Introducing an employee advocacy platform is not a big deal. But it takes more than a platform to turn employees into active ambassadors. At Soveryus we believe in an integrated approach to: a) embed advocacy as a key behaviour in the organisational culture; b) create a workforce that is highly engaged and informed about what the company or brand stands for and about the benefits of its products or services; and c) provide an advocacy platform to facilitate and support employees to share relevant stories with their social networks – face-to-face as well as on social media.
The rationale behind our approach is that it is important to be ‘first time right’. It may be tempting to just start an experiment and see what happens, but a failed experiment could also be a very visible warning sign not to try it again. We have therefore developed a roadmap that will help you make your employee advocacy programme a success right from the start. Here are some key steps:
1. Develop an integrated advocacy plan with all relevant departments. Determine how employee advocacy can contribute most to the success of your organisation. Set your goals and define the steps you will take in order to realise those goals.
2. Create buy-in of key leaders. You need managers to embrace the concept, act as role models and encourage their employees to become ambassadors. So it is crucial to invest time in discussing the advocacy programme with management teams and other stakeholders.
3. Develop clear guidelines: What are the do’s and don’ts, for example when employees represent the company on social media?
4. Define your advocacy agenda and develop content. What are the focus areas and messages you want your employees to talk about in the next six months? How will you educate and inform staff about those focus areas and topics? Which formats do you need to effectively reach staff and get your messages across?
5. Launch the advocacy programme and the platform. Develop an internal campaign to create awareness, communicate the guidelines and encourage staff to sign up.
6. Start monitoring and analysing the programme’s effectiveness by means of the platform’s analytics and use your insights to further optimise the content and the programme. Regularly report the results of the programme to senior management.
7. Develop a motivation programme to promote and reward advocacy. This programme should be a combination of overall feedback to the organisation (what are our collective achievements?), personal feedback to employees, and some form of gamification (leader board, personal incentives etc.).
It is important to realise that employees as a ‘communication channel’ don’t belong to any particular department. Setting up an advocacy programme should therefore be the joint effort of all relevant departments: Marketing, PR, Public Affairs, Internal Communication. Maybe even Sales or product departments. That might sound like a lot of fuss (and perhaps in your specific case it is not feasible), but it is worth a try. Because collaboration right from the start enables you to maintain focus on, and consistency in how employees help build your reputation.
Michiel van Delden
Michiel van Delden is a co-founder of Soveryus
