Your company’s workplace culture and brand are permanently linked. Business leaders often view it as a one-or-the-other undertaking, but that’s a mistake. If you want to improve an employer brand, you should couple brand and culture together.

Impossible, you say? Too much of a heavy administrative lift? Keep reading, you’re in for a surprise.

When you address culture and brand simultaneously, you’ll discover these two parts of any corporate psyche have a mutually beneficial symbiosis. Your company culture can drive your brand, and your brand – now on a solid foundation – can reinforce the culture.

First, what is an employer brand?

An employer brand refers to the reputation and image that an organization cultivates as an employer – both to current and potential employees, but also to clients, customers and stakeholders.

Building a strong employer brand is done through many factors including work environment, employee wellness programs, organizational values, learning and development opportunities, and more.

All of these factors can be rolled up into one umbrella, which is your company culture, which, overall, creates your employee experience.

What comes first: Company culture or employer brand?

It’s a chicken and the egg scenario, and it’s a trick question.

Positive culture feeds into a successful, effective employer brand. Similarly, your brand will sputter if your workforce isn’t committed to the culture or if the culture is simply a bad fit.

Once your organization accepts and embraces the unbreakable link between company culture and employer brand, you will have taken the first step toward unlocking the combined power of both.

When HR and marketing are free to work together to develop, communicate and promote the employer brand and company culture, you give your company the best chance to make both successful.

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