What Signals is Your Culture Sending Out into the World?

Hosts: Steve Boese and Trish Steed

Guest: Saima Rashid, Chief Marketing Officer at Workhuman

Summary

It’s easy to point to a careers page, recruiting campaign, company values, or social media presence. But ultimately, an employer brand is shaped by something much harder to manufacture: what employees actually experience inside the organization.

In this episode of the HR Happy Hour, Steve Boese and Trish Steed welcome Saima Rashid, Chief Marketing Officer at Workhuman, for a conversation about the evolving role of employer brand and how recognition data can provide a much more authentic view of workplace culture. Saima describes employer brand as the external expression of the internal employee experience. That means organizations need real examples that demonstrate how people collaborate, contribute, support one another, and live company values every day - and recognition data can help uncover those stories.

Because recognition happens in the flow of work and comes from employees across teams, roles, and functions, it can provide leaders with real-time insight into the behaviors, skills, relationships, and contributions shaping the organization. It can also reveal where recognition is missing - giving leaders an earlier indication of potential disconnects before they appear in traditional measures such as engagement, retention, or employee referrals.

Steve, Trish, and Saima also explore how recognition can help new leaders understand their teams, bring greater context into performance conversations, strengthen employee advocacy, and give organizations authentic stories that employees actually want to share. And with AI making it possible to analyze large amounts of unstructured recognition data, organizations have an opportunity to uncover even deeper insights about skills, leadership, culture, and whether business values are truly showing up in the way work gets done.

Topics include:

• Why employer brand is ultimately shaped by the lived employee experience
• The difference between promoting company values and demonstrating them
• How recognition data provides real-time, human insight into how work gets done
• Why specific employee stories can be more powerful than traditional employer-brand messaging
• How recognition can help leaders uncover skills, contributions, and relationships they may not otherwise see
• Why authentic employee advocacy must be earned rather than orchestrated
• How organizations can compare their stated values with the behaviors employees actually recognize
• How AI can help uncover new insights from recognition data

Thank you for joining the show today! Remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!

Workhuman is a proud supporter of the HR Happy Hour Network. 

Nearly every HR leader knows the feeling: Teams are stretched thin, priorities keep shifting, and it's getting harder to see what's really going on beneath the surface. That's the subject of Workhuman's new documentary, Spotlight: The Leadership Reset, an investigation into why managers are losing visibility into their teams, and what it takes to see clearly again. Featuring Harvard’s Professor Amy Edmondson, crisis leadership expert Dr. Syra Madad, and bakery-owner-turned-business-leader Joanne Chang. The Leadership Reset premieres September 29th. Register for free today at workhuman.com/spotlight.