What is the purpose of an employee advocacy program?

According to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace Report , 85% of employees are not engaged in the workplace. There are geographic differences, of course, 33% of employees in the United States are engaged while only 10% of employees in Western Europe are. According to a study by The Conference Board , low employee engagement costs companies $450-$500 Billion each year. Companies with highly engaged workforces are 21% more profitable . When we look at the number of creators on LinkedIn, we don't see significant numbers. According to LinkedIn , only 1% of its 260 million monthly active users share content on a weekly basis. While employee advocacy programs are not LinkedIn-only programs, this number from LinkedIn raises questions for me about the efficacy of employee advocacy programs . It made me want to understand employee advocacy programs better.

What is the purpose of an employee advocacy program?

I want to stimulate a conversation about this topic. I know I'm connected to people who promote employee advocacy programs. I'm sure many communications and marketing professionals have launched employee advocacy programs. Why did you do it? What were you hoping to gain for the organization with the program? I am sure there is some flaw in how I think about employee advocacy programs causing me to miss why companies invest in them.

I understand how employers use employee advocacy programs. I thought I understood why they were doing it. But then, I had a conversation that made me question what I thought I knew. I was speaking with a personal branding and culture expert about her organization's employee advocacy program. What she described to me was perplexing. I've been struggling to make sense of it since the conversation. That's why I began to question whether I understand employee advocacy. How does employee advocacy help to advance an organization's goals?

Before writing this article, I went to my reference library to see what I could find on brand, employee advocacy, and engagement. These topics are related.

When I want to understand a brand, culture, or employee experience topic, I go to Denise Yohn . I wanted Denise to explain how employees live an organization's values so I reached for her book, Fusion: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World's Greatest Companies. As I read and considered her approach, she explained there can be a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem regarding aspirational values. An aspirational value does not yet exist in an organization's culture, but the CEO aspires to it. There may be a gap between when the organization articulates a value and when the employee lives the value. It makes perfect sense that speaking an aspirational value is required before employees can live it. As I understand it, employees live a value when their actions reflect it.?

But do employees need to share consistent language describing a brand value in an employee advocacy program if they are living the value? By share, I mean using the exact words and hashtags to communicate a brand message. Don't actions speak louder than words? Imagine everyone in your organization posting the same terms and hashtags on social media about your organization's values to communicate a brand message on the same day, precisely at noon. That is an effective way to raise awareness about a social justice issue on International Woman's Day, for example, but would it be credible for communicating a value about equity in the workplace for customers or potential employees? I sought Denise's guidance about whether this is what she meant by "living your core values." Here's what I found.

[It's] not enough to espouse them--that is, claim or speak about them. You must also enact them.

Denise thinks there's more to core values than speaking them. My question is, do you undermine the credibility of your core values when you require certain words to be used to describe them? Is it essential for employees to use the same words for brand or reputation management? I don't want to be na?ve. I understand that organizations want to control brand messaging, but to what end? Does this type of brand management undermine the effectiveness of your employee advocacy program? If your employees are living your values, aren't the words they would use in their voice about those values more credible than brand messaging?

This analysis reminded me of something that happened with my daughter's 5th-grade teacher.

My daughter had a project to complete for one of her 5th-grade teachers. I don't leave the teaching to the teachers. When my daughter has assignments, I often help her complete them. I don't do my daughter's work. But I teach my daughter. My daughter's work product is better than a 5th grader's would be on their own because I've helped her to understand how to succeed.

In the local public school, my daughter's 5th-grade teacher chastised me and marked my daughter down because I helped her. The teacher said, "the words in this presentation aren't the words that a 5th grader would use, so I knew she didn't do the work." I explained to the teacher that I had helped my daughter. I did not persuade her. Ironically, if I weren't helping my child, I would be criticized for not being involved enough in her education. My daughter is no longer in our local public school system.

The teacher's logic is flawed because she's lost sight of the goal. The goal of education is not for students to complete their work unassisted. The goal is for children to learn the skills they need to succeed. It would be great if all parents helped their children to learn. That would show that parents are engaged in the learning process. But because my daughter's words weren't typical of a 5th-grader, the teacher didn't trust the work product. How the audience perceived the situation mattered. The work did not resonate with the teacher. Resonance with the teacher was critical.

Isn't an objective of the employee advocacy program for the message to resonate with the organization's market? What is the benefit if prospective customers, talent, and partners discount the message because scripting the message isn't credible?

Isn't the point of "living values" demonstrating the values credibly such that it resonates? In other words, if your brand message is to delight customers in everything you do, isn't delighting customers consistently more important than saying, "we delight our customers."?If your employees delight customers in their interactions, yet the employees say, "we treat our customers better than anyone else," have you damaged the brand by not saying, "we delight our customers?"

I don't think so. But I'm not a branding expert. What am I missing here? Communicating brand values internally so that employees understand them and communicating them externally through corporate communications channels is very different from requiring your employees to use brand messages in the name of brand or reputation management in an employee advocacy program. We need to make adjustments on social media so that the message resonates.

My daughter's in a charter school now. Her 6th-grade teacher assigned a project to complete during the summer. This past week we met with her teacher during parent-teacher conferences. He was really impressed with my daughter's summer project. He asked, "did she do the project on her own or did she have help?" I explained that we helped her with the project. We went over the structure and the rubric with her. We challenged her writing and expression. We made her write and rewrite until she completed the assignment to our satisfaction. He said "Aha! That's why her writing is so strong. You showed her how to do it." We said, "Yes! We showed her what it takes to write an excellent essay. We didn't do the work for her. But we showed her how to excel." The teacher had no issues with us helping her and he didn't mark her down because the goal is for my daughter to know how to write. He understood that we are actively engaged in training her.

What is the purpose of the employee advocacy program?

In his book Social Media Marketing for Business, Andrew Jenkins wrote,

"it's the promotion of the company through the people that work there…. Employee advocacy programs are intent on extracting value from [the employee's] personal relationships for the benefit of the brand."?

How exactly does a brand extract value from an employee's personal relationships?

When I was a kid, we called this "using" someone. The goal is framed with the company's objectives in the center. An employee is an object the company uses for its purposes. Andrew wrote it sounds "disingenuous." That's one word for it. Would you participate in an employee advocacy program where your employer was extracting value from your personal relationships? I wouldn't.?

In a conversation a few weeks ago, I said that employees on social media are the conduit for an organization's culture. Whether your culture is people-centric or company-centric will be transparent on social media. Low engagement in an employee advocacy program could be a canary in the coal mine about your company's employee experience. Employee advocacy programs have been around for a while. I have spoken with practitioners and technologists about the machinations required to get them. It may be that now is the time to redesign those employee advocacy programs to make them people-centric.