The connection between culture and brand

By Sue Davenport, marketing director, Liniar.

Creating a collaborative culture and positive brand experience should go hand in hand for any business.

From the outset, employees and all other stakeholders should be able to understand the culture of a business and how it aligns with their own brand values.

Communication is key!

A company experiencing growth can become focused on profit over people, but this could have a detrimental effect on the brand. Losing employee buy-in or the team having a perception that the business has grown to undervalue them can be very damaging for a business’s brand and reputation.

Maintaining the same values throughout growth helps keep employees engaged. If you’ve always communicated directly with team members, try to maintain that position. There should never be a time when ‘business priorities’ overtake employee communication.

Whilst this is easy when a business is small, during growth phases it can be a hard position to maintain.

We have seen incredible growth over the last two years in particular, which has not been without its challenges. At every twist and turn, however, there’s been a focus on not losing sight of our roots and the importance of maintaining our culture.

Challenge is a good thing

Allowing challenge helps to create a collaborative, open culture. If employees who are invested in your company care enough to challenge you, they should be listened to. This will both help their personal career journey and be of benefit to the business.

We actively encourage our team members to challenge the status quo; it can be easy to become too focused on a direction that might not be right. A fresh pair of eyes is an opportunity to challenge, discuss and ensure that we are taking the right course of action for all stakeholders.

Allow personal growth

Having a culture that encourages people to grow within both their role and the company reinforces a positive brand experience. Recognising that employees all have their own aspirations as well as wanting to help the business achieve its own should have equal billing.

Many members of our senior management team have either come through the Liniar apprenticeship route or have completed professional formal learning, funded by Liniar. I am incredibly proud to be part of a team that encourages personal development, which reinforces our positive culture and brand.

Engaging with your team to understand what’s important to them helps build a positive culture. It can be easy to presume you know what your team cares about, but if you don’t ask them, how do you know?

You could be missing a key issue that will also be important to other stakeholders.

To gain a real understanding of what our teams care about we ran an anonymous employee engagement survey in 2021. We were prepared to use the results to take a critical look at ourselves – and we’ve already implemented many of the suggestions put forward by team members who may otherwise not have spoken up.

Your culture is your brand

Remember, your logo isn’t your brand, and your website isn’t your brand – your culture and your people are your brand. Ensuring that customers, shareholders, and all other stakeholders know that your culture is positive, collaborative and inclusive helps to build a positive brand. If you’re saying something is important, make sure it really is – no-one likes lip service or virtue signalling. A brand can be destroyed by this.

As a manufacturing business, safety is our number one operational priority – quickly followed by customer service. Our people, customers and community follow closely behind. We have been a key employer in the East Midlands since 1974 and we are continuing to grow.

We are creating systems that are key to the fenestration industry, but our team’s safety and wellbeing comes first. We believe in a positive, cohesive culture and having seen huge growth, we are working harder than ever to maintain this. We are all proud to work for Liniar and we recognise that every member of the team is vital to the success of our business.