How Business Leaders Can Activate Employees
Employee Activation can significantly impact an organization’s bottom line and overall success, making it a crucial concept to understand and cultivate.
Today, the majority of organizations run employee advocacy programs. While there aren’t any statistics available for employee activation programs yet, it’s safe to say that they are also growing in popularity.
In a nutshell, employee activation refers to engaging and empowering your employees. The goal isn’t just to get them to become ambassadors of your organization; you’d ideally want to build trust with your employees, resulting in a nice boost in employee satisfaction, retention, and performance levels.
When employees are activated, they are more likely to:
Perform at a higher level - Activated employees are more productive, innovative, and efficient.
Improve customer satisfaction - Employees passionate about their work are more likely to provide better customer service and build stronger relationships with customers.
Increase job satisfaction and reduce turnover - Activated employees are more likely to be satisfied with their jobs and stay with the company longer, reducing the costs associated with high turnover.
Enhance brand reputation - Activated employees who believe in the company's mission and values are more likely to act as brand ambassadors and positively influence public perception of the company.
Employee Activation vs. Employee Advocacy
Employee activation and employee advocacy sound similar, and some people use the terms interchangeably, but they’re two different concepts.
Employee advocacy programmes are fairly one-dimensional and typically involve organisations devising some sort of reward scheme to incentivize their employees to become brand advocates.
Employee activation, on the other hand, goes beyond that. With employee activation, you’re encouraging your employees to share their expertise and pursue their career goals — creating content to share online (and/or sharing content the company has created online) is just a bonus side effect.
When done right, employee activation will make your employees feel more valued at work and trust upper management more. This, in turn, results in better job satisfaction and performance. It’s a win-win!
External Benefits of Employee Activation
When you activate your employees and get them to generate and share content, it humanises your brand and makes it more “authentic” and relatable. Edelman’s Trust Barometer has shown that employees are perceived as a more trusted and credible source of information for buyers than, for example, the CEO or marketing activities of the company.
Once you start activating your employees, you should see an uptick in engagement: employee content receives, on average, 8x more engagement than content shared by brands. If you’re wondering if all the likes, comments and shares you’ve generated drive actual traffic and leads, the answer is that it does. Studies have shown that companies with engaged employee advocates witness 5x more website traffic and 25% more leads. The icing on top of the cake? Salespeople are 7x more likely to close leads generated through programs that activate employees.
Internal Benefits of Employee Activation
Employee activation also brings about plenty of internal benefits. As you empower your employees and give them opportunities to grow, you’re essentially building trust — and for 93% of employees, trust plays a critical role in influencing work satisfaction. In turn, work satisfaction is linked to other factors such as job performance and employee retention. In fact, companies empowering their employees are 20% more likely to retain talent.
It’s pretty straightforward — if you’ve got employees who trust their bosses and are happy with their work, they’re more likely to commit themselves and strive harder.
Internal Versus External Communications
Most companies understand the importance of getting their external communication right. It’s crucial to strive for quality and quantity here; that’s where employee activation comes in. Because employee activation results in key messages reaching more consumers and generating more engagement at the same time, it’s a huge asset in both aspects, qualitatively and quantitatively.
On the flip side, most organizations are typically less invested in their internal communications. That said, ensuring that teams are equipped with the right systems and environment to communicate effectively is essential.
Environment-wise, work on building an effective organizational culture, communicating openly, and implementing an open-door policy to empower employees to approach supervisors and speak their minds.
When it comes to systems, try implementing forums and anonymous feedback systems.
The Internal Brand Experience
In order to have a successful employee activation programme, you need to walk the talk. This means showing your employees that you are committed to whatever principles and initiatives you say you’re committed to. At the end of the day, your employees need to see that whatever you’re communicating externally syncs up with your internal messaging and initiatives.
How do you have your employees experience your brand in such a way? Organise activities and initiatives and allow your employees to get involved. If you run a food & beverage business, for example, and your mission is to help people live healthier lives through food, organise an internal CSR campaign to donate groceries. Even better, set up a recurring workshop that teaches low-income families how to cook simple, healthy recipes with ingredients that don’t cost much. If you’re a technology provider that helps businesses be more efficient, ensure your employees have access to such technology.
Challenges of Employee Activation
While employee activation comes with plenty of benefits, it also comes with several challenges. First and foremost, there’s always the danger that an employee might take it to the extreme and “overshare” about your company on social media. To prevent this, ensure you have proper guidelines in place.
