Branding culture into the workplace

This post is the first in a series of articles covering internal branding. 

When most managers and heads of organisations think of marketing to their audiences, they usually leave out their employees or forget about them completely. There are a number of reasons for this – they might not see their staff as an audience that needs to be marketed to, which is a huge oversight. Employees are an audience that is fundamental to the success of the company,  they’re the ones who carry out the tasks and interact with consumers – everything they do or don’t do affects the bottom line, making them an important audience to address and consider in your businesses communications.

All leaders want staff that’s engaged, enthusiastic, motivated, believes in what they do and understands the organisation, and the only way to get your staff here is by marketing to them.

Start at the beginning; a Digital Ocean story:

Digital Ocean is a cloud infrastructure provider based in America and is a great example of an organisation that has reaped the rewards of engaging their internal audience through the process of onboarding. Onboarding is an important part of indoctrinating new employees and ensuring that from the outset they feel like they’re part of the team, understand the organisation and see themselves as contributors to the companies operations and success.

In 2017 Digital Ocean committed themselves to improving their onboarding procedures, after a look at their onboarding process revealed that it was laborious and admin heavy. Digitial Ocean worked with Sapling to build an onboarding system that would focus on ensuring that new hires were productive, by automating certain aspects of their transition programs, and bringing in managers who were strategic and intentional in their engagement with new hires.

In a world where employers are fighting for the best talent, they cannot afford to miss the opportunity that onboarding provides to capture the heart of the new employee and almost ensure productivity. Hiring new employees is a costly exercise – finding someone that’s the right fit for your company can be a lengthy process and once you find that person, getting them to a place where they’re productive also takes time. In a world where, “time is money” and organisations are competing for the best talent, companies cannot afford to give employees a reason to leave.

Cole Ndelu

Cole Ndelu graduated from the Stellenbosch Academy of Design and Photography with a degree in Visual Communication. She is an internationally awarded photographer and is part of this years class of Design Indaba Emerging Creatives. She is a content producer at HKLM, specializing in social media management, PR and strategy.