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Employee advocacy is on the rise.  But what does that mean for companies like yours and how will it transform the way you work?  On this week’s episode, Jen McClure, one of the original authorities on digital and social media and CEO of JEM Consulting & Advisory Services, shares insights on the factors that affect the growth of employee advocacy and engagement.  Plus, she gives her advice about what it takes to make employee advocacy a core business initiative and get everyone in your company on the same page.

Takeaways:

• Things to look for when bringing an advocacy program including social up to the corporate level.
  • Be aware of various silos in departments and vendors
  • Test the various tools being used by the departments like a bake-off, the best one winning and creating standardization throughout your team.
• Employee advocacy programs grown organically from the ground up have their advantages; first and foremost, of which is that the employees are invested already in the program

• JEM Employee Advocacy Study Results Highlights
  • 25% growth in the adoption of employee advocacy since 2016.
  • The growth was across all industries included highly regulated industries which is different from years past.
  • The primary tools that employees are using to share shifted away from LinkedIn to platforms like Facebook, Instagram etc.
  • Two main goals of employee advocacy as stated in the survey:
    • Humanize the brand
    • Employee engagement
  • Survey showed that there is still a significant hole in the area of training, particularly company mandated training.
  • A lack of tools and technology being used to secure the employees’ accounts and the information shared

• Core business initiatives – employee engagement, brand enhancement, driving sales and leads, recruitment (being driven by social in many cases); we don’t treat social as core business tools yet and we should

• How do you deal with the fear of including social at the highest levels?
  • Education of the value and the risks and how to address them
  • Pinpointing the best areas to invest time and money

• You can’t just say that as a company you aren’t going to use social because your employees are going to use it no matter what.

• One thing people need to put into practice for employee advocacy program:  they need to have a specific and well thought out policy no matter what and it should always be coupled with training across all levels of the company.

Read more about the survey JEM Consulting conducted here.

Connect with Jen on Twitter @jenmcclure_JEM or on LinkedIn

About Shel Holtz

Shel Holtz, ABC (Accredited Business Communicator), is director of Internal Communications at Webcor, a commercial general contractor headquartered in San Francisco. Before joining Webcor, Shel spent 21 years as principal of Holtz Communication + Technology. In addition to integrating technology into communications strategies, his expertise includes strategic communications planning, change management, organizational culture, business initiatives and communications research. Full bio