5 Useful Tips to Get Employees On Board When Executing a Rebrand Strategy
Rebranding is far from easy and requires a lot of work and careful planning to redefine a company’s identity, values, and market presence. However, a lot of its success also hinges on the support and engagement of employees who are the face of the company and the ones who interact with customers, embody the company’s values, and bring its vision to life.
If you want to get employees on board and ensure your rebranding goes off without a hitch, here are 5 useful tips you need to follow:
1. Communicate the Purpose of the Rebrand
Employees need to understand why the rebrand is happening in order to feel invested in it. Explain to them the purpose of the rebrand, whether it is to reflect updated values, reach a new audience, or stay competitive in other ways. Share as much as you can about the new values and vision of the company, and what it means for them.
2. Get Employees Involved Early
Don’t wait to get your employees involved, and start to loop them in as early as the planning phase. Seeking their input via focus groups or surveys makes sense seeing as they’re the ones working with customers directly and may have a better grasp of what works and what doesn’t.
By involving employees early, you’ll show you value them and that their voices are important – making it easier to engage them.
3. Provide Comprehensive Training
Rebrands often introduce new values, visual identities and messaging, as well as customer interaction protocols and other processes. To help your employees confidently represent the new brand, you should arrange for training sessions that cover its new elements and what will be expected from them.
4. Use Employee Monitoring
Software for monitoring employees such as Controlio can play a pivotal role in ensuring employee engagement when rebranding. Its ability to track employee activities can be deployed during the transition to identify any bottlenecks or inefficiencies and ensure everything stays on track. By tracking work hours you can also evaluate how effectively employees allocate time to rebranding tasks, and optimize schedules if necessary.
After rebranding, monitoring software like Controlio can assess how well employees are adopting to the changes and whether they require further training. If applicable, it can also monitor communications and check that employees are consistently using updated brand language, tone, logo, or taglines to reinforce a more cohesive brand experience.
5. Reward Engagement
What better way to get employees on board with a rebrand than by rewarding them for engaging with it. Simple rewards such as gift cards, a day off, or other types of perks can go a long way towards incentivizing engagement and making employees more willing to dive into the rebrand – feet first.
If you want you could even create a rebrand ambassador program that tracks which employees exemplify the new brand values and puts them in the spotlight. It’ll show employees you value their contributions, and are willing to reward them for it.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, every successful rebrand needs the willing participation of employees in order to succeed – ideally from the very start and before you launch the rebrand or send out a Whatsapp bulk message. As you move forward, your employees are the ones that will reflect the new brand and play a huge role in developing its image.
Suffice to say, the more effort you put into getting employees on board and making sure they’re engaged, the more likely it is that your rebrand will go smoothly. Following the tips we just discussed is a good starting point, but be sure to build on its foundation and continue to find ways to improve their engagement.