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Employee Advocacy: Utopia or Stroke of Genius? |
The Dream: Employees who are proud of the company they work for, speaking highly both internally and externally, sharing positive experiences, and promoting company initiatives, values and successes across their own personal social networks.
The Reality: Only 15% of employees are engaged in their job and barely 17% are satisfied with their work experience.
Employee advocacy is the holy grail for HR and Communication departments, and for good reason. Paying for advertising, writing news articles, or developing ‘discover our culture’ webpages are great, but pale in comparison to an engaged employee sharing positive first-hand endorsement.
And it’s powerful: the reach of your company branding is 24x stronger when advocated by an employee (Source: Daily Digital). After all, we live in a world powered by reviews, so why should this be any different?
First things first: identify your ambassadors. ‘Ambassadors’ are those within your organization who take the lead on employee advocacy, explaining to their colleagues how – and why – to advocate.
With many mediums for advocacy, a safe place to start is on social media. Even though a whopping 88% of employees have social media for their personal use (Source: Sociallymap), it’s not a given they’re willing – or equipped – to use those platforms in a professional setting.
Yes, many will reject the idea of using their personal accounts for company gain. But those aren’t the ones you want to focus on. It’s the employees who are happy and driven to promote your business that will have the strongest influence in the social sphere; i.e. the ambassadors. Spend time explaining, training and equipping these employees, encouraging them to ‘like, comment and share’ company content on social media platforms, or write an in-depth review on Glassdoor. Support and recognize their efforts; after all, it’s their voice which is your strongest communication asset.
Once you’ve identified and mobilized your ambassadors, it’s time to get the rest of the team on board.
Remember: reviews aren’t always positive. You’d be ignorant to not anticipate potentially toxic employees sharing negative experiences about your company. Chances are, your ambassadors will be outspoken. By nature, they’re not shy in letting you know how they feel. It’s the quiet, unspoken, hidden-in-the-wings employees that you need to shine a light on.
Zest can help you distinguish engaged ambassadors from disengaged – or worse; actively disengaged – employees. By launching short and relevant surveys, you can uncover the strengths and weaknesses of your company, as perceived by your employees. Insights will enable you to adjust your actions, in real-time, to align with employees’ values. For example, you might find out that 90% of your workforce value ‘employee friendships’, yet 60% feel ‘alone at work’. You could conclude to arrange more physical team-building activities to nurture such relationships.
Shining a spotlight on the real engagement levers of your employees will prepare you for any unanticipated negative critics and enable you to manage them before they do any damage.
So, you’ve got a great group of ambassadors who are advocating for your business left, right and center. Your goal now is to keep it that way. Here are a few ideas for recognizing, and encouraging, the efforts of your top ambassadors:
Don’t just take our word for it: Mélanie Corolleur, France Marketing Manager at Brandwatch say that “Since we launched the (employee advocacy) program eight months ago, the engagement of our employees has increased dramatically: up 123% from one month to the next. This quarter, we received more than 870,000 impressions only from employees’ participation alone” (Source: Forbes).
More and more companies are turning to employer-centered advertising campaigns which place advocacy at the center of such strategies. The likes of Nutella, Uber, Intel, American Express and Whole Foods are some of the 45% of companies currently implementing an ambassador program (Source: Com’in).
Now you’re equipped with all the knowledge, are you going to create a culture of ambassadors and discover the power employee advocacy can have on your business?