Do Your Employees Feel They are Part of Befuddled Inc.?

Most organizations are confused about their identities.  Is this true of your workplace?  Take the Sleekstone Organizational Befuddled Exam (SOB) and find out.  Every time you say “Yep, we do that,” give your company one point.

 1. Has your company created an image (or brand) for recruiting that is different from what employees experience when they come to work?  Employer brands can have value.  However, when new or existing employees do not experience what they were promised, productivity is reduced significantly. 

 Bonus: In a related area, does your company continue to strive for a spiffier tagline, updated logos, or better collateral material explaining the employer brand?  This just adds to Befuddled when there is no perceived affect on the work environment.

 2. Executives believe almost every employee knows the company’s mission, values, and culture since these statements are posted in most locations.  This statement is befuddling for two reasons: (1) it assumes that everybody interprets the written word the same way, and (2) it is typically an indicator that managers and supervisors have not been formally trained on how to put the statements into practice uniformly.  (BTW training only managers so they can talk to employees about vision, mission, and culture doesn’t work … or count.  This technique is interpreted by employees as “my company doesn’t care enough about these things to train me.”)

 3. Did your company avoid asking employees how they perceive the organization before creating an employer brand?  Befuddled starts with not knowing where you are so you can plan on what steps you need to go through to get where you want to be.

 Bonus: Frequently, companies ask employees how they perceive the organization and then avoid doing anything about the perceptions in favor of creating a fictional image.  This reduces the effectiveness of using employees to find other outstanding employees.

 4. The employer brand is not consistent with the external brand.  Just think about the implications of having an empowering external tagline that says “just do it” to your customers and then creating an internal brand that is based on a command-and-control culture.

 5. The workplace image was created by either marketing or human resources without much input from the other departments.  Marketing, whether internal or external, frequently tangles with human resources over who should have the responsibility to determine how and what the organization will communicate to employees and potential new hires.  This battle detracts from having a complete and accurate message.

 Bonus: The management systems do not jive with the picture that is created in the messaging.  This includes such things as:

• Pay systems that are not aligned with the type of organizational values the company wants to possess (e.g., having a meritocracy and paying for group performance)
• Cultures that are not aligned with communication systems (e.g., wanting to be collegial, but not having an effective mechanism for employee input)
• Performance review systems that only measure traits when the company is focused on performance.

 Scoring:

Organizational confusion is not just content for Dilbert cartoons.  It is a key reason our country is lagging in competitiveness and creativity.  If your company scored 4 or more, the place you work is part of the problem.

Coming Next – How to Create an Effective and Compelling Workplace Brand