The Importance Of Brand Compliance In Employee Training
You likely have heard of the importance of keeping your eLearning courses brand compliant, such as using the same logo and colors. However, brand compliance is not only important for external content but also for internal employee training.
If you want to maintain a consistent brand identity, then every member of your team has to be aware of that brand identity. This awareness starts with your employee training and each experience your employees have with your brand.
Why Brand Consistent Employee Training Is Important
To Develop Your Brand Culture
Whether you are training your employees through online courses and presentations or printed reading materials, everything needs to echo your company’s mission and identity. Your employees will often be a customer’s first point of contact in the buying process. The way you speak and act toward your employees is likely how they are going to speak and act toward your customers. If your employees don’t understand your brand identity, then they can’t give customers the desired brand experience.
Having brand compliant training not only means using your brand elements, such as the company logo and brand colors on all of the materials, but also using the same tone and voice with your employees that you use with your customers. The way you train your employees should follow your company’s values and beliefs.
To Establish Employee Loyalty
Whether you employ a full Learning Management System or create your own learning program, branding the material demonstrates a commitment to your employees’ development that will drive brand loyalty. Employee onboarding is also frequently an employee's first in-depth exposure to the brand’s mission and values. By communicating that throughout the training, you won’t just have loyal employees, but you will have brand ambassadors who are passionate about their work.
Balancing Creativity And Brand Guidelines
While it is important to keep your internal training brand compliant, it is also important to make the presentations engaging for your employees. Finding the right balance between creative and brand compliant training can be difficult, but can be achieved through collaboration.
Encourage creativity in training while maintaining brand consistency by creating guidelines specifically for the eLearning within your organization. Individuals in charge of employee onboarding and development can collaborate with the marketing team to ensure that materials are brand compliant, but also allow for creativity. Internal training is continually changing as the company grows and changes, so creating flexibility in brand guidelines for eLearning allows for the training to stay up to date.
Some areas where you can be flexible include:
- Colors: utilizing brand colors helps establish familiarity and trust. However, encourage employees to use a wide variety of colors within your brand palette, rather than limiting themselves to the one or two main corporate colors.
- Images: Allow some flexibility in using creative imagery to keep decks creative and engaging.
- Use of humor: While not every brand is known for its sense of humor externally, the majority do value friendliness. Allow employees to have some fun with their internal decks that they normally wouldn't have with public-facing content.
How To Keep Your Employee Training Brand Compliant
1. Create Brand Guidelines
Put together a brand compliance guide for employees (especially those in charge of putting together the training materials) that includes the logos, colors, tone, voice, and how to use all of these elements.
2. Look At Company Values
If your employees are to be brand ambassadors and represent your company’s identity, then they need to understand the company values. By training your employees on these values, they can know how they are expected to treat each other and customers.
3. Brand Management Systems
Along with sending a brand guide out to the members of your team who will be training your new employees, give them access to all of your brand assets so they can use them. There are several options out there for brand management systems, where you can store and keep up-to-date logos and colors for your employees. This keeps all of these assets together and current for when HR needs to put together a training presentation.
Hiring new employees is exciting, as you get to introduce these individuals to their place in the company. It is also a great time to begin introducing your new employees to your brand identity and help them make the transition to a loyal member of your team.
