There are many factors to consider as you set out to build or strengthen your company’s employment brand, including the type of branding content you desire and the tone of your internal messaging. You'll also need to resolve one critical component of internal communications: How quickly your company’s brand should communicate.

Imagine this: In one of your conference rooms, there’s a long, horizontal line drawn on a whiteboard. On the left side is the word “fast.” On the right, “slow.” Now imagine representatives from HR, Marketing, Operations and Internal Comms are all sitting in that room.

pull n. – a force drawing someone or something in a particular direction or course of action.

Supply chain issues. COVID-19. The Great Resignation. Quiet Quitting. According to conventional logic, the U.S. labor market is past-due for some relief. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Last month, U.S. worker productivity levels reached at an all-time low. Shortly thereafter, it was announced that over 70% of economists believe that we’ll be in a recession by mid-2023—if we’re not already in one.

But what does this mean for employers? How do we connect with our current, and potential, workforce while maintaining our competitive edge?

In the age of the Great Resignation, there’s been no shortage of signs that many employees are beginning to look for new opportunities that better align with their priorities. Three fundamental truths remain:

• Burnout is sky high.
• Dissatisfaction is still running rampant.
• Employees are putting life ahead of work and want a company that mirrors that priority.

Let’s get one thing straight: It’s not quitting, they’re just tired.

American workers have had enough.

Enough of their employer’s broken promises, of unhealthy work/life balance, toxic workplaces, being overworked and underpaid—and they aren’t holding back their collective disappointment.

In recent months, many have flocked to TikTok to share their stories of “quiet quitting” and stand in solidarity with their peers. The similarities between this trend and last year’s Great Resignation—a period in 2021 that saw close to 4 million workers leave their jobs each month—are staggering, to say the least. It indicates a clear and present disconnect between many organizations and their own employee experience initiatives. A disconnect that, if left unchecked, could evolve into a larger, potentially more devastating employment branding problem.

For now, at least, most folks aren’t actually quitting their jobs, they’re just choosing something new: themselves.

The answer is probably more complicated than you think, but might surprise you. In fact, it's likely your organization already has a plan, but you might not call it that or follow it with the rigor you know you should. Complex, multi-unit organizations with distributed employees cannot not communicate internally, or they wouldn’t exist. But to what degree is your team’s plan documented, aligned to, executed and measured?

Recently, I had the privilege to sit with our business development team along the sales journey of a new client. Our goals in the conversations that comprise these meetings are pretty simple: Remove barriers and get to the next conversation. The barriers are usually invisible constructs, present only in the prospects’ minds, but with the potential to block us from doing business together. So the art of the sale is really the act of throwing paint on invisible objects, making them visible only for long enough that we can smash them together.

For centuries, storytellers have employed tools to create and understand the Heroes in their narratives. They work tirelessly to define their Hero from the inside out: from their motivations, fears, and desires, to their mannerisms, appearance, and habits. One of the most popular and time-tested tools for character development? Character personas. And they’re one heck of a tool for HR and internal comms pros too.