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Personal Branding in A Hybrid Workplace // 6 Tips that Will Help You Stand-Out
One of the most recognizable brands globally is the Coca-Cola brand. The classic red and white lettering, vibrant artwork, and distinctive font have lasted for over a century.
Having stood the test of time, the Coca-Cola brand is a testament to the power of consistent, successful branding that consumers have come to love.
That said branding is the management of a company’s image and reputation, aiming to make it more desirable and positive in the minds of its customers and the general public. The goal is to differentiate the brand.
Similarly, personal branding is the act of developing the strategy and actions to guide and manage your brand to either advance your career or be chosen by potential clients. It is acting and positioning yourself in such a way that your audience clearly understands who you are and what you offer.
To thrive in this new hybrid environment, where virtual is the ‘new frontier’, it is important to adapt to the new business models and ways of working.
To do so successfully, you must strategically develop a hybrid personal branding strategy and project your image and reputation to your target audience to set yourself apart.
In other words, you cannot simply go back to the old way of doing things — the post-pandemic world will be a combination of online and offline, whether you like it or not.
Hybrid working allows people to split their time between home, an office HQ, and a local coworking space & has opened up a world of new opportunities to promote and enhance career prospects.
Personal branding in a hybrid workplace encompasses topics around networking, mentorship, limiting beliefs, unconscious bias, living through your core values, being authentic at work, not losing yourself, and much more but essentially personal branding is about answering this one important question, which is, ‘what do I want to be known for? Is there a gap in how I’m perceived and what people really think I am?”
Here are some golden rules of personal branding in a hybrid world, which are:
Network
In a hybrid workplace, it at times gets lonely, but with it a lot of new events have come up including hybrid events.
It is therefore important that you participate and speak in online and offline events. By networking and building relationships regularly, you’re constantly engaging with new people that have the potential to shape your brand by offering new opportunities for personal and professional growth.
You can either create your own event to participate in or join an industry event on Eventbrite. Also, develop partnerships that will allow you to host or manage online events where your name will be highly promoted.
Whether you’re comfortable with it or not, public speaking is a tried and true way to extend your personal brand.
Have a Social Media Presence
According to Statista, over 3.6 billion people use social media worldwide. Social media creates excellent opportunities for personal branding efforts, both for personal and corporate purposes.
Well-planned brand management on social media creates value for your brand – from creating posts to interacting with followers, it all contributes to a solid social media presence which, in turn, contributes to a solid personal brand.
Leverage on LinkedIn and personal website
A personal website and completed LinkedIn are the crux of your personal brand.
Your target audience will research you on LinkedIn before deciding to work with, hire, or recommend you, so it’s crucial that you do more than the bare minimum.
Find out why these top 7 new -age ventures should opt for a coworking
Don’t simply complete the core steps in creating your LinkedIn profile or build a basic, bland website. Be compelling.
Ensure your Linkedin is quite engaging post frequently and join Linkedin Groups that are in line with your brand and participate in the group’s conversations.
Make your website more user-friendly, and quite interactive. Use simple language and also get recommendations from your clients.
Virtual recommendations on LinkedIn, websites, and internal groups are essential.
Join a Coworking Space
By now know the many advantages that come with joining a coworking space. A coworking space is a good place to meet new people and position yourself and your brand.
With different companies in different sectors working together, you will probably have a great platform to interact with others either through networking events, workshops or even the watercooler conversations.
Spaces like Nairobi Garage also offer workshops that help you with personal development and business growth.
These workshops and webinars bring in experts that you can always connect with later and they can help with personal branding and offer you a platform and a community that you can always plug in to.
Create a strategy
Develop an online and offline personal brand strategy and stick to it. Use the Personal Branding Canvas to develop your personal brand strategy. While at it also determines your efficient time: This is the percentage of your time that could be used more productively for tasks other than meeting clients in person.
Instead of traveling to visit clients, what if you used part of that time to network or seek new prospects? To determine your percentage of the efficient time, identify the number of hours you wished you had available each week to be more productive through tasks other than face-to-face meetings.
Make contact easier using technology
In the hybrid world, virtual selling essentially becomes selling. With that in mind, it is important to ensure you have a clear call to action or an easy contact route for your network. For example, use the WhatsApp tab on your website to enable contacts to reach you without thinking twice.
In conclusion, hybrid working is a great opportunity for us to create a work-life balance that can allow us to bring out the best in us across both worlds. The hybrid working platform provides us with the space to promote our personal brand.
Hybrid working limits us to have to be in the office, so you get a little bit more freedom to plan for your days.
But also think about what happens when you’re in an office or coworking space like Nairobi Garage.
You still feel like you’re working on your career because you might be able to connect to people in a different way, set up meetings in a different way, or talk to people and get ideas from them in a different way.
There are greater opportunities to network or share ideas and grow your brand.
The flexibility that hybrid working has given us is going to be the way forward because people want flexibility in their lives – and this includes the freedom to work how and where they want.
