Building a More Engaged Brand Culture: The Solution is Literally at Hand

At Chromium, one of our most deeply held philosophies is that brand = culture and culture = brand. You can't have a great brand without building the culture to support it – to live it.

Any cursory reading of the business media makes it clear that remendous resources are being expended by companies to build strong, vibrant corporate cultures that attract and retain valuable talent. But the instruments currently

used (annual surveys, email questionnaires, quarterly reviews, and external rating systems such as glassdoor) to measure the effectiveness of internal communications, engagement processes, and team-building initiatives are not up to the task. 

And while this is troublesome, the answer is truly at hand: Employees themselves are bringing the solution to this challenge with them to work everyday, in the form of their smartphones.

Smartphones are not only ubiquitous, they are practically extensions of our very physical being. We take them to bed. They are our traveling companions. Our families and friends virtually reside within them. And, as the success of the recent mobile app Secrets has shown, we’re willing to share our truest feelings

CulturePulse is Chromium's mobile
app for building great cultures

with them.

As a result, smartphones show great promise in the quest for greater employee engagement, and will certainly play an increasingly significant role in the years to come. The challenge is to take current processes and methodologies for measuring and inducing engagement and adapt them to the way people actually use their phones. Long form questionnaires are out. Activities that require more than a few moments of concentration and action will likely not be readily adopted. And confidentiality and instant feedback are key to the success of any mobile solution.

From the leadership perspective, mobile tools provide actionable insight in real time, something that has never before been practical. There is real power in the

ability to see internal cultural trends as they develop, and formulate initiatives to respond in real time. There are real savings in being able to see which of those initiatives are working and which are not, and make corrections before they become costly mistakes.

The potential for brands and their cultures to take great strides by leveraging mobile is quite remarkable. To help our clients engage with this new opportunity, Chromium has developed a mobile app called CulturePulse®, which gives everyone in a company a window into how the culture is doing, and where they as individuals stand in relation to prevailing sentiment. It's pretty powerful stuff.

And even with tools such as CulturePulse, what's really needed to make the shift is for corporate leadership to show a willingness to adapt the way they currently approach employee engagement to the new paradigm that mobile tools represent. Can you do it, C-suite? 

I think you can.