Do you love your own brand?  Are you your brand’s own biggest fan?  If not, then you should be. And your teams should be too!  How can you expect customers to love your brand if you don’t love it first?

A little brand narcissism is a good thing, and it starts at the top. When the leadership team actively loves the brand and freely expresses that love, it’s infectious to teams below. It’s not about indoctrination or mind-control.  You can’t tell your teams how and what they should feel, but when your employees hear the leaders actively and enthusiastically loving the brand, they’re more likely to jump on the bandwagon and love your brand too. 

A little brand self-love can go a long way toward internal-external marketing alignment. Building a culture within your organization that expresses that self-love can be an excellent first step toward aligning your internal messages with your external ones.

While it may feel like you’re asking your teams to drink the Kool-Aid, the other valuable point about brand self-love is that it can quickly weed out the people who aren’t on board with you.  Employees who are skeptical, cynical, or resistant are not the people you want on your team who might leak their feelings onto a customer. Figure out who your biggest cheerleaders are and then let them express their passion to their colleagues and to your customers.

Who are your brand’s biggest internal cheerleaders? How do they express their love of your brand?  Leave us your comments and share your story.

Effective onboarding goes beyond tactical training and integrates new employees in a brand-right, comprehensive, and strategic program.

Every new employee reflects time and money - not only in the recruiting and interviewing process but in the time it takes to bring them up to speed and make them productive.  Creating an engaging and comprehensive onboarding program will maximize your investment, reduce your overall training time, and generate motivated and enthusiastic new employees who are ready to help your company thrive.

How can Onboarding align your brand and marketing messages?

Many companies view onboarding as simply “orientation” - those first few days on the job where new hires learn how to use the phones, find the bathrooms, and fill out paperwork.  This completely misses the bigger picture.

Onboarding is an opportunity to immerse your new team member in every element of your company - from the basic and tactical to the strategic and cultural.  An effective program will help new employees become ambassadors of your brand and company, which is especially crucial if they have contact with customers, vendors, partners, or anyone outside the company. They will reflect and deliver your brand to the outside world so it’s imperative they do so in a brand-right way.

By integrating brand, culture, and marketing messages into your onboarding program, you will generate alignment and consistency throughout your organization and support the delivery of your brand.

Ten On-boarding Best Practices

1. Reflect the brand. The strength of your brand plays a huge role in recruiting and retaining top talent. The on-boarding process should reflect your brand seamlessly and consistently.
2. Reduce time to productivity. How fast can your new hire be up-to-speed? The sooner they’re productive, the sooner the company will benefit from their contributions.
3. Unify all on-boarding efforts.  There are multiple components and agendas that make up on-boarding - everything from payroll and benefits to security, IT, branding, customer service, and more. A unified and integrated program that covers all on-boarding elements will ensure each topic is trained consistently and according to company standards.
4. Introduce company culture. New employees can impact an organization’s culture. Now’s the time to introduce the company culture, and help new hires understand how they will be expected to meld into it.
5. Roll-out for maximum retention. Don’t overwhelm new hires by cramming all on-boarding into the first few days or weeks on the job. Spread it out to improve retention and provide on-the-job experience that can build better context.
6. Provide coaching & mentorship. It’s easy for new-hires to get frustrated, overwhelmed, and simply throw in the towel. If you lose them, you’ve also lost time and money. Give new employees an appropriate and safe outlet to vent, ask questions, and get coached.
7. Include evaluation and go/no-go checkpoints. Sometimes that person who shined in the hiring process turns out to be not the best fit after all. Build in checkpoints and measures for evaluation to help identify and de-select a poor fit early in the process, before you’ve invested a lot of time and money.
8. Involve managers. Don’t pass off on-boarding to the training or HR departments. Involve managers to establish rapport quicker and help them identify strengths and weaknesses, communication styles, motivation factors, growth opportunities, and more. 
9. Keep employees in the work environment. It’s tempting to ship your new employees off to a classroom for onboarding, but they’ll learn faster and retain more if you provide as much training as possible in the actual work environment.
10. Map to a larger plan. Onboarding should connect to and reflect your overall business objectives to support long-term company success. Also, development plans for each employee that are initiated in the onboarding process will improve motivation while building upon larger business goals.

This was a big week for RadioShack as the 88-year old company announced that it’s reintroducing itself as simply “The Shack.”  According to an article in USA Today, the company is making the change in an effort to maintain its brand heritage while also attracting more tech-savvy shoppers. The article goes on to say that a new ad campaign will focus on the company’s knowledgeable sales staff and the idea that their small stores are easier to navigate than big-box competitors.

Bloggers and Twitterers buzzed about the change all week long - many were quite critical saying the name change doesn’t pull the company out of relative obscurity compared to sleeker rivals like Best Buy.  One blogger wrote that his impression of RadioShack is that it’s a brand that “never made the jump to the 21st Century” and that this re-name doesn’t do enough to give the brand a larger overhaul to make it relevant.

Any time you make a change to your brand, it’s perfectly natural to experience resistance, both from your customers and your employees. What will make this a win for RadioShack will be well-trained, engaged employees who are truly enrolled in and representing the fundamentals of the brand to customers.  This is the foundation of internal-external marketing alignment, and it can make or break a shift in your brand.

This is is critical in the face of competitor Best Buy who recently launched a new program on Twitter called Twelpforce: “A collective force of Best Buy technology pros offering tech advice in Tweet form.”

What do you think of RadioShack’s name change?  Does it impact whether or not you will shop at the store?  Leave us your comments and tell us what’s on your mind.

Any business leader accountable for management of their company’s employment brand, talent pipeline, or employee engagement should read a new article from Harvard Business Review (July-August 2009 issue) titled How Gen Y & Boomers Will Reshape Your Agenda. The subhead states that your oldest and youngest talent cohorts demand many of the same things in a workplace - and have the numbers to get their way. This article offers an interesting perspective on an issue we hear frequently discussed by major HR organizations as they work to create a compelling work experience that allows them to attract and retain the best talent.

In addition to detailing a vision of what the workplace should include to effectively retain Gen Y and Boomer talent the article provides this interesting portrait of each generation.

Portrait of Gen Y

Ambition
84% profess to be very ambitious

Loyalty vs. Quest
45% expect to work for their current employer for their entire career

Multicultural Ease
78% are comfortable working with people from different ethnicities and cultures

Healing the Planet
86% say it’s important that their work make a positive impact on the world

Networking by Nature
48% say having a network of friends at work is very important

Portrait of Baby Boomers

Staying in Harness
42% project they will continue working after age 65

Long Runways
47% see themselves as being in the middle of their careers

From “Me” to “We”
55% are members of external volunteer networks

Yearning for Flexibility
87% say being able to work flexibly is important

Familial Obligations
71% report having elder care responsibilities

What I find so interesting is that I often hear disparaging comments targeted at members of the Gen Y generation that are often leveled by Boomers. Perhaps, with a closer look, the distance between these groups is not that great.

So what do you think? What has your experience been navigating the generational divide in the workplace. Join the discussion. We would love to hear from you.