Rethinking Employee Experience: The Brand Strategy You've Been Missing

We talk about employee experience like it’s an HR project—something you roll out, measure once a year, and hope boosts engagement. But what if that’s exactly why it’s not working?

In this episode, we challenge how employee experience is defined and show why it’s actually brand strategy in disguise because the way employees experience your company is the way customers experience your brand.

You’ll discover how forward-thinking companies like Delta, Adobe, and Warby Parker are proving when you build your brand from the inside out, everything changes...trust rises, retention strengthens, and business performance skyrockets.

We share:
✨ Why employee experience is your brand (and not just HR’s job)
✨ The real difference between engagement and alignment
✨ A 10-minute quick win to uncover hidden gaps in your brand culture

If your brand looks great on the outside but feels disconnected on the inside, this episode will challenge how you lead, build culture, and define success.

Because strong brands aren’t built through marketing, they’re lived through people.

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Sources Mentioned:

1. Gallup – State of the Global Workplace 2023
2. Edelman Trust Barometer 2023
3. Gartner Research
4. IBM / Aon Hewitt Study
5. Delta Airlines & JD Power Study
6. Adobe

Brand isn’t marketing’s playground anymore, it’s HR’s secret power move! 

The Real BS is the podcast flipping brand strategy on its head, hosted by Jaclyn Scrivens—brand strategist, experienced marketer, and the HR hype woman you didn’t know you needed. 

With each episode, get bold insights, no-fluff strategies, and straight talk on leading brand from the inside out. Because when HR owns brand, people stay, talent chases you, customers notice, and the who

That’s a wrap on this week’s Real BS! 

If you loved it, hit subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs a little brand boss energy. For more, visit BrandCulture.org or head over to LinkedIn and follow Brand Culture Association, or connect with me personally. I’d love to keep

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Brand starts with HR, not marketing.
On The Real BS podcast, we cut through the fluff and get real about how culture shapes the brand more than any campaign ever could.

Hosted by executive leader, brand strategist and experienced marketer - Jaclyn Scrivens - you’ll hear bold truths, fresh strategies, and no-BS conversations designed to help HR professionals and leaders step up as strategic brand powerhouses to change the game inside your organizations.

If you're ready to flip the script on brand and elevate your HR and leadership role, you're in the right place.

>>> Explore more information at www.BrandCulture.org.

>>> Don't forget to subscribe, share with a colleague, and keep building the brand from the inside out.

Chapters

• 1:50 Employee Experience Is The Brand
• 3:23 Myth #1: Brand Lives Inside First
• 4:23 Delta’s People-First Proof
• 5:05 Myth #2: Not HR’s Job Alone
• 6:28 Adobe’s Alignment Flywheel
• 7:41 Myth #3: Alignment Beats Engagement
• 8:10 Warby Parker’s Purpose In Practice
• 8:48 Three Truths And A Playbook
• 9:35 Ten-Minute Alignment Check & CTA

