How strong is your corporate brand? Important question. How can you do better than guess at the answer? Well, you could spend six or seven figures on some quant research on reputation (which will do little more than confirm your gut about what people think of you), you can invest in a brand valuation (which will give you a nice round number that isn’t reliable and won’t tell you much about how well your business is performing) or you can put a PR resource on retainer to track the interweb for mentions, sentiment and buzz. Or there is Net Promoter Score, and no doubt myriad other ways to extract your dollars and distract you from what matters. Even after all this expenditure of time and money, I don’t believe you’ll be any better informed than you are now.
But wait, there’s hope. Wander over to HR and ask them to give you the last three years of your company’s employee engagement data (and if they don’t have employee engagement data tell them to get busy and start collecting it).
My hypothesis – and I am about to launch a research initiative to test it – is that organizations with low employee engagement scores have weak brands and those with high employee engagement scores have strong brands. I have observed this pattern in every organization I have worked with that has had the data available. Naturally I cannot name names as we are talking about confidential data but there are winners and losers.
