As the Buddhist proverb goes, “Everything changes, nothing remains without change.” We know that change is inevitable.  Leading organizations are the companies who can manage the change quickly without a negative impact to their employees.  These companies recognize that their employer branding strategy can be the differentiator when it comes to change management.  Here are a few of the ways that leveraging the employer branding strategy allows change to happen quickly and effectively:

1.  Assessing employee readiness

The beginning – a very good place to start:  any successful change effort has to begin with an assessment of employee readiness.  This helps you determine where your organization’s beginning is.  As part of your employer branding strategy, you should be conducting regular assessments to see how your employees, vendors and external talent perceive your organization.  These assessments will help you understand what the employee perceptions of your strengths and areas of opportunity may be.  This critical insight will help your organization map the change to align with these existing perceptions.  It also helps you understand where and why you may see resistance, and can help you plan how to proactively address these areas.

2.  Guidepost for making decisions

Companies that have done the work to uncover their Employee Value Proposition, vision, values, and mission can use these as critical guideposts when making and implementing change.

Determine how the desired outcome maps to the overall vision of the organization and choose those change activities that are aligned with your corporate values.  When the EVP has been aligned with the entire employee life cycle, it becomes easier to show employees how that gap between where the company is now and where they want to be – is negatively impacting the EVP.

3.  Fosters communication

Employer branding helps you communicate key messages aligned with your overall EVP, vision, values, mission using the right channels. Communication is a critical aspect of any change efforts.

During your branding exercise, you learned the most effective channels to use to communicate to your different stakeholder groups.  This defined communication process will be one of your strongest tools for any change management.  Align these messages with the branding and culture of your organization, and put them into a language your employees recognize and identify with.  This direct communication helps each person understand what their own role in the change will be. When every employee who may be impacted by change understands what to expect at each stage, they can be a more active participant.

Change may be inevitable – but it certainly doesn’t have to be a long, painful process.  An organization can use the employer branding tools as a jumping off point to work with employees to quickly move through a successful change initiative that will actually contribute positively to engagement, and strengthen the organization overall.