Building ties between internal comms and employer branding

The strongest workplaces know how important it is to keep top talent in place — but there’s careful planning that goes on between internal communication and employer branding professionals to ensure that top performers know they’re valued and want to remain in their positions.

Ragan spoke with Alison Zurcher, director of internal communications at Seattle Children’s Hospital, about the ways her team works with employer branding and marketing pros to recruit and keep her organization’s top talent.

“Even if we don’t agree on anything else, we can agree on the mission,” Zurcher said of the symbiotic relationship between the two functions.

Defining roles and collaborating effectively

Zurcher told Ragan that internal communication and employer branding make up two unique but mutually supportive branches of the hospital’s employee retention and messaging strategy.

“Internal communications is not necessarily the driver of retention messaging,” Zurcher said. “We are the promoters of those things.”

She added that internal comms should be a consistent presence in employer branding conversations and vice versa. This enables the sharing of perspectives early and often during messaging pushes to ensure that there’s a more holistic view during the planning process for employee outreach.

“It’s super important for internal communications to be embedded with branding teams,” Zurcher said. “You can come alongside and really be a cheerleader for their initiatives. You can’t do any of it in a vacuum.”

Zurcher provided a few examples of collaboration between employer branding and internal comms at her organization that can serve as a guide to others.

• Sharing common language and wording. Even if the angles and audience differ somewhat, internal communications and employer branding should look to use the same language to communicate about how their company is a great place to work. Zurcher said that her team looks at everything from CEO messaging to job listings to ensure that it aligns both inside and outside Seattle Children’s. “Do your external messages and job posts reflect the same language, the same values and the same mission that you are promoting to your own internal workforce?” she said.
• Keep the values front and center for both teams. Zurcher told Ragan that Seattle Children’s has six main values that guide everything the internal comms and internal branding teams do. They are:
  • Compassion
  • Excellence
  • Integrity
  • Collaboration
  • Equity
  • Innovation

She said that these core values help define the way forward when the internal comms and employee branding team may not agree on a certain comms tactic. Each value serves as a guide of sorts that keeps employee experience and the mission of the hospital at the forefront of messaging, which helps with retention. Zurcher shared that one way both teams collaborate within this value set is the hospital’s internal Hidden Gems series, which reinforces the company’s externally shared values with the employee base. The Hidden Gems series highlights unsung employee stories and boosts them for the entire organization to see. “These values help ground us in a world that’s very emotional,” she said. “We always use the mission as our north star. Bring it back to the mission, bring it back to patients and families and bring it back to our core set of values.”

• Showing helps alongside telling. The time comms pros have to grab the audience’s attention seems to shrink by the day — that’s why communicating visually never hurts. Zurcher told Ragan that her internal comms team works with employer branding pros to place visual tags promoting the six values on employee-centric content. This creates a visual link between the values promoted internally and what the world beyond the walls of the hospital sees, fostering a culture of belonging and engagement that’s a major boon for retention. The hospital also uses branded story formats that can be used interchangeably on internal and external platforms. “It reinforces the message and the culture we want to create,” Zurcher said.
• Let employees tell the story. Sometimes, the retention strategy is letting employees tell the organizational story themselves. Zurcher shared that Seattle Children’s does a series called “My Best Friend at Work,” in which employees share stories about connection and collaboration on the job. Both internal comms and employer branding work to oversee how these stories figure into the larger retention and cultural comms strategy. “Crowdsourcing is another way we’ve brought the employee voice into our communication.”

Employer branding and internal comms might have different job descriptions, but when they’re in sync they support the same goals and values. If they can align their messaging strategies and packaging, the two functions can work to keep an organization’s best employees happy and in place.

“Employees should experience the same story internally that brought them to the door externally,” Zurcher said.

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications. In his spare time he enjoys Philly sports and hosting trivia.