Welcome and introductions

Camilla, Content Creator at Ambassify, and Marie Beckers, Chief of Staff at Ambassify, host this session on building a strong employer brand in a hybrid company.

The session runs in four parts. How to shape your employer brand, specifically in a hybrid setting. How to activate and maintain it over the long run, covering the employee life cycle and the sense of belonging. Why employee involvement is critical, particularly when your workforce is scattered. And finally, what Ambassify has implemented internally, since Ambassify is a hybrid company itself and has been building its own people culture the same way.

Marie's framing at the outset: this is aimed at anyone looking to create impact with their employer brand over the long term, rather than run a short campaign.

Setting the tone, three definitions

Employer brand, employee value proposition and company culture are broad terms that mean slightly different things depending on who you ask. These are the working definitions used throughout the session.

Employer brand is how people perceive you as an employer. Not only existing employees, but applicants and potential candidates too. It is your overall image, which means you also have to be willing to see where a gap exists between the brand you wish to portray and the brand people actually experience inside your company. Ideally there is no gap at all.

Employee value proposition is the one thing that makes your organisation stand out as an employer. In a hybrid company it becomes the thing that unites an otherwise dispersed workforce.

Culture is your set of values, behaviours and standards that define you as an employer.

Why hybrid work changes the equation

Remote and hybrid work are simply the reality for a lot of companies now, and Camilla is clear that this is progress. People being free to work in the way that makes them most comfortable and most effective is a step forward.

But it has a consequence worth naming. The employee experience becomes far more individualised. Employees are in contact with your culture and your identity as an employer, rather than with the atmosphere created by colleagues sharing a physical space. The connection is digital rather than physical.

Which means that without deliberate effort, employees can gradually come to feel more and more detached.

An exercise, can you describe your employer brand?

Camilla put this to the audience as a live exercise, and it is worth doing before reading on. Are you a quirky company looking for young talent who think outside the box and work half the week from home? A more traditional employer with fixed hours and clear-cut roles? Somewhere in between?

Her own answer for Ambassify: everything is founded on one belief, that people are your unique selling point. Every initiative, principle, value and standard is built around it. People are encouraged to take ownership of their projects and given space to think for themselves. Passion and motivation get actively cultivated, people are kept engaged with the company mission and goals, initiative is encouraged, and successes get celebrated as a team.

Why a strong employer brand matters

Candidates look at a company's employer brand to decide on their future, and the numbers bear it out:

75% of applicants say they want to work at a company that actively manages its employer brand.
68% of millennials, 54% of Gen X and 48% of boomers check social media to evaluate a potential employer's brand.

That second figure covers a wide demographic span, and it matters because these are the people looking at your careers site and your LinkedIn vacancies. How your brand reads there becomes a determining factor in their decision.

People want purpose, culture, friends at work, the chance to innovate, to learn, and to be themselves at work. All of that is part of your employer brand, so it belongs in your strategy and it needs to be clearly communicated.

And employees carry more weight than the company does. Employee voices are more trusted than a corporate voice, including the CEO's, and they are more credible and more impactful when it comes to communicating and embodying your brand.

Start with your own why

General importance is one thing. Making an actual impact requires knowing why this matters to your company specifically.

What are your goals? Why does working on this make business sense for you right now? That question belongs at the design stage, not after.

Camilla's argument is that results only follow if the company genuinely believes the why, because belief is what produces authenticity and long-term impact. Employees will only trust a strategy that is aligned with the truth. Be true to your DNA and your values and the offering stops being words on paper, because it matches what employees actually experience.

This is why she traces employer branding back to company DNA and culture. Good employer branding builds culture from within and embodies the company's core values.

Hybrid work demands attention and intention

Both words matter here.

When your workforce is scattered and there is no office to gather in daily, people are much less likely to absorb the attitudes and behaviours you stand for, because their experience is individualised and their connection is digital.

That is where intention comes in. If there is no natural place for people to meet regularly, the initiatives that do bring people together need more thought behind them.

Camilla's example makes the point sharply. Saying you are a flexible company is fine, but it cannot end there. You have to be intentional about what flexibility means to you. Does the day start between seven and eight, or whenever you like? Defining yourself a certain way on paper is not enough unless it is translated into practice transparently.

The first step is leaders acting according to that definition, because leadership behaviour is the most valuable example you can set.

Something frequently overlooked: communicate clearly and regularly about changes in expectations, in policies, and in brand direction.

Link behaviours to values

Your employer brand is tied to your culture, and your culture has values. But a value on its own is abstract.

A practical way to help employees see what each value looks like in daily working life is to link specific behaviours to it. Explaining values through behaviours makes them concrete and shows people how to align with them.

Recap of part one

Shaping an employer brand that creates impact comes down to two things. Align the strategy with your culture so it is built from within and embodies your values. And give it the attention and intention it needs, which means defining what you mean, being clear about it, and leading by example.

Involving employees, the bottom-up approach

Marie takes over for the second half. Since employees are the ones who live out your culture every day, any long-term strategy for maintaining an employer brand has to involve them.

Involvement can mean many things, but ideally it means a bottom-up approach where employees are connected to the strategy from the point it is being created. The consequence is that they develop a deep connection with the brand and genuinely resonate with it, which means they embody the culture more fully.

Two conditions have to be in place:

Open and clear communication. If you want to involve employees, every employee needs equal access to information and knowledge at any time. This is especially true with a scattered workforce.

Giving employees a voice, in a way that fits your company. For a digital-first company that might be anonymous or named online surveys. For an organisation that prefers face-to-face contact, one-to-ones or breakout sessions work better. However you do it, it should be recognisably you.