Transcript

Jaclyn Scrivens: 0:55

You know what I think is wild? We've gotten so used to talking about employee experience like it's this standalone project, like something you just tack on to keep people happy or to check a culture box. But employee experience isn't just a project that falls only on the shoulders of HR. It's not a box to check, and it's not separate from the brand. It is your brand. Until leaders start seeing it this way, their brand will never reach its full potential. Why? Because how your employees experience your company on the inside is how your customers experience your brand on the outside. It really is a mirror, not two separate things, but more like the same story told through two different audiences. And if the inside and the outside don't match, your brand breaks. But if they do match, man, let me tell you, the brand magic shows up everywhere. I'm talking in loyalty, your profits, customer experience, acquisition, retention, and the list goes on and on and on. You don't have to take my word for it. Data backs us up. Gallup did a study and found companies with highly engaged employees see 23% higher profitability. Not because of better marketing, but because employees deliver the brand more consistently across every touch point. So what does this tell us? If your employees don't fill your brand, your customers never will. And what do you think that does to your business growth? All right, let's start busting down some myths that will help you think about employee experience in a completely different light. Let's tackle big myth number one and talk about why employee experience is brand work. Most companies still treat brand as only an external marketing play, while employee experience is handled by HR. The perception is brand means logo, marketing campaign, or customer experience. But what most companies miss, real brand lives inside your organization first and foremost. It starts in the way your employees experience your company, the promises, the values, the leadership, the system, the culture. That is your brand, shaping how people show up, how they deliver, and ultimately impacting how your customers feel. According to Edelman, 67% of people trust employees more than company messaging. Think about that. Your brand reputation is being carried or crushed even by the experience your people have and deliver every single day, not your marketing message. So just imagine what could happen for your business if just as much was invested in your people as what's invested in your marketing campaigns. Let's see how this plays out with Delta Airlines. Delta has built their entire reputation on the belief that if they take care of their people, their people will take care of customers. During the pandemic, they didn't lay off a single employee. That one move built massive trust inside the organization. In the payoff, Delta hit record profits of $4.6 billion in 2023 and ranked number one in customer satisfaction and three class segments in a 2024 JD power satisfaction study. They didn't build their brand on an ad campaign. They built it through the lived experience of their people. That's what it looks like when employee experience is your brand strategy. Are you ready for the next big myth? I see a lot of companies acting like employee experience is a standalone project that again falls only on HR's shoulders. This couldn't be further from the truth. Employee experience doesn't belong to one department. It's the responsibility of every leader. It's marketing, its operations, its product areas, its leadership. It's every department and division. Of course, HR plays a powerful lead role as the bridge, the team who develops the employee experience strategy to help align the inside to the outside. But it's everyone's responsibility to bring it to life because it's how the entire organization shows up in alignment with its brand promise. If leadership, brand, and culture aren't working together, you end up with a brand that may look great on the outside, but falls apart on the inside. This actually happens quite a bit, and trust me when I say, customers notice this and your business is impacted by it. If you're in this boat and feeling the pressure, it doesn't have to be this way. Just imagine if you start thinking about employee experience as the delivery system of brand strategy. Stop and think about that for a minute. If you start treating employee experience as a delivery system of your entire brand, does it still feel like just a project only HR is responsible for? Or does it feel like employee experience should be prioritized as part of a larger strategy that HR has the opportunity to lead? Gartner recently shared that organizations with strong employee experiences see 31% higher productivity and significantly better retention. That doesn't happen because HR is hosting more engagement activities and doing more surveys. It happens because the whole organization is aligned around a cohesive single brand story. Adobe is such a great example of this. They realized early on that employee experience can't live in a single department. It has to be built into the way the business operates. They created what they call their employee experience index, which measures employee connection to their brand values like creativity and authenticity. Employees who score high on the index are three times more likely to stay and two and a half times more likely to recommend Adobe as a great place to work. Who wouldn't want to report those numbers to their executive team? Do you want to hear another stat that really perks up executives' ears? Adobe's internal success with their employees has impacted their business. They now hold a 90% customer retention rate. That's not HR in a silo. That's employee experience as a shared responsibility delivering a shared brand strategy. And finally, let's explore the third myth. This one is a biggie and may sound a little shocking to you. We've got to stop making engagement the finish line. Engagement is an outcome, not your strategy. What really matters is brand alignment. When employees can connect their daily work to what the brand stands for, in other words, when what you say as a brand matches what employees experience and what customers feel, that's when you start seeing results like advocacy, retention, and performance. Have you ever heard of a little company called IBM? They put this to the test and found that brands with high employee alignment outperform peers by 147% in earnings per share. That's the power of everyone rowing in the same direction. Warby Parker gets this. They don't just talk about brand purpose in their marketing, they weave it through their entire employee experience. Every employee in every department is trained not just on what they sell, but why it matters, and it pays off. They've maintained double digit revenue growth of 12 to 15% in recent years and are widely known in retail for being a desired place to work. That's what can happen when you stop chasing engagement scores and start living your brand. All right, you just learned three key brand truths you can start using today. One, employee experience is brand work. Two, employee experience may be led by HR, but it's everyone's responsibility. Three, if you focus on brand alignment, your employee engagement will grow. Here's what I want you to sit with. Employee experience is not a program. It's not a budget line, it's your brand. Every Slack message, every meeting, every policy, every leadership moment, it's all shaping your brand, whether you realize it or not. If the inside doesn't match the promise on the outside, the brand will always fall short. But when you bring those two worlds together, when employee experience and brand strategy become one, everything shifts in the right direction. So here's something you can do this week. And it doesn't require a big budget or leadership buy-in to start. Take just 10 minutes this week to do a simple brand alignment check. The first step, grab your company's brand promise or purpose statement for reference. Step two, ask yourself, do employees actually experience this brand promise every day inside the company? If you need to, ask a few employees. This 10-minute reflection can uncover powerful misalignments or help you see where your culture already shines. If you're sitting there thinking, yep, I know we have a gap we need to close, that's exactly where Brand Culture Association comes in. We help HR teams and leaders build brand-aligned employee experiences that transform how people feel, work, and lead. And we are so passionate about it. Because when employees live the brand, customers believe the brand. And that's when your culture becomes your competitive advantage. And do you know what that does for your company? It impacts business growth, and your executives will want to hear all about it.