by Janus Boye
Anne Frost is a renowned international expert on employee advocacy - how to get employees to become good ambassadors for their workplace
Employee advocacy is when the people who work for your company take steps to promote their employer. It has become a really big thing in recent years, in particular given the rise of social media and the never-ending challenges with recruiting and retaining top talent.
Surprisingly according to Anne Frost, marketing and corporate communication can actually often be a part of the problem, if you want to succeed with your employee advocacy program. In a recent member conference call, she provocatively shared three easy steps on how to ruin your advocacy program.
Anne is based in Aarhus and works as a leadership advisor and executive coach in digital transformation and communication. Her expertise lies in leveraging employee advocacy as a leadership tool to help companies increase knowledge sharing and employee engagement.
Below you’ll find my notes and highlights from the call. To avoid confusion, each chapter is centred around her helpful advice on how to do it, rather than the easy steps on how to ruin it. In the final chapter, you can also download the slides and view the entire recording.
Employee advocacy 2.0
Before Anne embarked on her entertaining story on how to ruin it all, she also shared a brief summary of how she sees employee advocacy today.
As shown on the slide shown below, it is no longer about just treating your employees as another distribution channel and achieving increased campaign reach. Focus is now much more on actual and professional conversations, meaningful relationships and a sense of belonging.
The differences between employee advocacy version 1 (at the beginning) and how we have moved on - slide by Anne Frost
What if senior management is too busy to engage and be a part of the employee advocacy program? Anne had a blunt answer to this:
If top management doesn’t have time for employee advocacy, then they are busy with the wrong things
Don’t treat it as a project
According to Anne, one of the key mistakes that many organisations make is that they treat employee advocacy as a project with a start and an end date. As she said:
Employee advocacy is organisational change
She listed a few usual deliverables when advocacy programs start:
Choosing key ambassadors
Improving social media profiles, in particular on LinkedIn
Internal training on ‘the good story’
Choosing a platform
Still, the work doesn’t end once you have completed these bullets. It’s a forever project, similar to other large digital initiatives.
As an example, Anne mentioned results from the six-month employee advocacy pilot that they did at Maersk back in 2017. One of the perhaps unsurprising findings were, that employees that share on social media are engaged employees. Read more about the Maersk case study and key results in this post: Our learnings from a six-month employee advocacy pilot
Don’t have marketing run it
Authenticity is the keyword for any successful employee advocacy program. Anne advised against going down the path, where you leave employee advocacy to your friends in marketing. As she explained, marketing teams tend to be quite skilled and knowledgeable about audiences, improving reach on social media and creating quality videos with captions.
Still, as she said, that’s not really what you want. Keep in mind that most people will easily recognise, when a post has been through the hands of marketing. Consciously or not, they will flag it as an ad, and that’s about the least credible you can get.
For employee advocacy to work, don’t overthink audiences and do what you can to help your employees keep their credibility. And her final advice on avoiding marketing mistakes:
Stop making up useless hashtags, that are only there for you to measure reach
Don’t ask corporate communications
Her third and final advice was around corporate communication. In another memorable one-liner she said:
Corporate communication is where authenticity goes to die
If your job description is controlling your organisation’s communication, online conversations between employees and their network are unstructured, impulsive and just plain annoying.
Still with that said, corporate comms know how to "do it right”. From that perspective, we are all loose cannons. And to be fair, comms are usually the ones who get sent to clean up the mess, so their reservations are understandable.
An important piece of advice from Anne was, that if you focus too much on what could go wrong, it makes you forget that it’s really rare to see an employee go online to harm their workplace on purpose. Should that be the case, you have bigger problems than employee advocacy.
The key part is to get management on board. This is the real fear reducer, as she called it. Keep in mind, that employees will be concerned about making mistakes. If they see that top management also shares everyday conversations, like big challenges, professional learnings or how diversity is a strength, they will be encouraged to also be themselves and start sharing.
Learn more about employee advocacy
During the questions and answers part of the call, Anne also confirmed that just nominating a few employees for the program is not the way to go. As it was written in the chat by another community member:
We all know nomination has never worked
If you are interested in continuing the conversation, you can also join our Future Workplace peer groups. You can also meet Anne Frost in person in November at the Boye Aarhus 22 conference.
Finally, you can also download the slides (PDF) or lean back and enjoy the 28-minute recording from the call