some food for thought on a Friday afternoon: "People join companies, but they leave managers." So, you can call for corporate to improve employer branding, but you may only have yourself to blame for high turnover rates in your team.

When talking to HR managers, internal communication professionals, and other people responsible for engagements surveys or any kind on employee survey, we find that many of them have a similar problem: employees respond with an increasing amount of cynicism, mostly along the lines of “It doesn’t matter what we say in these surveys. They don’t change anything anyway.”

There are various reasons for employees feeling (often rightly so) that these surveys are a waste of their time and their organisations’ resources. Sometimes they are done for no other reason indeed, than to have a number to benchmark against, and to boast about. There’s no need to comment on this.

However, quite often an engagement survey is run based on the best of intentions, but its design or the levers actually available to pull do not allow any action that’s eventually reaching the workforce. There is also a common misconception that HR changing policies and pieces of paper qualifies as “action”.

Engagement surveys have the potential to help you improving business performance and to be perceived as a valuable exercise by your people. To get there, 3 basic elements must be observed:

• Design the survey so that it clearly indicates the levers you have to pull, once you get the results. That’s far more important than having a single number for benchmarking purposes. We love to use surveys based on the Gallup Q12, but there are other ways to do it.
• Make sure that you are actually able to pull these levers. In most cases this means you need to be able to change the way line managers manage the people directly reporting to them. If this doesn’t happen, you are unlikely to get beyond a paper exercise.
• Act (there’s always some opportunity to improve. Being above industry benchmark doesn’t justify complacency) and make it very transparent to everybody what you are going to change, how this relates to survey results, what it is supposed to achieve, and what this means for the individual.

Sounds simple enough, but experience shows it’s not that easy. In most cases the initiative falls down because HR owns the survey and follow-up, but is not able to influence line managers to make any effective changes. If this is the case, you can save your money. Why would you invest in expensive diagnostics, if you know you won’t be able to treat the patient?

We recently came across this figure: the extramarital escapades of Tiger Woods cost the shareholders of his 5 major sponsors anything between US$ 5bn and 12bn (see http://faculty.gsm.ucdavis.edu/~vstango/tiger003.pdf). This is a lot of money and companies have become increasingly aware of the risk they take with celebrity advertising.

However, it often seems that a factor most likely to be far more important is off the radar screen of executives: the every day impact of your employees behaviour, even when they are not directly interacting with customers.

• It’s the way the drivers of your branded vans behave in traffic – not to forget unbranded company cars, which are often easy to recognise from number plates or just colour and type.
• It’s how employees talk about their employer, when they are with friends and family (do you recon they say “We are going to launch this product” or “They are…”)
• It’s when this employee of a credit card company says at the store checkout: “I know these cards are crap. I only use it, because I work there”.
• And it’s when prominent managers behave disgraceful in public, even where no explicit connection with the company is made. And make no mistake: much less is needed to damage your brand on a local level than a CEO being arrested for antisocial behaviour in the centre of Rome (this 15 years old escapade of Daimler’s CEO Jürgen Schremp still comes up second on Google, when searching for “Daimler” and “Rome”)

All these things can constantly erode your brand value, leaving your marketing department fighting an uphill battle. What you really want are employees taking pride in the organisation they are representing and broadcasting a positive message. So what?

We are not suggesting that you should police your workforce’s behaviour nor should you draw up a huge set of rules on “How to behave brand friendly 24/7”. On the contrary. If you want your people representing your brand positively, than it has to be their brand to begin with. It is still striking how often organisations treat their “normal” brand and employer brand as two separate entities. On this basis, you’re not going to excel.

What you need is a set of shared values to build a brand upon your people are proud of. If you create ONE culture, ONE reality, then there’s no micromanagement required to keep each employee in line with the brand. Culture is much stronger than rules and formal controls.

This is not that easy? Right! This is a strategy for winners, not for the mediocre firm. It’s a long shot and it’ll never be 100% perfect, but even if you get it nearly right, you probably won't need the Tiger Woods’ of this world any more to raise your brand value.

And as this is a Monday and Mondays are perfect to start something new, here’s the first step for you: take stock of your organisation’s culture and values. Not the executives’ view! Go out there and do a proper cultural audit across your organisation. And then find out what journey lies ahead of you to get it where it needs to be…