When staff strike - it’s the least of your problems

 Brands are built from within.  Brands are not about promises made by marketing. They’re about promises met by employees.

When staff choose industrial action; walk out; strike it signals a fundamental disconnect between your employees and your brand. Employee engagement has broken down.  It’s rebuildable, but only if everyone involved remembers that communication is more about listening than it is about pushing and managing messages.

Strikes tend to be synonymous with the public sector – like the Winter of Discontent in the 70s or miner’s strikes a decade later.  They are usually simplified in the press as clashes of intransigent polar extremes; management vs workers; greed vs survival. But they’re a lot more complicated than the caricatures of greasy pinstripes vs blue collar table bashers suggest.

Consider the Royal Mail dispute. On the face of it this can be seen as the death throes of the once irresistible force of New Labour’s spin doctors meeting the formerly immovable object of trade unionism. But talk to the ordinary postie or even customer in the street (or behind the letterbox) and this dispute is about so much more. 

It’s about a fight for identity by employees who are emotionally connected with a brand which they, and their customers, see as a national institution (see Buckingham; Brand Engagement http://www.by2w.co.uk/new.html ).

It’s about culture, “the way things get done around here” and workers resisting the march of automation which experience tells us may slash cost off the bottom line but does not guarantee better customer service or an improved quality of life (anyone remember the days of second post and trustworthy postal staff?).  In short, it’s a brand battleground that reflects a range of hot social issues topics including culture, values and identity.

As someone who specialises in helping organisations manage brands from within I’ve been called upon to help avert three high profile strikes in the last five years. Two were in the retail sector during the run up to Christmas and the most recent was a college where the staff were actively dissuading students from enrolling.

In each case the core issue wasn’t about pay and rations but fundamental communication issues like listening; consultation and disengaged staff who felt their managers were no longer connected with the values they believed their brand represented. In all three cases, catastrophe was averted through re-opening communication channels; fostering respect and active listening

People care more about the brands they work for than you may think.  Culture, the way people do things within the organisations that support those brands, is probably the most important determinant of brand performance.

It’s worth spending some time understanding the true dna of your brand. If you don’t know what brand engagement is worth, especially in these lean times, can you risk your employees deserting their posts? Or even worse, disengaged staff continuing to represent your brand?