If you have a rewards programme set up, your employees might feel like you’re trying to “buy” their engagement, which could cause disenchantment and resentment. To avoid this, ensure that you aren’t just focused on getting your team to share externally—also focus on engaging your teams while building up a great internal brand experience.
Brands Successfully Using Employee Activation
Many brands have created and implemented successful employee activation programmes, with the two most notable examples being Dell and Adobe:
Dell — Dell is my first example, and it has driven 150,000+ shares and 45,000+ clicks to its website and increased its profits by over $ 14 million through its employee advocacy programme. Their secret sauce? The tech conglomerate doesn’t restrict their employees to posting solely to promote the company (i.e., posting for the sake of posting). Instead, employees are encouraged to share other content they find online, as long as it’s about informative, helpful and relevant topics to Dell’s customers. As a general rule of thumb, employees post 20% about Dell and 80% about other topics.
Employee advocacy aside, Dell also prioritises engaging their employees internally; they even created an internal platform — EmployeeStorm — to help them do this. EmployeeStorm was well-received by Dell’s team: Dell employees collectively generated 3,000+ ideas through the platform within the first 60 days of its launch. An impressive 45% of Dell employees participate in discussions on EmployeeStorm on any given day.
Adobe - Then there’s Adobe, well-known for empowering and training its employees to speak up on social media via its Social Shift Programme. 30% of Adobe’s employees have undergone the Social Shift Programme; in this programme, they learn about their company’s social media guidelines, best practices for social sharing and more. All the resources that Adobe invests in its training programme are paying off. According to employee social research group SociaLook, Adobe’s employees are the most social among all technology companies.
The company’s employee activation efforts don’t stop there—once employees finish the programme, they’re given opportunities to become brand champions and tell the company’s story. For instance, employees may contribute to the Adobe blog and share a behind-the-scenes view of their workday. The Adobe blog draws 10,000+ views per month and frequently publishes employee blog posts, employee interviews, and more.
Lauren Friedman, Head of Social Media Enablement & Innovation for Adobe, says about their employee activation efforts: “We believe that people trust people. People buy from people. Relationships fuel our overall success.” She also emphasises how important it is that employees can be authentic and themselves: “We don’t want to create an army of Adobe-bots!“.
How to Get Started With Employee Activation
New to employee activation? Here’s a step-by-step action plan to get you started:
Develop a plan - Create a structured programme with goals and expectations. Talk to your employees and get their buy-in. You should encourage them to participate in the programme by emphasising its benefits. You may or may not want to incentivize your programme and offer perks such as gift cards, time off, or flexible working arrangements.
Work on Your Internal Brand Experience - Organisations should act more like Marketing departments, start segmenting employees (like customers), and leverage data analysis to drive decision-making. Foster an internal community and create a company culture where employee activation can flourish. It is important that your employees feel trusted and are free to choose whether they want to participate in the employee activation programme. According to a study, 46% of employees say that the corporate culture influences their engagement and motivation to get active.
Provide High-Quality Content - Make sure to provide content that employees want to share. Encourage your employees to create their content and create more content featuring your employees. Champion your team and share their stories.
Offer Training, Guidance & Tools - Provide employees with sufficient onboarding, conduct training sessions if necessary, and provide resources and tools your employees can use. You can guide your employees’ activities by setting up guidelines and do’s and don’ts. Nevertheless, to truly empower your employees, allow a variation in behaviour in terms of channels or activity levels.
Test, Modify & Optimise - Monitor and track your progress, and allow your team to provide feedback and input. Based on that, you can make adjustments over time.
Measuring Employee Activation Success
Measuring employee values, attitudes, and sentiment will help organizations reinforce positive mindsets. Integral, an employee activation service firm, recommends mapping employee experience to meet multi-generational needs and increase understanding between workforce generations. Also, a closer look at employees’ perceptions and behaviours will help build trust and balance risk.
If you’re using an employee activation/advocacy tool such as Bambu or EveryoneSocial, these come with integrated analytics that you can use to measure the impact of your activation programme.
If not, you’ll want to keep track of key metrics so that you can chart your performance. These key metrics include:
Number of active sharers
Reach generated via employee activation
Traffic generated via employee activation
Leads generated via employee activation
Conversions generated via employee activation
The content driving the most shares (ie: what are your employees sharing?)
Employee Activation Moving forward
In a world where it’s becoming increasingly difficult to reach and capture the attention of various stakeholder groups, from sales prospects and partners to recruits, employee activation is evolving to be a huge asset. Tap on that asset; don’t let it go wasted!
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