Category: Employee Engagement

So much goes into building and sustaining a successful employee advocacy program, yet one of the most commonly overlooked steps is determining how to evaluate and measure the varying degrees of engagement amongst program participants. Without a measurement framework, you will not be able to evaluate against transparent criteria and provide the appropriate level of reward and recognition based on the efforts each individual puts forth.

Here are 3 tips on establishing criteria for measuring Employee Advocacy program engagement: 

1. Evaluate the degree to which they perform activities aligned with the Employee Advocacy Program’s goals
2. Evaluate the degree to which employees are engaging in the content (commenting on it, linking to it from their user generated content i.e. blog posts) and the degree they’re sharing it with their networks
3. Evaluate the degree to which employees demonstrate ongoing interest in being part of and advancing the program, this could demonstrated by consistently attending to program update calls, active participation in communities, providing peer-to-peer mentoring support to colleagues

For more guidance on measurement approaches and how to build out a mentoring program where employees who advance their commitment and adoption can become mentors of others to coach/train — reference Chapter 5 of The Most Powerful Brand on Earth.

Successful employee empowerment begins with a plan, yet all to often critical planning stages are overlooked, and rushing to execution is the norm. The following 3 critical planning steps are an essential foundation for a successful employee advocacy program:

Build a plan that considers:
1. Business alignment
2. Team design
3. Role design

Let’s take a look at each of these in more detail

Business Alignment
In order to understand the current state of your employees in social media, ask the following questions:

• Which business topics will your employees discuss online?
• To what extent do your employees discuss topics related to your brand in social media?
• Do they have the expertise to discuss these topics in a knowledgeable manner?
• In which venues do they discuss those topics?
• Where do they participate most actively?
• Which target audiences engage in those conversations with employees?
• Do employees represent your brand, or only themselves, when discussing the topics that matter to your brand?
• To what extent do employees publish versus listen?
• Do they have a degree of authority among the people in their online community?
• To what extent do your competitors’ employees possess authority in the same online communities?
• How would you like the above factors to change?
• How much would it be worth to your brand to change the factors above?

Answering the above questions and creating an inventory of engaged employees helps you to understand what you need to do.

As you work to determine the organizational goals that your program will support, collaborate with the leaders of the business units or functional teams that the program supports. And help them to understand how your program can help them to achieve their goals. Then determine the order in which you will take the steps to implement social media empowerment for people in their organizations.

Specifically, you will not be able to deploy this program to the entire organization at once. Instead, prioritize internal teams for enablement, and manage expectations with their leaders. Ensure that everyone understands when you will be able to support their goals and empower their people in social media.

Team Design
Once you understand the organizational goals that you need to support, you can think about how you will organize your teams to achieve those goals.

For example:

• Will you empower one person per subject area, or multiple people per subject area?
• Will you empower people in one location, or across global regions?
• How much time commitment can you expect from each participant?

This will depend largely on the extent to which their management supports their participation. To what extent will your organization’s marketing, PR, and brand staff participate in the program? Will they provide support, tools, or content to the people you empower?

Role Design
During this step, you will define the roles and domains of expertise that you wish to activate in social media. Your selection criteria should be based on your program requirements and the business outcomes you plan to support.

Employees must be segmented to determine which training, support, and tools they require and receive. Employee segmentation also determines the policies, rights, and privileges that apply to each employee. Some job roles may not be appropriate to activate or may require restrictions on their social media activity. For example, employees with access to the private data of your customers may need different tools than people with no such sensitive access.

See Chapter 6 of The Most Powerful Brand on Earth for more information about protecting the safety and security of employees, customers, and your organization.

Determine which roles in your organization are able to support brand outreach based on goals of your program and the extent to which each employee is expected or allowed to participate. Then, prioritize the segments of your employees and define the order in which you will empower each role type. For example, you might choose to empower product managers first, then product development staff, and market researchers last.

Finally, based on the information above, define the roles that socially empowered employees can play within your program. Specify how a role will be different when supporting marketing goals versus supporting recruiting goals. Perhaps they will use different tools, they may need different skills or experience, and they might set different goals for professional development.

For more detailed guidance, reference Chapter 2 of The Most Powerful Brand on Earth

Many brands avoid empowering their employees in social media because they do not want to dis-intermediate the marketing team from customers, or they do not want employees creating brand assets that the brand does not own. Some brands fear that employees in social media could damage brand reputation or violate regulations and create liability for the brand. Some brands just do not know how to begin.

Regardless of how a brand feels about its employees in social media, nearly every brand today has employees who are active in social media and employees who talk about their brand in social media. Those employees engage in social media for a wide range of reasons. In many cases, employees get into social media because their partners and customers demand it.

While almost every brand today can find employees using social media to discuss their products, services, working conditions, and so on, the brands that achieve the most value deploy corporate resources to empower their employees in social media.

Simply asking employees to parrot brand-generated messages through their personal social media may help the brand to gain small amounts of reach or engagement, but it is not a sustainable strategy for engaging audiences and developing relationships online. It is easy to do, so a lot of brands do it; however, that approach fails to respect the relationships between employees and their audiences, so it does nothing to help employees create a differentiated and effective presence online. At the program level, design your training and support in 3 stages: Prepare, Manage and Reinforce. From an Individual level, program participants will advance along a continuium at their own rate and pace based on what they commit to. More details can be found in The Most Powerful Brand on Earth

In general, the greatest potential value of socially empowered employees can be achieved only when the brand aligns employee activities in social media with brand goals. And you should do so across the organization.

As stated by Danna Vetter, Vice President of Consumer Marketing Strategy at ARAMARK: “Each of our businessesthat are active on social has different strategies to meet their business needs. So the metrics we use to determine success vary by strategy. We expect employees to set goals and objectives to meet their business’ needs, just like they would in any marketing campaign. Our job is to give them the opportunity to be successful and provide them the tools that allow them to be.”

Brands that build the competitive advantages of socially engaged employees quickly encounter a host of internal and external challenges, including potential conflict between brand goals and the employees’ personal goals for their own professional reputations. Often, those two sets of goals may not align completely, and it takes some effort for the brand to keep it all working together.