things like media coverage and the Internet, the Brand Contract actually can affect expectations of people before they come to work for you.
• Your Brand Contract plays a major role in your ability to attract talent to your organization or team.
• The Employee Value Proposition (EVP) is the value an employee receives from an organization in exchange for the employee’s work.
• Your Brand Contract is an organizational weather vane created by your reputation, how your organization communicates, the values it claims to follow, the personas of your leaders, your culture, the firm’s authenticity, and its level of openness.
• The Brand Contract is a tool for fostering employee engagement and loyalty. The stronger it is, the more loyal your people will be.
• This Contract shapes the Employee Experience (EX) by providing a sense of consistency, predictability, and safety in the face of continual organizational change.
• You have a strong Brand Contract when employees invest in your culture, defend the organization against detractors, feel comfortable questioning and challenging authority, and are comfortable taking risks.
• Recruitment problems, lower engagement scores, increased employee focus on pay and perks, cynicism, and fear of change are warning signs that your Brand Contract is hurting.
• Preventing Brand Contract damage is far better than repairing it after it happens.

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