Engaged Employees are Essential to your Brand

By Eve Laidlaw, Employee Engagement Specialist,
Engage and Grow

Firstly, what exactly is behind employee engagement?
If we delve deep and look at the most important factor behind the concept of employee engagement. What exactly is at the core of cohesive, productive workplaces? Research and empirical evidence are continually pointing to the same answer: employee trust.

Secondly, what does employee trust have to do with your brand? One of your companies most powerful brand assets is your people. It is so common to see organisations focusing all their branding efforts on marketing activities rather than spending money and time on their people.

Regardless of the industry that you are in, to build a strong corporate brand, you need brand ambassadors. Employees who are thoroughly engaged, connected and committed to your organisation.

If you’re not motivating your team to be brand ambassadors, you are missing out. Edelman’s 2019 Trust Barometer found that 78% of people believe “how a company treats its employees is one of the best indicators of its level of trustworthiness”.

Obviously, we should all be striving to treat our employees well, which sometimes is easier said than done. If you are succeeding at this and know that you have an engaged team you should be publicising and amplifying your strengths in this area.

Nothing conveys the appearance of happy and invested employees better than the employees themselves. That said, there is other ways that you can emphasise team engagement to your wider audience. Some of our recommendations are as follows:

• Loading up the Life Tab on your organisation’s LinkedIn Page with content and visuals illustrating your company great culture.
• Posting updates on your social media pages that highlight your employee achievements.
• Creating ‘Day in the Life’ videos of your team members, to highlight how passionate they are about their workplace.

Behaviours like advocacy, loyalty, engagement and commitment are all fundamentally shaped by the level of trust employees feel toward their employers.

Strong trust fostered internally within your organisation translates to the way employees advocate for and talk about your brand in their own circles, which then reflects in the eyes of customers. Building trust with your employees is a critical step toward building trust with your greater audience.

For more information the contents of this article, please contact Eve Laidlaw  at eve.laidlaw@engageandgrowglobal.com