Every company is like a big machine, the engine of which does not run without those who work hard every day to keep everything running at its best: the employees.
Thanks to approaches such as people-centric, they are being recognized as increasingly central to the company's own policies designed to create an organizational environment that fully meets their needs.
This is particularly functional for theEmployee Advocacy actions, a tool that uses the voice and experience of employees within the company to attract new talent, retain current customers, and most importantly, to increase the company's positioning and perception at the level of reputation and theemployer branding strategy in both online and offline contexts.
1. What is Employee Advocacy and why choose it
Defined by Walden and Kingsley Westerman as «an organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) that is voluntary in nature and not explicitly rewarded by organizations», Employee Advocacy involves support from a company's employees through positive word-of-mouth with audiences such as friends, family, acquaintances and potential employees, both online and offline.
According to scholars, the activities of Employee Advocacy also include the defense of the company and its products and/ or services in front of an attack by those who do not work there.
However, they are not formally recognised or directly by the organisations' reward system, nor are they supervised by their own voluntary character.
Employee Advocacy makes employees become the first supporters of the brand they work for, so integrating it into the marketing strategy can bring several advantages and benefits due to the initiation of a positive word of mouth:
✅ Increased credibility: the story of an employee is more truthful than that of a CEO in 53% of cases;
✅ Increase of brand awareness: the sharing of the activities of the company by employees, helps to make it known and increase its reputation;
✅ Increase of brand reputation and brand image: a company with employees who speak well, is more attractive for potential talent looking for a job, as well as more reliable for consumers;
✅ Lead generation: positive influence also includes obtaining new contacts with which to establish medium-long-term relationships and collaborations;
✅ Brand humanization: the direct story of their experience by employees, helps to shorten the distance between the company and its target audience, strengthening the relationships between brands and consumers.
Employee Advocacy is therefore part of the internal communication activities, exploiting the potential of social networks to convey company-related content and make employees brand ambassadors and influencers, contributing to the increase in reputation and online awareness of the brand they work for when there is a structured strategy.
2. Ways to stimulate Employee Advocacy.
Satisfied and happy employees are the essential element of Employee Advocacy, so cultivating relationships with them is functional to trigger positive word-of-mouth. For this to happen, there are several ways to start the process:
1️⃣ Company swag & merch: direct sending of promotional material to employees, one of the most classic techniques that encourages sharing on social networks;
2️⃣ Internal incentives & awards: cultivating relationships with your employees also involves granting rewards and incentives to those who do a great job during a certain period. Regardless of whether they are material or intangible awards, those who receive them will know that the company they work for has an interest in rewarding merit;
3️⃣ Educational and recreational activities: workshops, masterclasses, business trips and so on. This kind of activity outside of the office, contributes to the team working, learning and development and allows employees of a company to live experiences that allow them to get out of the daily routine and constitute an added value.
Through these actions, you can begin to connect more deeply with employees, increasing employee retention and pushing them to support your business.
3. The Employee Advocacy Program
To succeed in getting employees to be promoters of the company values, incentives and extra activities are not enough, but there is the need to build a real strategy, in fact, a well-structured Employee Advocacy program.
It involves different business functions and must succeed in inspiring and engaging employees so as to instill in them the appropriate enthusiasm to share company content and, therefore, benefit in reputation and image.
To be effective, an Employee Advocacy program must include:
📌 Content creation and sharing: Each employee involved must take care of the contents of a specific area and share them through their social channels. If people are not practical in using social media, it is necessary to implement training programs in such a way that they feel confident in sharing. In addition, each of them must be trained to follow precise lines in the way of online communication;
📌 Personal branding development and training: the team involved in the program becomes the company’s ambassador and, therefore, an authoritative personality connected to it. Helping staff build their personal branding online helps to make shared content more credible, especially if the training includes the teaching of communication techniques suitable to convey the content in a functional way to give value to those who use it;
📌 Goal setting and KPIs: Choosing the goals to follow is essential for employees involved in the Employee Advocacy program to make them their own and thus contribute to the cause more consciously and productively. In addition, setting the objectives of the programme is essential to be able to monitor the results through appropriate performance indicators.
However, implementing an Employee Advocacy program is a next step from building an Employer Branding strategy aimed at maintaining high levels of employee satisfaction. Employee Advocacy actions, in fact, make it a resource that is still underutilized but that in the long run can help improve the company's brand awareness, reputation and image in the eyes of current and potential consumers as well as facilitate the entry of new talent fascinated by the stories of those who work there.
