How to Build and Grow a Successful Employee Advocacy Program
Best practices for organizing an employee advocacy initiative that benefits everyone involved
July 1, 2022
Employee advocacy is when employees promote your company through their personal connections outside of work. This can take many different forms, including sharing company content on their social media accounts, recommending job postings to friends and followers, wearing and using company-branded items in their daily lives, and highlighting their own experiences in the workplace.
In this article we’ll help you understand the benefits of employee advocacy for both your company and its employees, outline some of the best practices for organizing a formal employee advocacy initiative, and provide tips for encouraging people to engage with your program in a meaningful way.
Benefits of Employee Advocacy
When your employees are advocates for your company, it benefits both the brand image and employee experience by building trust with the general public. According to a recent survey, 63% of people believe that business leaders are purposefully trying to mislead them. Since an overwhelming majority of people believe that trust is more essential than love for the brand when making purchasing decisions, there needs to be a way to bridge that gap with authenticity.
Employee advocacy allows for a company to share information through a source that people trust, while also taking advantage of the existing reach that their staff has through personal networks. An impressive 93% of people say that they trust in information shared about brands and services when it comes from friends or family, as opposed to 70% trust in a product website or 38% trust in an advertisement. And since 88% of employees are already using at least one social media platform, there is a low barrier to entry into that conversation space.
This increased brand awareness and trust can lead to higher sales and promote social selling, all while improving staff recruitment and retention. Our mission at Swit is to re-humanize work by connecting the dots in the workplace — workforce, workflow, work context — so that all these essential human elements fall into place. A structured advocacy program offers both the company and its employees the opportunity to present themselves as industry experts and provide thought leadership, but in order to gain these benefits, it needs to be thoughtfully planned and implemented. You can’t just assume advocacy will happen naturally if you want to ensure the benefits are accessible to everyone.
Best Practices and Strategies for Implementation
It’s essential that you know your goals before you start organizing an employee advocacy program. Identify what you hope to achieve, both in terms of company growth and also employee participation. Are you looking to kick off a rebranding initiative? Is there a new product or feature being released? Do you have recruitment or retention numbers you’re hoping to reach? Having those clear objectives in place will help guide your efforts and set you on the path to success.
Once you know your goals, the next step is to create documentation that clearly communicates them to employees. Transparency is a crucial component of the process because employees need to feel invested before they’ll be inclined to advocate. Identify key influencers within the company to involve in the planning process, such as a selection of managers, HR personnel, or employees who are already active on social media and in the community.
With Swit’s unique channel structure, you are able to use the Ideation section for brainstorming and more in-depth conversations. You can then take these Ideas and share them to other channels, add them to existing tasks to provide context, or convert them to new tasks in order to explore them further. This provides a space where you can tackle complex topics and have meaningful dialogue as you develop your employee advocacy program.
Once your plan is ready to share with employees, create resources that they can use to participate in the program. This can include a set of general guidelines, branded marketing language, logo files, and even stock graphics or images. For promotion on social media, consider making a hashtag that is specific for employees to use; this is good for both branding and for company culture. Attach these resources to one or more channel Tabs within Swit so that people can easily find them when needed.
If you know your goals, it also gives you more freedom to think outside the box! Not all advocacy needs to be tied to planned or structured content. Sending out care packages to employees that include company swag is a simple way to foster a healthy culture and also inspire employees to want to represent the brand. Another option is to provide employees with resources and information that empower them to position themselves as industry experts in relation to your brand. You can also celebrate and reward employees for the work they do, such as setting up an employee of the month program. This naturally leads to people becoming advocates for the brand as they share the news of their recognition with friends and family.
Tips for Encouraging Employee Participation
The most critical element of any employee advocacy program is the participation of staff at every level of your company. If structured well, employees should want to get involved and not feel coerced or think that involvement will be tied to their performance assessments. This is about building a culture where employees are enthusiastic about their workplace and the company mission.
Involve Employees in Content Planning
Share your corporate social media strategy and ask workers if they feel it accurately reflects the culture. Getting their feedback helps employees feel more involved and also gives you a more diverse perspective when developing the brand’s persona online. In Swit, you can create a channel dedicated to sharing content and making suggestions. This will enable you to find out if there are specific resources that employees would like to have for sharing purposes. If these resources don’t currently exist, you’re able to convert the messages into task cards to create the content they need.
Turn Advocacy into a Game
The easiest way to make advocacy feel fun and inviting is to create contests that reward participation. Rather than tying rewards to impressions or results, consider entering everyone who participates into a random prize draw. This helps encourage people to participate by removing any performance pressure. At Swit, we regularly offer gift cards for employees who participate in branding and brainstorming exercises. This helps us expand our pool of ideas while also acknowledging the value that our employees bring to the process. Another option is to give employees a challenge to complete and post to social media using a specific hashtag, such as sharing a photo of their at-home desk setup, competing in a cooking challenge, or performing in a talent contest. Not only does this represent your brand in a positive light, it also helps foster a sense of community in a distributed workforce.
Provide Networking Opportunities
Support the professional development of your employees by providing them with the funding and logistics needed to network in their field. This could range from tuition reimbursement to convention participation to membership registration in specialized organizations. Partner with a client or vendor to also involve their team and give employees from both companies an opportunity to make industry connections. You can also nominate employees for industry, regional, or national awards as representatives of your brand. This shows employees that you appreciate their contributions while also presenting additional networking opportunities and promoting the company.
However you decide to organize your employee advocacy program, make sure it benefits everyone involved. It’s important for your employees to feel connected to the corporate mission and values in order for them to want to represent the brand in their personal lives. Contact us to see how Swit’s work management tools can help you create and maintain a successful employee advocacy program.
Natalie Litofsky, Copywriting Manager
