And What Is Actually Going On Beneath It
A conversation with Leandra Harris and Joey Frosst, Blu Ivy Group | Blu Threads Conversations, Episode 22
As a business leader, you have been here many times before. Engagement is slipping. Trust feels thinner than it used to. Performance is inconsistent, and the culture you thought you had built is not showing up the way you intended. So you do what makes sense. You commission a Culture Refresh. You invest in an Employer Brand strategy. You build a program.
And then, six or twelve months later, the needle has not moved the way anyone hoped.
What makes this moment different is that the old playbooks no longer work. The approaches that once motivated performance, clarified direction, and built loyalty were designed for a different relationship between people and their work. That relationship has fundamentally shifted. And the organizations still running the old plays are feeling it.
The usual warning signal, people leaving, is also no longer reliable. In today’s labour market, turnover is not the crisis. The crisis is quieter and far more corrosive. Engagement is dropping. Trust is eroding. Active disengagement is spreading through the middle of organizations. And people are staying, physically present but mentally somewhere else entirely.
This matters enormously because the organizations that will come out ahead right now are not the ones with the lowest attrition. They are the ones with teams that are highly engaged, able to shift quickly when conditions change, capable of staying focused through uncertainty, and building momentum rather than quietly bleeding it. That requires a fundamentally different kind of culture health than most organizations have been measuring, and a more honest diagnosis than most have been willing to do.
In Episode 22 of Blu Threads Conversations, Leandra Harris, a senior strategist at Blu Ivy Group with over fifteen years helping organizations navigate culture and employer brand transformation, sits down with Joey Frosst, Head of Business Development, to name the pattern they see most consistently across organizations in Canada and the United States.
The problem organizations bring to Blu Ivy is rarely the problem that actually needs solving. And in this environment, that gap between the presenting problem and the real one is more consequential than it has ever been.
When the old playbooks stop working, the instinct is to run them harder. The more useful question is: what has actually changed, and are we solving for that?
What Leaders Are Actually Dealing With Right Now
When a CHRO or CPO reaches out to Blu Ivy today, the conversation has shifted. A few years ago the urgent ask was usually about attrition. Now it is something harder to put a number on. Engagement scores are softening. Middle layers of the organization feel uncertain and unfocused. Leadership alignment is fraying under pressure. And there is a growing sense that the culture the organization worked hard to build is not translating into the performance and momentum it should be producing.
The ask that arrives is usually specific: refresh the EVP, strengthen the employer brand, run an engagement initiative, build a leadership program. These are legitimate responses to real pressure. But as Leandra explains, the stated ask is rarely where the work actually needs to begin.
“No one comes to us and says, ‘Our leadership isn’t aligned’ or ‘Trust has been broken.’ They come asking for the deliverable.”
What sits beneath is usually a combination of things that are harder to name and harder to measure: leadership priorities that have quietly drifted out of alignment, a slow erosion of psychological safety that is suppressing honest conversation, communications that are not translating into clarity or direction at the team level, and a widening gap between the culture the organization believes it has and the daily experience of the people working inside it.
None of these appear cleanly on engagement survey results. But all of them are directly responsible for the active disengagement, the loss of momentum, and the creeping mistrust that leaders are feeling but struggling to diagnose. And in a market where people are not leaving but are not fully showing up either, the cost of leaving these things unaddressed is compounding every quarter.
Most HR leaders already sense that something deeper is going on. The engagement data confirms there is a problem but rarely explains what is actually driving it. That gap between signal and cause is exactly where the real work begins.
Why Organizations Default to Solving the Visible Problem
There is a very human reason organizations reach for operational fixes first. Revenue targets, headcount gaps, and productivity metrics are tangible. They can be tracked, reported to a board, and adjusted in a quarterly review. They feel like progress.
The deeper drivers, things like leadership behaviour, employee trust, cultural coherence, and manager effectiveness, have historically been difficult to quantify. And in most organizations, what cannot be easily measured does not attract sustained investment.
That dynamic is shifting. In this episode, Leandra and Joey walk through how the most forward-thinking organizations are now building direct connections between:
- Employee experience and measurable productivity outcomes
- Leadership alignment and engagement scores across teams
- Culture health and downstream customer experience
- Employer brand credibility and long-term organizational reputation
This is the inflection point where employer branding stops being a talent marketing function and starts being a performance driver that belongs in the conversation alongside finance, operations, and growth strategy.
Every organization measures financial performance, operational efficiency, and customer satisfaction. The ones outperforming their peers are also measuring culture health, leadership effectiveness, and employee experience. Not because it feels right. Because the data now shows it drives everything else.
The EVP Problem: When a Good Tool Gets Used the Wrong Way
The Employee Value Proposition is one of the most misapplied tools in the employer brand toolkit. Not because organizations do not take it seriously, but because it is often built in the wrong direction and deployed too narrowly.
