How Your Culture Feeds and is Fed By Your Employer Brand

In the intricate business ecosystem, company culture and employer brand are two intertwined elements that play crucial roles in an organisation's success. While often discussed separately, these two concepts are deeply interconnected, each influencing and shaping the other in a continuous feedback loop.

I've covered how I think culture, EVP, employer branding and talent marketing all connect in a previous post. Here, I'll dig deeper into the relationship between company culture and employer brand - looking at how they feed into each other and why understanding this relationship is important for your talent attraction and retention efforts.

Defining Company Culture and Employer Brand

Before looking into their relationship, let me provide a definition of what each of these things are:

• Company Culture refers to the shared values, beliefs, attitudes, and practices characterising an organisation. It's the personality of a company that influences how employees communicate, interact, make decisions, and approach their work. Culture is often described as "the way we do things around here" and can be both formally articulated and informally understood.
• Employer Brand, on the other hand, is a company's reputation and image as an employer. It encompasses and builds mental associations towards the company's culture and value proposition, including factors like work environment, career development opportunities, compensation, and overall employee experience.

How Company Culture Feeds Employer Brand

Company culture serves as the core upon which the employer brand is built around. Here's how culture contributes to shaping the employer brand:

1. Authenticity: A strong, well-defined company culture provides the raw material for an authentic employer brand. When the culture is clear and consistently lived within the organisation, it becomes easier to communicate genuine messages about what it's like to work there.
2. Employee advocacy: Employees who are immersed in and aligned with the company culture are more likely to become brand ambassadors. They share their positive experiences with their networks, contributing to the employer brand's reach and credibility.
3. Distinctive identity: A unique company culture can help differentiate an organisation in a crowded job market. It provides compelling stories and experiences that can be showcased in employer branding efforts.
4. Consistency: A strong culture ensures that the employee experience aligns with the promises made in employer branding messages. This consistency builds trust and reinforces the employer brand.
5. Values alignment: Culture defines the values that guide the organisation. When these values resonate with potential employees, it strengthens the employer brand's appeal to like-minded individuals.

How Employer Brand Feeds Company Culture

While culture forms the basis of the employer brand, the relationship is not one-directional. The employer brand also plays a significant role in shaping and reinforcing company culture:

1. Attraction of cultural fit: A well-articulated employer brand attracts candidates who align with the company's values and culture. This self-selection helps maintain and strengthen the existing culture.
2. Setting expectations: The employer brand communicates what new hires can expect from the company culture. This priming helps new employees integrate more quickly and effectively into the culture.
3. Reinforcement of values: By consistently communicating cultural values through employer branding efforts, these values are reinforced both internally and externally.
4. Employee pride: A strong employer brand can instil a sense of pride in employees, encouraging them to embody and promote the company's cultural values more actively.

The Virtuous Cycle

When company culture and employer brand are well-aligned and mutually reinforcing, they create a virtuous cycle:

1. A strong culture provides authentic material for the employer brand.
2. The employer brand attracts candidates who fit the culture.
3. New hires who fit well strengthen the existing culture.
4. The reinforced culture provides even richer material for the employer brand.
5. The cycle continues, continually strengthening both the culture and the brand.

Challenges and Pitfalls

While the relationship between company culture and employer brand can be highly beneficial, there are potential issues to watch out for:

1. Misalignment: If the employer brand doesn't accurately reflect the actual culture, it can lead to disappointed new hires and damage to the company's reputation. New employees can then decide to leave quickly, which then drives up costs to replace them as they come and go through a revolving door.
2. Resistance to change: A strong culture-brand alignment can sometimes make it difficult to evolve either element, potentially leading to stagnation.
3. Overemphasis on "fit": Too much focus on cultural fit in employer branding can lead to a lack of diversity and groupthink within the organisation, which in turn feeds into the stagnation called out above.
4. Negative feedback loop: Just as positive aspects can reinforce each other, negative elements of culture can also be amplified through the employer brand, creating a challenging, vicious cycle to break.

Strategies for Harmony

To leverage the symbiotic relationship between company culture and employer brand effectively, organisations can:

1. Ensure authenticity: Regularly audit the alignment between culture and employer brand to ensure authenticity.
2. Encourage employee voice: Create channels for employees to contribute to both culture-building and employer branding efforts.
3. Balance consistency and evolution: While maintaining core values, allow both culture and employer brand to evolve to meet changing needs.
4. Measure and adjust: Regularly assess the effectiveness of both culture and employer brand through metrics like employee engagement, retention rates, and quality of hires.
5. Integrate efforts: Ensure that teams responsible for culture, communication, and employer branding work closely together.

The relationship between company culture and employer brand is an important combination that can impact an organisation's success in attracting, retaining, and engaging talent. By understanding and nurturing this symbiotic relationship, companies can create a strong, genuine, and attractive presence in the job market while fostering a positive internal environment.