People make organizations

People make organizations have an identity through the culture they practice. 

When people understand, accept and have ownership of the organizational values, their behaviour is  the resultant culture. This behaviour creates the brand experience and leads to the brand identity for the organization.

 When we speak of people, among stakeholders of a brand, employees are the single most important stakeholders. Yet, strangely enough, organizations fail to acknowledge this in the brand experience and identity development process. 

 An organisation having strong ethics & empowerment, with goals that clearly link to developing individuals and where the employee feels empowered to contribute ideas inspires employees to strive for delivering to the best of his/her abilities. This comes about because the employee likes going to work every day, learns and is appreciated. It creates engagement.

 This engagement leads to specific behaviour that is aligned with the organisational values and manifests as the work culture. Strong teamwork is visible. Positivity is visibly felt and success of individual activities occurs.

 Activating a culture creation plan is not easy. It takes time, persistence, consistency and most importantly clarity. Clarity between business goals, functional roles and individual development.

Culture Impacts Business

 As individuals we have our names which give us part of our identity. So also with brands who have their names and logos. But that’s half the job done. As with individuals, our personality and behaviour provide an experience. Together this gives a complete identity of us to the other person. Similarly with brands, through employees and their behaviour, coupled with organisational processes, a brand stakeholder has specific experiences that lead to having a complete identity of a brand.

The specific experience a stakeholder goes through is purely dependent on two factors:

1. Employee behaviour
2. Organisational processes

The impact of behaviour and service quality, in terms of process, creates either a positive or negative perception of the brand in the stakeholders’ mind and affects the buying decision and ultimately on the bottom-line of a business.

Where do we start?

Leadership!

Developing an effective corporate culture is not an external effort. It is purely an internal exercise that needs as much attention and planning, for effective implementation, as the regular functions of an organisation.

The leadership of an organisation needs to provide clarity of its business and the brand experience it wants stakeholders to have. This then needs alignment between organisational and departmental goals and desired behaviour of employees.

Changing behaviour is oft very difficult. Work habits are part of our individual cultural make-up that we carry with us when we walk into a job. Affecting change requires having a consistent engagement program through which employees clearly feel and get a feeling of pride and value.

Next Week read --> "4 Steps to developing an effective employee engagement program"

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Joy Abdullah is a strategy and brand marketing executive with substantial experience in designing brand experience, leading and implementing a broad range of corporate growth and realignment initiatives, across industries in Asia.
He writes on leadership & culture, ethical brand marketing, strategic brand management, employee-brand relationship and sustainable business strategies. 
Click here for his articles.  Connect with Joy on:
1. Linked In 
2. Twitter @JoyAbdullah.

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