For many organizations, their EVP was built for the first time during a talent hiring crisis. Attrition was high, competition was fierce, and the pressure to have a compelling story for candidates was immediate. What got built in that moment was designed for job seekers, not for employees. It spoke to attraction, not to the daily reality of working there.
The result, for a great many organizations, is a strategy that still talks primarily to people on the outside looking in, while the people already inside are left to figure out for themselves what the organization actually stands for. Joey describes what it looks like when organizations finally close that gap:
“EVP is a great tool. It’s a foundational element. But the real opportunity is integrating it into the employee experience so that it shapes how organizations motivate and connect their teams every day, not just how they recruit.”
When EVP is integrated rather than simply activated, it does something fundamentally different. It shapes how leaders behave in difficult moments. It informs how managers support their teams. It creates a through-line from the promise made to a candidate on day one to the experience a ten-year employee has walking into a difficult quarter.
Organizations that revisit their EVP with employees rather than just leadership, and rebuild it as an operational commitment rather than a marketing message, find that it starts doing the work it was always supposed to do.
Your employer brand is not what you launch. It is what your people experience on a Tuesday afternoon when no one is watching.
Three Questions Most Organizations Have Never Formally Asked About Their Employer Brand
One of the most consistent patterns in employer brand consulting is that organizations have invested significantly in building their brand without ever stepping back to ask what they actually need it to do right now. That question has a very different answer today than it did five years ago.
Joey names the core tension directly:
“We forget about the talent we already have and how they’re included not just in the development, but in how that EVP is lived day to day.”
That observation opens up three questions worth sitting with seriously.
The first is about purpose. Get genuinely clear on what your employer brand and culture work needs to solve for the business over the next two years. Not what it has always done, but what the business actually needs now. Is it shifting engagement and rebuilding loyalty? Strengthening motivation through a period of change? Elevating leadership effectiveness and manager capability? Protecting and elevating your reputation? Those are fundamentally different outcomes than polished careers pages, job advertising, award submissions, and candidate experience programs. Both have value. But they are not the same work, and they do not require the same investment, the same skills, or the same internal infrastructure. Getting clear on which one you are actually solving for is the most important first step.
The second is about investment. Once you are clear on the purpose, look honestly at where your employer brand and culture dollars are going. Are they concentrated on the outcomes in your two-year priority, or are they spread so broadly across so many initiatives that no single area gets the depth of investment needed to produce meaningful results? Breadth without depth rarely moves the metrics that matter. The organizations seeing real results are making deliberate choices about where to go deep, and they are letting some things go in order to do it.
The third is about who is leading the work and whether their role reflects what the work now needs to do. Many of the strongest employer brand practitioners we know sit inside talent acquisition. They bring marketing instincts, commercial thinking, a growth mindset, and a genuine understanding of how people make decisions. In organizations where growth and hiring remain the primary strategic priority, talent acquisition may absolutely be the right home for employer brand to stay and scale. However, if the demands of the work are shifting over the next two years, it may be time to expand roles, establish clearer scope and results objectives, or bring different executive stakeholders into the mix. The honest question to ask is a simple one: are you shaping culture and experience, or telling recruitment stories? Both matter. But they require different leadership, different measures, and a different seat at the table.
Many organizations are still running a 2020 employer brand model. Exploring whether a shift in approach is needed can be a massive performance unlock in 2026. And here is a clear signal worth paying attention to: if your CEO is still asking why the work matters six months in, you are not solving the right problem.
That is why Blu Ivy Group developed the Employer Brand and Culture Index. To consistently manage and measure the impact of this work on business performance, not just recruitment marketing results.
Measurement: The Discipline That Changes Everything
For years, employer brand effectiveness was assessed by application volume, career site traffic, and review platform scores. Those metrics told you something, but not enough to understand whether the underlying work was actually solving the right problem.
Leading organizations are now measuring what actually matters:
- Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) and engagement trends over time
- Voluntary turnover and regrettable attrition by team and leader
- Leadership effectiveness scores and trust indices
- Culture alignment across geographies, functions, and tenure groups
- The relationship between employee experience and customer satisfaction
Joey makes an observation that reframes how most organizations think about this:
“If we’re at the end of the work and still asking ‘why,’ we didn’t solve the right problem.”
Measurement is not the final step in culture work. It is the discipline that should frame the entire engagement from the beginning. When organizations define what success looks like before the work starts, and agree on how it will be tracked, the work itself becomes more focused, more accountable, and significantly more likely to produce the business outcomes that justified the investment.
What gets measured gets aligned. What gets aligned gets sustained.
The Leadership Variable Most Organizations Underestimate
Leadership is the most powerful determinant of culture. It is also, right now, one of the most strained. After years of continuous disruption, competing priorities, and rising expectations from every direction, leaders are being asked to carry more than most were hired to do.
