Employee Activism: Encouraging Employees to Become Brand Ambassadors
Employee activism is a new movement that goes beyond customer satisfaction and employee engagement, and is becoming an underlying foundation in successful companies. Many employees are defending their employers from criticism and acting as brand ambassadors for their companies, both online and offline. It all begins with social media. Many companies are intrigued about ways to enhance employee engagement, but highly concerned about an employee’s use of social media, especially during the work day. But rather than limiting an employee’s media usage, companies should be promoting the benefits and encouraging their employees to become activists for the brand they represent. Many companies still remain somewhat skeptical, and not without reason. Reasons for caution include valid concerns about privacy, cybersecurity, productivity, and actions by rogue employees that could go viral. This behavior is the exception to the rule and most companies already take a lot of care in building their culture with people they can trust , so why not trust them to advocate as well? Here are some tips to successfully build employee activism:
Get Social with Employee Engagement
Social media has become and integral part of all of our lives, whether we like it or not. Using social media to engage employees can be a great tool, it's become a staple for many Americans in their day to day routine and requires voluntary participation by definition. Here are four great ways to use social media to stimulate employee engagement, no matter your organizations size.
Improving Employee Engagement with Technology
A company's most valuable asset is their top performing employees. Employee engagement and keeping those employees happy are the easiest way to retain those top performers. Most companies focus on finding and hiring the best talent, but the goal shouldn't stop there. Employee engagement, keeping employees motivated and invested in the company culture, and the strategy behind it all is equally important. Management must do more than just the "given" benefits, such as compensations, vacation, and paid lunches.
Employee Recognition= Lower Salaries: Part 1
According to recent studies in the U.K., employees would rather be recognized for their professional accomplishments and have a solid benefits package then get paid a higher wage. Is it possible that our neighbors across the pond are on to something we can apply here? We can all agree that it feels great to get recognized by your boss for a job well done, almost more than getting that paycheck we all expect twice a month, however, could it be true that we might all pass up a raise for some good old fashion employee recognition. These numbers seem to indicate that if Americans are anything like Brits, we would:
The Business of Gamification
Gamification is a booming business, and it helps businesses boom. It has become a great tool for giving simple rewards, like getting a free game for hitting a high score, to an industry that does everything from track your workouts and push you harder, to serve you special offers for becoming the "mayor" of your favorite coffee shop. Gamification helps drive business forward, and for employers it helps drive employees to the next level. The infographic below from Click Software, notes that by next year 40% of the top 1,000 companies by market share will be using gamification as their primary lever to make operational changes.
Gartner notes that 70% of companies that try to make large scale operational changes fail due to lack of adoption within the organization. Gamification combats this issue by working within your organization to motivate employees towards organizational goals and values. Rewarding employees for reaching certain goals and milestones builds camaraderie, relationships and drives a unified organization towards company goals.
