organizational identification

Employee Branding, done well, can be a great tool for the organization. The organization gets employees to behave in ways that are aligned with the organization’s desired brand message, and employees get a sense of connection to the brand and what it stands for, as well as a little bit of empowerment for making these promises more of a reality.

However, there are times when even the most carefully conceived and respectfully executed employee branding problems end up hurting the employees. In particular, employee branding can end up hurting an employee when the employee-organization relationship ends.

When employees end the relationship themselves, it can be difficult to say goodbye to a meaningful connection and to let go of that sense of themselves that was crafted through all those employee branding activities. However, when employees leave on their own, it is often to take on another role (at another organization or not) where their desire to be connected and to have a meaningful relationship with their work environment can be filled in the new way.

But woe to the “branded” employee whose separation from the organization is not voluntary.

We know that a lot of these involuntary separations have occurred (just look at the data on layoffs). For a large proportion of these employees, their relationships with their organizations were not ended because the employee’s performance was bad or because he or she no longer cared about the organization’s goals. Rather, the relationships were ended by the organization, for the organization’s benefit.

An involuntary ending of the branded employee’s relationship with the organization is painful, because it can feel as though the organization is rejecting the employee even after all the employee has done to serve the organization- – even going so far as to change her priorities, her behavior, and her “self”-expression.

Employee branding hurt s when employees who have contributed their skills, their energy and especially their sense of self self to the organization are abruptly (and sometimes even blithely) dropped by their organizations. (This is one of the reasons I dislike how quickly organizations resort to layoffs rather than alternatives.) At this moment, those “living the brand” programs , certificates and coffee mugs are seen for what they too often are– tools of the machine.

Consider this excerpt from a fabulous blog by an ‘ex-employee’, IttyBityCrazy. Describing her day at the “outsourcing consultant”, she writes:

… my ex-employer has not simply hired an outplacement firm and let them take care of us at their facility. Nope. My ex-employer had set up a special office for its outcasts, manned by (the outplacement agency) staff. But everything other than the staff is from my ex-employer. The cube furniture, the equipment, the fridges with sodas, the snack machines, the coffee makers. The coffee cups have my ex-employer’s branding on them! Way to help us move on!

(So the way this outplacement experience will work is:) I can drive for forty minutes, walk the silent corridors, sit in a soulless cube and, when I can’t stand that anymore, I can meet someone in the kitchen and, both holding our ex-employer-branded coffee cups, we can chat about the good old days. And about how we’re moving on up and moving on out. How it’s time to break free, and nothing can stop us.

After I let IttyBittyCrazy’s writing sink in, I imagined this ex-employee (who elsewhere describes many great things about her (former) organization/ job) standing there in the kitchenette. Struggling to find some hope after having been told that she must “let go”.

But what have they given her to hold on to? One of the very tools that her organizations used to bring her in more closely.

How’s that for a contradiction?

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