If co-creation is not an option, focus on connectivity

Marie acknowledges that not every organisation is open to co-creating its employer branding strategy. If that is your situation, the alternative is to focus on the feeling of connectivity.

The job then becomes making sure the brand is so intertwined with day-to-day operations that employees feel it in how you work. They notice it in the policies, in how people interact with each other, in the ordinary texture of the job. That produces connection at a high level, and eventually alignment between strategy and practice.

Aligning your employee life cycle

Maintaining an employer brand over the long term means matching your strategy to reality, and for employees that reality is largely the employee life cycle.

Marie's example: say your employer branding centres on ownership and flexibility. Then you analyse your life cycle from onboarding to offboarding and find numerous policies and checkpoints that employees have to clear in order to do things. That is a mismatch between strategy and reality, and it produces disengaged employees and visible cracks.

The work is therefore to analyse the life cycle, identify the mismatches, and then actually make changes. Taking action matters as much as the analysis that precedes it.

A clear, well-executed employee life cycle raises the sense of belonging and turns employees into willing, strong ambassadors. Where there is a mismatch, that is very hard to achieve.

Employee ambassadors are the key

Employee ambassadors are valuable because their voices carry a much higher trust factor. They are three times more credible than the CEO or the corporate voice when talking about company culture and working conditions.

Marie walked through real examples from Ambassify employees posting on LinkedIn:

Laurens posted about a quarterly kickoff session celebrating the previous year's successes, which reflects the work hard, play hard value.
Rik posted something that embodies the hustling humbly mentality, sharing company stories spontaneously and spreading news from events.
Marie and Camilla's own post about this webinar, which was Marie's first, reflects Ambassify giving employees new opportunities and letting them take ownership of their own development.

Her point about that last one is the important one: she advocates for the company because she genuinely resonates with what it offers, not because she was asked to. The result is that a visitor to the company LinkedIn page finds it full of examples of who the organisation wants to be, demonstrated by its own employees.

Authenticity is the whole game

Camilla returns to draw the conclusion the session has been building toward.

If you do not have authenticity and credibility inside the company, you cannot make the impact you want outside it. Corporate messaging and social posts from a company account sound hollow to candidates and to the public if employees are not visibly mirroring them in their working lives.

The trust gap is stark:

15% of people trust company messages.
83% of people trust messages from people they know.

That gap is why word of mouth matters and where employee ambassadors come in. Your employees collectively have a far larger network than your company page's follower count. They are somebody's former colleague, friend or professional acquaintance, and that relationship gives them credibility a brand account cannot buy.

One more figure: messages from employee advocates are shared 25 times more often than the same message posted through a company account.

Which is why it is worth trusting employees to be thought leaders in your industry and actively empowering them to be. The only way to get there is by being true to yourself, communicating your culture, and giving people the tools to advocate for you.

And prospective employees will research you outside your company page regardless. They will look at your employees' profiles and work histories to find out what working for you is really like. So make sure your real employee experience is fully aligned with the offer you make on paper.

How Ambassify does it, three pillars

Answering Camilla's opening exercise for Ambassify itself, Marie describes three pillars:

Involvement. People are encouraged to take ownership of their projects and their work, with space to think for themselves.
Innovation. The goal is an innovative product and an innovative team, so people are encouraged to take initiative, be creative, and challenge the status quo.
Motivation. Passion and motivation get cultivated deliberately, and people are kept engaged with the company mission and goals.

The aim is to intertwine all three with the actual way of working, not just state them.

Compensation as an employer brand statement

Marie's first concrete example, chosen because aligning the employee life cycle matters and compensation sits inside it.

A compensation strategy can be entirely ordinary: a salary, a few fringe benefits. But thought through against your identity, it becomes specific to you. Ambassify's version is a cafeteria plan, presented internally as a salary package à la carte.

The reasoning maps directly onto the pillars. A standard salary with a company phone or car would not make Ambassify stand out, whereas a cafeteria plan reflects the innovation pillar, applied to policy rather than product. And because the approach gives employees a bigger say in how part of their salary is allocated, it raises their ownership, which is the involvement pillar.

The implementation mattered as much as the idea. Employees were given a say in how the plan would be rolled out and which benefits it would include. That produced a 100% response rate and surfaced potential issues immediately, which benefited the company as much as the employees.

Embodying employee involvement

A sense of belonging can be built through many initiatives, but at Ambassify it is rooted in co-creating with employees and giving them a voice.

One example is the onboarding experience survey, which asks for feedback and an onboarding satisfaction score. The same approach is applied at every stage of the employee life cycle, which keeps the company open to feedback and improvement as a matter of routine rather than exception.

A lighter example: the last three team buildings were co-created with the team. Anyone could add ideas to the community, and the idea with the most votes won. Next week's is co-created the same way.

Marie's closing observation on this is the useful one. A team building may look trivial from a business perspective, but it is not trivial to employees. Small changes and small thoughts make a real difference to how a company is perceived as an employer, and to whether it visibly walks the talk.

Closing thoughts

The intended takeaway is tangible rather than theoretical: things you can start working on to increase alignment and authenticity as a company, so that you end up with employee ambassadors who maintain your employer brand for you.

Both hosts landed on the same closing point. Adding concrete examples of what Ambassify does internally seemed the best way to show one route from theory to practice, and to demonstrate what sits at the core of a company's culture and values.

Webinar. Building a Strong Employer Brand in a Hybrid Company

Ambassify