In that context, employer brand and culture work can easily land as another initiative to absorb rather than a resource to draw on. That perception is one of the biggest obstacles to this work having real impact.
The question Blu Ivy hears most from CHROs and CPOs navigating this is not whether culture work matters. It is how to help leaders actually care about it enough to change their behaviour.
The shift happens when the work is framed correctly. Not as a culture program, but as a direct solution to the specific pressures already on a leader’s plate. When a senior leader can see that improving cultural alignment reduces the friction slowing their team’s execution, that rebuilding trust increases the discretionary effort they have been trying to unlock, and that a stronger employer brand makes their own talent challenges easier to solve, the work stops feeling abstract and starts feeling essential.
“The issues organizations face today are not isolated challenges. They are interconnected, and they are deeply influenced by how culture is designed and experienced. When leaders see that, this work stops being another initiative and starts being the answer to what is already keeping them up at night.” – Leandra Harris, Blu Ivy Group
Where Employer Brand Is Heading Next
Joey describes a directional shift already underway in how the most respected organizations are approaching employer brand. It is moving away from the marketing-led model that has dominated the last decade.
Less investment in polished campaigns and one-size-fits-all positioning. More focus on the quality of lived experience, the authenticity of community presence, the consistency of leadership behaviour, and the internal coherence that employees can feel long before any external audience sees it.
She describes it as something quieter, but far more durable:
“If you know, you know.”
In a world where employees share experiences in real time and candidates research organizations more thoroughly than ever, reputation is not managed through communications. It is built or eroded through the accumulation of real moments. The organizations that understand this are investing accordingly, building brand credibility from the inside out rather than the outside in.
Employer brand is becoming less about what you say and more about what people feel when they work for you, interview with you, or leave you.
So What Does This Actually Require?
If any part of this conversation resonates, it is probably because you are living some version of this pattern right now. You have done good work. You have invested real budget. And the movement you expected has not fully materialized.
The path forward is not more of the same work done faster. It requires a different starting point.
- Start with an honest diagnosis before committing to a solution
- Bring the right stakeholders into the room before the work is scoped, not after
- Design for sustainment from day one, not as an afterthought at the end
- Define what success looks like in business terms and measure against it throughout
- Build and validate internally before amplifying externally
- Equip leaders and managers to be genuine culture carriers, not just communicators
Most importantly: be genuinely open to the answer not being what you expected when you started asking the question.
Across Canada, the United States, and globally, the organizations building cultures that actually perform have one thing in common. They asked the harder question first. Not “what should we build?” but “what is actually going on, and why?”
That is the question Blu Ivy Group was built to help organizations answer.
We want to be clear about something. This piece has been deliberately focused on the diagnosis, because in our experience that is exactly where most organizations shortchange themselves. They move to solutions before they have been honest about what is actually going on. But diagnosis is only half of the work, and arguably the easier half. The harder part is knowing what to do with what you find.
That is what the next conversation is about. How organizations translate an honest assessment of their culture, their employer brand, and their leadership alignment into a focused, measurable strategy that actually moves the business forward. It is what Leandra and Joey continue to explore in upcoming episodes of Blu Threads Conversations, and it is the work Blu Ivy does with organizations every day. If you are ready to move from naming the problem to solving it, we would like to be part of that conversation.
Where Are You in This?
Wherever you are in the journey, there is a meaningful next step.
Still exploring the thinking
Watch the full episode of Blu Threads Conversations with Leandra Harris and Joey Frosst: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb_gWi-8wEM
It is a candid, practical conversation between two advisors who have worked through this pattern across hundreds of organizations. No slides, no pitch, just the real thinking.
Ready to have a real conversation
If you are questioning whether your current investment is addressing the right problem, or whether previous initiatives have produced the outcomes they should have, this is the right time to connect.
Reach Stacy Parker directly: sparker@bluivygroup.com
Or visit bluivygroup.com to learn more about how Blu Ivy partners with organizations, boards, and private equity firms across North America and internationally.
About Blu Ivy Group
Blu Ivy Group is a globally recognized employer brand, culture, and reputation consultancy. For more than a decade, we have partnered with organizations, boards, and private equity firms across Canada, the United States, and internationally to align leadership behaviour, culture narrative, employer brand, and organizational reputation in ways that produce measurable business value.
We work at the intersection of people strategy, communications, and business performance. Our clients come to us at a specific moment. Sometimes it is because something is not moving the way it should. But more often it is because they have seen what is possible when culture and employer brand are built as a true performance platform, not just a reputation management exercise, and they want a partner who thinks at that level with them. They are not looking for a cleanup. They are looking for the inside-out impact that changes how an organization performs, how its leaders show up, and how its people experience the work of getting there.
Culture and employer brand are not HR initiatives. They are enterprise growth drivers and risk indicators shaped directly by how leadership behaves and what employees experience every day.