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Is ‘belonging’ the deserved successor to branding?It’s a few years ago, and Isabel Collins is facilitating a brand workshop somewhere near York. Sitting in front of her is a ticket inspector – the kind of gruff railwayman you’d expect to see in any northern period drama.
He sits with his thumbs in his waistcoat and stares her down. ‘All I know about brand,’ he barks, ‘is that every five years they make me change the colour of my tie.’
Fast-forward a few years. Now running her consultancy, Belonging Space, Collins is presenting at one end of a room at the Law Society on Chancery Lane. We’re at a breakfast event organised by the search and selection consultants, Hoggett Bowers. Rain is pouring down outside, noisily.
Collins, though, has won the full attention of the room: she’s intelligently explaining why employer branding is – in its current form – a thing of the past. In its place should be a philosophy of belonging, a rather more nuanced and collaborative way of fostering engagement.
The basic premise goes something like this. Employer branding is a clunky process, best seen as an imposition by an organisation onto an employee. Collins visualises this in her presentation with a photo of cow flesh being clumsily seared with a heavy branding iron.
‘Employers often ask if we can fix it so values go through their employees like a stick of rock,’ Collins says. ‘I hate that, and I hate talk of ‘alignment’. I’d far rather the conversations were about membership, not ownership.’
‘Too glib’
The philosophy of belonging, she suggests, is much more respectful: it sees a workforce as ‘not just numbers’ but as a collection of individuals that can be ‘subtly engaged’.
So out go the restrictive, copy-written EVP statements that can be ‘too pat, too glib’. In comes an ‘ethos’ that is inculcated into a number of touch-points overlooked by most employer brand practitioners. These include Symbols, Habits, Interaction and Camaraderie. (This last is ably illustrated by a question: ‘If you sent an email out asking for help, how quickly would it be before someone actually helped you?’)
It’s certainly an intelligent challenge to standard employer brand thinking. But as the room debates the ideas, the challenger itself is subjected to interesting challenges.
If the belonging philosophy is about ironing out conflict and silos, how is this reconciled with the ‘need’ for internal competition, someone asks. And: What about organisations with high percentages of customer-facing employees, for which ‘alignment’ is a necessary part of delivering the customer promise?
Hardcore, not soft option
Collins has answers, but tacitly acknowledges that the philosophy works better in some organisations than others. (Family-owned companies, such as Lego and W.L Gore & Associates, seem in particular to lend themselves to this way of thinking.)
She emphasises that despite the airy-fairy associations of the word ‘belonging’ – perhaps one more easily ‘belongs’ to a chess club or the WI than to, say, a multinational. ‘Belonging is hardcore,’ she says, and ‘Commitment is the currency of belonging.’
Hoggett Bowers’ CEO Karen Wilson sees the benefit. To her, the concept of belonging helps to really bring ‘brands alive in the real world, and turn them into great behaviours’.
Someone else who’d have liked it is that ticket inspector. If you needed to convince him that engagement is about a lot more than being told what colour tie to wear, this idea of belonging might just be the way to go.
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