Employee Advocacy: Meaning, Benefits and Examples

How likely will employees recommend your company as the best place to work and engage in business? Most successful businesses use their staff to represent them to potential customers. These organizations have implemented employee advocacy programs encouraging their staff to spread the word about the company’s image.

So, why is employee advocacy important? Below, we take you through the definition of employee advocacy, its advantages and examples. You will better comprehend the connection between a content workforce and brand promotion with the aid of this idea.

What is Employee Advocacy?

Employee advocacy is the practice of a company’s staff promoting its brand and entails building a positive online and offline reputation for the company’s services. The best method to sell your brand is to engage your staff as ambassadors because they know your business better than anyone else.

Most of your employees likely utilize social media platforms to communicate with individuals worldwide; as a result, you can benefit from their social media interactions, which may include talking about their work environments. To increase the efficiency of the business, you must create high-quality employee advocacy programs.

Your staff will spread the word about the company’s products and services through employee advocacy programs, share their professional experiences, and increase brand awareness. Why is employee advocacy crucial, then? Let’s examine the rationale behind why you must employ this tactic.

Employee Advocacy Benefits

• It boosts brand awareness, and prospects reach out more when employees are the ones to share the brand sentiment. As a result, there will be a drastic increase in the company’s productivity.
• Employee advocacy in hrm promotes employee engagement. By trusting them with the power to market your brand, the employees feel valued, trust you and enjoy being part of your business.
• It improves your team performance. Due to employee engagement, your workforce will perform better, plus it enhances recruitment and retention.
• Employee advocacy lures passive candidates to your organization. When your current employees speak well about their workplace, more qualified talent will be interested in joining your team, helping you create a diverse talent pool.
• Employee advocacy help in increasing the employees’ credibility by providing them with brand information for them to share on their social media platforms and other professional sites; you will be creating thought leaders.
• It enhances networking. Participating in social media and sharing content expands your employees’ connection, helping them grow professionally and socially.

There are various forms of employee advocacy, including swag and merchandise from the company, social media advocacy, and employee rewards. However, urging staff to utilize social media is encouraged the most since you can create a policy that tells them what to post and what not to.

Cisco, IBM, Dell, Fidelity, and H&R Block are social media advocacy examples from the technology-based industries. You can use these as some of your company’s most effective and successful social media example programs.

Employee Advocacy Guidelines

If employee advocacy is new to you, you probably have questions about how to create employee advocacy programs. You can use the employee advocacy setup instructions below to start this program.

1. Create a Positive Workforce Culture

You will receive favorable ratings if you give your staff a sense of value and appreciation for your business. They will serve as the company’s ambassadors to potential customers and the community. One method to inspire your team to support you is by creating a positive work atmosphere and solid relationships with your staff.

Additionally, establishing a solid employee advocacy guideline that rewards employee advocates is essential to ensuring that staff members are content and motivated to promote your business effectively.

Promoting personal and professional development, giving feedback, having compassionate supervisors, and paying attention to employee reviews to address your weaknesses are some strategies for establishing a pleasant workplace culture.

2. Offer Training

Since not all employees have social media accounts, it is not sure that they will all take part in social media promotion. Such staff members need the training to get comfortable using social media platforms for personal and professional growth and brand marketing.

Furthermore, several advocacy programs that use social media advocacy examples must provide their spokespeople with extensive training to operate effectively. Consistent training is necessary to ensure effective communication between management and the employee advocates.

3. Have Goals and KPIs for Your Program

When your staff members are content and satisfied, they will likely post about their work experiences on social media. It is unclear whether the corporation will benefit from what they are sharing. Therefore, setting employee advocacy goals and communicating them to the team clears up any confusion and improves performance.

The most important KPIs for an employer to monitor are the top contributors who get the most engagement, organic traffic, how much attention the content receives, and how advocacy affects the brand’s perception. Additionally, you can promote your company’s culture by using pertinent hashtags for your employee advocates.

4. Identify Employee Advocacy Leaders

Choosing the most outstanding advocacy leaders can be challenging because you might simply consider an employee’s rank. However, whoever is more active in disseminating firm information on social media sites will win. You can concentrate on those who fervently share the industry’s content or on well-known representatives of the company.

You strengthen these advocates by including them in implementing the employee advocacy guidelines and recommending their incentives. Engaging them will also enable you to comprehend better consumer preferences and the tools needed to promote the company’s brand.

5. Create Engaging Content for Employees to Share

Most employee advocacy examples like Starbucks invest in worker programs to increase engagement and productivity. You can freely produce and share material with your employee advocates with a strong engagement strategy. By employing this tactic, you can make your staff give only pertinent information about the business.

You should also learn from the staff about the FAQ and the materials needed for the advocacy program. Using the advocacy team’s extensive information, you may quickly develop material directly addressing prospects’ demands. You must, however, provide the advocates with the freedom to contribute by coming up with their captions and improving the quality of the material.

6. Compensate Employee Advocates

Since promoting the company’s brand is an entirely different job, all companies are required to recognise and reward their top employees. When employees feel you are taking advantage of them, employee advocacy in hrm can strengthen or sever your relationship with them. Giving them rewards, such as cash or other gifts, is the most excellent method to inspire this group.

Along with rewarding them, you should inform them of the advantages of taking part in employee advocacy activities. Inform them about how the program can advance their professional development by increasing their visibility and credibility.

Employee Advocacy Examples

Given everything we’ve discussed, you must wonder if any employee advocacy examples have succeeded. To answer your question, let’s look at three of the best employee advocacy examples that numerous organisations worldwide have used.

• Google

One of the top companies that encourage its staff to act as brand ambassadors is Google. Their employee advocacy hrm program ensures they find and hire the most remarkable individuals and build a positive business reputation. The Google employee advocacy team is skilled in producing original content which is appealing and authoritative. They draw in more customers and increase the business’s reputation.

• Salesforce

Salesforce is one of the best employee advocacy examples you can model your programs after. Salesforce has many employees on social media to promote its brand, and the introduction of employee advocacy technology led to imitating this company’s employee advocacy program. The process is more effective and genuine by Salesforce’s advocacy platform, allowing employees to share information.

• Adobe

Adobe’s advocacy program aims to educate its staff members on the value of employee advocacy. The company promotes employee content creation and sharing on its website. As a result, they have generated a lot of web traffic and significant employee participation on various social media platforms.

Conclusion

The employee advocacy program is challenging to make but produces the best outcomes when done correctly. Organisations have realised that practically all activities revolve around technology. You may develop the most outstanding employee advocacy program by using social media advocacy examples and modelling the employee advocacy examples. Use our data to encourage your staff to promote your brand for increased productivity.