Inspire your Employees to Transform your Business

Over the past decade, organisational culture has gone through a seismic shift. It has gone beyond the world of employee benefits, free coffee and ping pong tables, and become deeper and more central to both the way people work and the ways that businesses attract and retain talent. But it’s also become ‘make or break’ for businesses as they navigate their own inflection points - whether that’s new leadership, hypergrowth, M&A activity, IPOs and more.

Following 60 years of building successful company cultures, including our own at Wolff Olins, we know that a company’s culture can be a legacy-defining platform for business leaders with an eye on the future, and a fundamental part of business transformation.

The Current State of Company Culture

The world of work is changing. This is due in no small part to the way that employees are changing. Nearly 9 out of 10 Gen Zers and Millennials say they’d leave a job to work somewhere that better matched their values (WEF, 2023) and over half of U.S workers say they’d take a 20% pay cut in exchange for a better quality of life (Ford, 2024).

From the climate crisis, to geopolitical upheaval, to a multi-year global pandemic, this collective stress has a clear impact on working life. As priorities continue to shift, so too have people’s needs.

In 2023, businesses were rated as the most trusted institution, outperforming governments, media, and NGOs as being more competent, ethical and believable among the general population (Edelman, 2023). There is now a profound opportunity to meet this moment by not only operationalising the values they stand for, but by inspiring employees to engage in how they come to life in the workplace.

How? By aligning culture with brand.

Brand and Culture: The Ultimate Dynamic Duo

Great brands inspire us. By articulating compelling answers to questions like, “Who are we?” “Why does what we do matter?” and “What will this idea mean for our future?,” brand becomes the ultimate and most unique design tool for creating stories that shape beliefs and behaviours.

By using brand as a launch pad for inspiration, employers can unlock a more supercharged and authentic employee experience. In a fascinating study by psychologists Thrash and Elliot (2011), inspiration was shown to be a strong driver of creativity and well-being. Inspired people were also shown to be more open to new experiences as well as being more intrinsically motivated – a strong tie to overall work performance.

Where Inspiration Begins: Your Employee Value Proposition (EVP)

Wolff Olins views an Employee Value Proposition as the vehicle which articulates the inspirational story of an organisation – capturing the distinct essence of a brand’s cultural charter. As the stated agreements between employers and employees, EVPs can include the values, benefits, rewards, and perks the organisation has to offer, as well as the expectations they have of employees in return.

The catch? EVPs are often developed in a vacuum rather than by employees themselves – resulting in words that sound hollow rather than visionary, or in platitudes rather than a call to action. And even when they’re viable, they’re underutilised and under-implemented.

Building brand-led cultures that inspire is only possible when employees are invited to be the storytellers.

Co-created EVPs bring to life a single-minded rally cry that gives current employees something to align with and attracts talent to see their employer’s unique value. It also often leads to stronger adoption rates and overall commitment, as the EVP takes root within the organisation.

Making it Real

Though high impact, EVPs are just a starting point for creating an inspired culture. Integrating them within a company’s end-to-end employee experience should ultimately address a more expansive set of provocations:

1. Is the story of who you are clear and accessible to all your employees?
2. Is your employer brand observable in day-to-day behaviours?
3. Can employees see and feel your culture in their environment?

Clear and Accessible

Making an EVP real to employees starts with defining the organisation’s culture in a way that’s easily shared with new and tenured employees. Whether in the form of a playbook or an artefact that lives on the organisation’s intranet – a codified culture equips leaders and galvanises employees to be champions of it.

When thinking about growth and hiring goals, codifying culture also helps onboard new hires more impactfully - rather than waiting for new hires to assimilate and just “get the culture” over time.

Observable

An inspiring culture should be observable in a company’s ways of working. Looking at different touch points across the employee experience - from onboarding, to rewards and recognition, to how managers and leaders are trained to support their teams - high-impact moments should always reflect the brand purpose for ultimate success.

Starting points:
- What global rituals reflect your brand’s values?
- How do your candidate interviews gauge values alignment?
- What mechanisms and tools are in place to support continuous feedback?
- How do your rewards and recognition system reinforce positive behaviours?

Seen and Felt

Do employees feel the power of your brand story when they enter the physical workspace? With most companies asking employees to return to the office, now is the time to connect culture and brand in physical environments so employees can feel and see the power of in-person moments of collaboration. Research shows that creativity in the workplace design itself can often contribute to greater employee productivity and happiness.

Translating company rituals and values in collaboration spaces, meeting rooms as well as virtual spaces (intranets and sharepoints) tell employees the brand story in ways they can see and feel.

Using brand to amplify company culture can create a new mindset for all – one that can cultivates alignment, stability and creativity. By re-imagining the role of the workplace in its most unique and ownable way, and in a way which inspires, a transforming business can offer something larger to its people as they look to the future.