How to Implement a Successful Employee Advocacy Program
In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I explained what Employee Advocacy is and why it should be the purpose of the employee experience.
To have someone advocate your brand is very powerful, and when it’s your employees, the impact is compounded.
Regardless of who is leading this program, whether HR, Communications, or Marketing or all of them combined, a structured approach is necessary to design, launch, and grow a successful employee advocacy program. In this part, I give an overview of that.
Getting buy-in
You must know that this program cannot be created by a corporate mandate. Try to force it, and you will end up with the exact opposite goal of bringing employees on social media to speak FOR the company. For this reason, buy-in across multiple stakeholders within your organisation is key. Your stakeholders include executive level, employees, and entire departments.
Your plan to achieve buy-in must start by creating the concept in the form of a business case around the benefits of advocacy, followed by communicating it to your stakeholders, articulating what’s in it for them, and finally gathering their feedback.
The buy-in you get at this very early stage will help you to design and roll out a successful employee advocacy program.
2. A resilient and reliable framework
Two things are what an Employee Advocacy program must be built upon – authenticity and a structure. To that end and for it to be resilient and reliable, the framework must have
A fit for purpose Social Media Policy to guide the advocates
A set of clear objectives to deliver
Social Media Policy
At this stage, you would want to have a clear social media policy in place to mitigate risks of exposing the brand to any sorts of unexpected negative repercussions to content shared on social media. Your social media policy should be a simple and clear set of guidelines of how employees should conduct themselves on behalf of the brand, all the so’s and don’t. The illustration below is a Social Media Policy template available for you to use.
KPI dashboards
Different functions in your organisation will want to leverage the employee advocacy program in different ways, depending on their needs. Their goals, objectives, and measure of success will vary accordingly.
Here’s a sample worksheet of what the function goals, objectives and measures could look like:
Once the above are defined, move on to decide the right technology you will use to deliver the value you desire (make sure the solution you choose has built-in analytics capability). It is not about selecting the flashiest digital platform but instead finding a fit for purpose solution.
3. Prepare a great content strategy
Employee advocates need, and they must get support from the marketing and communications functions and access to content for social sharing. It is not an exaggeration to say that content strategy is the backbone of the success and sustaining of an employee advocacy program. An effective strategy must be designed in such a way not only to deliver the desired brand messaging but also to bring forward the advocates as experts within the organisation. Content must appeal to your advocates’ interests and motivate them. A word of caution here, identifying ‘what’ you want your advocates to talk about must not come at the expense of personalisation. The advocates must be able to give the content their tone of voice. That’s how you safeguard the program’s key attribute – authenticity. Personalisation also helps advocates build their personal brand on the way, which is a key motivating point why they will want to sign up for the advocacy program for starts.
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While each advocacy program is different, here are two guiding points that you can apply when deciding your content:
Create a healthy mix between industry and brand content and use different channels to reach through. Use content reports to inform future content mix and selection of channels.
Use internal stories to appeal to your employees and drive them to your advocacy tools, including internal announcements, product releases, job openings, employee activities, and company outings, as long as it doesn’t contain sensitive information that’s intended for internal use only
Content is a living thing and must not be set in stone. Bring your content experts and advocates into one team and schedule regular meeting times with them to review strategy performance and gather feedback. Keep the momentum by making these meetings habitual.
4. Launch, measure and refine
Your content strategy is fleshed out and ready to deploy, your advocates are trained and are excited to start, and your technology platform is in place, you are now ready for lift-off. You likely already have a number of methods for communicating new initiatives across your organisation. Things like company-wide emails, internal social tools, newsletters, or other announcements can all be useful tools. Since these programs are social, be sure to think creatively and out of the box for how you can further get the message out in an exciting or fun way.
Measuring the effectiveness of your employee advocacy program is critical. And to do so, you’ll need to set the KPIs you’re going to track. Metrics you should choose will depend on your brand, industry, and your business goals. Refer to the table above for examples of objectives and relevant KPIs.
Finally, remember you measure for a reason – to establish the success of the program. Use the data to refine the content strategy, evaluate the social media channels used, enhance the training program, and attract more employees to participate.
Bringing it home
Having employees as advocates is what sets apart a truly great company from the rest. What do you think is the essential part of an employee advocacy program? Have you seen any company that has an employee advocacy program at all and does it well?
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hanadi El Sayyed’s writing explores the future of human resources and its impact on business, people and the future of work. She is the Founder of &humans, a consulting firm dedicated to raise the potential of HR leadership as they strive to innovate their organisation’s digital workforce experience and rethink how to better design and deliver employee services that exceed the expectations of the workforce and the needs of the business.
She has over 15 years’ experience in HR and specialises in creating employee experiences that mirror best customer experiences with people at the heart and powered by technology and data. Previously, Hanadi has worked for Majid Al Futtaim, one of the largest organisations in the Middle East where she took on key HR leadership roles. She received a Bachelor of Science from the American University of Beirut and a Masters of Economic Development from University of London. Follow Hanadi on Twitter @Hana_ElSayyed and on LinkedIn. She can be contacted on hanadi@andhumans.ae