Employee Advocacy action plan - The best way to get started

Employee Advocacy action plan

Here you get a good overview of points regarding what to do when you have to implement employee advocacy.

The points are:

1. Naming
2. Create a community
3. Create a space for learning
4. Celebrate your successes

So let's start by giving the group of corporate ambassadors a name.

1. Naming the group

Your start with building training for your employees, starts with you finding a really good name for the participants.

Since employee advocacy in a Danish context is not that well known and can quickly sound like something clever that has been discovered by the management, then you can advantageously come up with another name. In the case of such a need, you can use these expressions:

• Digital ambassadors
• Employees as ambassadors
• Corporate ambassadors
• Ambassador corps

but the recommendation from here is that you come up with a name that is unique to your company. If you sell vacuum cleaners, you can call your employee ambassadors ‘the suckers'. The name you come up with must only be used internally, so it doesn't matter if it's a bit cheeky.

The employees should be able to associate the word with something that is fun and something that you want to be a part of.

2. Create a community

In continuation of the naming, it is about getting one, or a few colleagues to participate for a start. It is these colleagues who must start the rings in the water. It is these people who must be frontrunners to tell the rest of the organisation how much fun it is to participate.

If you get the start right, you can achieve a snowball effect.

So how do you do it?

You do this by motivating the employees and taking into account that the employees have a busy everyday life. This means that you must help the employees get started, until the employees are more self driving. You can do this by being a role model:

• Spend 20-30 minutes daily on Linkedin to see if there is anything relevant and exciting to interact with and be inspired by. Interaction with other Linkedin profiles means that a Linkedin profile is strengthened in relation to reach. In this context, it can be noted that 40% of those who are on Linkedin only read the feed, but do not interact, and it is these 40% that your Linkedin profile must stand out from
• Share content that you have created yourself at least once a week, preferably 2 or 3 times if possible. You can use your notebook on your phone to write down ideas when they pop up. Then you avoid having chronic frustration with creating new content
• Make it a routine to take good situational photos during the working day, it can be internal or external events that are interesting for others to hear about. Make your workplace attractive to potential new employees. Give them insights they might not otherwise have
• Let the group of corporate ambassadors have fun. There must be time for that!

3. Create a space for learning

Everything is new for the employees. Some of course have a higher digital starting point in relation to experience, but regardless of level, there must be room to try things out and learn from one's posts, reels, videos, etc. Speech must be free.

Rome wasn't built in a day. Neither is your new corps of ambassadors.

You can advantageously arrange internal training courses such as:

• How to get started (including an introduction to your social media guidelines)
• How to get a good Linkedin profile
• How not to run out of good ideas
• This is how you can angle a story
• Learn how to write catchy updates
• How to counter any critical comments

For the last point, it is for example, important to maintain a professional and respectful tone when responding to criticism. Also, don't delete critical comments. Sometimes an apology can come from the sender of the criticism when they reflect on what they have written.

You can then turn the best digital employees into mentors for the new batch of participating employees. In this way, the mentors feel that they have been given expert status. Depending on how many mentors you choose, choose to give every new participating employee a buddy if possible.

4. Celebrate your successes

As soon as you get started with the ambassador corps, some statistics will also start to appear.

• On Linkedin, statistics can be viewed by the employee directly on the employee's post
• On Instagram, the employee must have a company profile to see the statistics. You can read more about that here.
• On TikTok, the statistics can be viewed via the employee's profile

In this way, the ambassador corps can gain insights into their own and their colleagues' posts. It can create inspiration and you can set some goals together that you would like to achieve, for example:

• Number of views
• Number of comments
• Number of likes

With these insights, you will also discover that working with employee advocacy is organic in the way that it is constantly evolving.

Employee advocacy can be said to be a long and tough process and it can be a very time consuming task. But the benefit of employee advocacy is that it creates:

1. Confidence
2. Credibility
3. Impact

Alternatively, how will you obtain it?

You can alternatively consider going down the track with: Employer Branding. It is, as a starting point, less demanding and therefore you have a higher degree of control. But it is not as effective as employer branding.

Still in doubt about what is best for your recruitment process, look here. How to make: