Having worked on quite a few corporate employee advocacy programs, and having trained over 1,000 employees across large organizations on how to handle employee advocacy content on social media, I have given the topic a lot of thought over the last 10+ years.
At its very basic, employee advocacy is simply the promotion of an organization by its own employees. The assumption is that more than any other outside influencer, the voice of the employees would seem most credible. This is also the reason why the HR/people section of most organizations’ websites carries quotes from employees.
I still recall one of the first big tasks of my working life, when I was a junior in a corporate communications team in a company in Delhi – to plan and organize the video shoot that aims to capture employees talking about the company.
The chosen employees were given a broad understanding of why the shoot was happening and what they could consider saying. As I was managing the individual shoot schedules, I could spend more time with each person chosen for the shoot and I noticed them writing down what they wanted to say. Most of what they were planning to say sounded like corporate-speak and hardly sounded like their own voice. I had a very limited understanding of the process and was keener on getting the shoot completed than focusing on the content 🙂
This was in the late-90s when the internet was very nascent (dial-up connections at home), and mobile phones (feature phones – everyone had Nokia bricks; I had an Alcatel phone) had just arrived in a reasonably big way. Now, with the internet having firmly taken root, when we think of employee voices, the first thing most people think of is ‘Glassdoor’, where employees leave unaided, anonymous comments!
Between the two extremes – employees guided to say something on corporate property, to employees leaving unaided, anonymous comments online, employee advocacy has come a long way.
There are a whole lot of players in the middle too, most software vendors who have smartly created tools that could help employers and employees manage the entire employee advocacy process. Many of these tools also gamify the process to make it interesting for the employees to willingly participate.
But tools are merely tools – they only help execute the process; they do not help employees with what to say. And that’s the heart of the entire employee advocacy program.
The larger contours are,
- what to say?
- where to say it?
- how to say it?
Consider this botched Amazon global employee advocacy program for the fulfillment centers, codenamed Veritas. The program was killed by Amazon in January 2022 because of ‘poor reach and embarrassing backfires’ as per a Financial Times report.
What was the program about?
Amazon’s fulfillment centers were facing a barrage of bad reviews and news mentions based on the working conditions. While Amazon’s PR team was managing the crisis through the media, the company also decided to rope in actual employees to voice their disagreement with some of the views floating on social media – on Twitter, in particular.
So the plan was to help FC (fulfillment center) employees create new, clearly identified Twitter handles and get them to react to negative comments on the working conditions at FCs by outsiders.
Not just that – the employees who participated in the program were paid for their effort too – or, in other words, replying to tweets was part of their work!
The program went haywire when non-employees and pranksters got wind of the Twitter handle template (‘AmazonFCfirstname’), created fake handles that purported to be employees, and said utterly bizarre things about Amazon FCs!
From a ‘what to say’ and ‘how to say it’ perspective, Amazon asked its chosen employees to counter negative perceptions. The Intercept got hold of the Project Veritas internal document and shared it online!
There were specific guidelines on how to counter the tweets that are against the FCs with specific cues on content and tone. The document also mentions training programs on the same, including how to use the chosen tool – Sprinklr. This is par for the course – organizations need to train employees on how to use the tool and also help them with the broad outline and objective of such programs.
One can’t even argue that organizations should avoid employees saying the same thing verbatim. For example, most employee advocacy tools have a section for corporate news releases and encourage employees to share the latest news about the organization. When they are doing that, they are not airing their opinion about the organization they work in – they are simply re-sharing the company press release. And the result would be that a lot of employees would be sharing identical news release headlines and body copy on Twitter and LinkedIn. This would be no different from outsiders doing the same by clicking on the Twitter share button from a news website that carries the same press release.
But where we draw the line is identical sounding opinions. This is where the Amazon program falters – the wording, sentiment, and expressions too seemed largely similar and coordinated. If it was being done offline, using real conversations, we may not be able to connect the dots to assume that it is all coordinated. But online, on Twitter, it is very easy to discern any coordinated pattern. And such patterns make the larger program seem insincere and not credible, almost as if Amazon is literally paying employees to mouth the same lines in the name of employee advocacy and crisis management.
A related issue with the Amazon program is ‘where to say it’.
Using Sprinklr, as a tool, is hardly a problem. It’s merely a tool and having seen hands-on how it works, I have to say it is pretty efficient in managing an employee advocacy program on a large scale.
The problem with the Veritas program is different, away from the tool – it asked employees to create new Twitter handles and with a format. So new Twitter handles with no followers and no tweets suddenly sprouted on Twitter, and started countering negative opinions! And they all had a similar naming pattern! If these won’t ring the alarm bells and question the credibility of what is being said in the replies, then I don’t know what would.
A better method would be to let the employees use their own personal Twitter handles to counter negative perceptions. That would be akin to a fulfillment center employee stumbling on someone with a negative opinion on the FCs at a local library or pub, and engaging with those views and countering them. But the idea to create new handles made it seem like Amazon was giving a mask for the employees to wear and then go around countering negative views.
It didn’t help that Amazon was also reusing some of the Twitter accounts by simply changing the first names in the handles!
Many of the employee advocacy programs I have worked on involved asking the employees to use their own personal handles on social media platforms so that the views on their employer are seen among their other posts about every other topic. Employees then would be more guarded on what they say, ensuring that it doesn’t sound like corporate-speak because it would then stand out among their other tweets or posts instantly.
Even if most control-loving organizations would prefer online sockpuppetry-style employee advocacy campaigns where they control every aspect of the program, that would be the least effective or credible way to manage employee advocacy.
An ideal blueprint for an employee advocacy program would,
- educate the employees about the purpose of the program on a broad level and offer what the endpoint (perception A to perception B) looks like
- teach them how to use the tool/software
- educate them on what to look for online that they can volunteer with their views in response to; what kind of opinions to avoid sharing, the kind of online characters to stay away from (trolls, etc.)
- and most importantly, frame the program not merely as benefiting the employer but as a win-win for both the employee and the employer.
The last point is crucial. For any employee advocacy program to be successful and seem credible, it needs credible employee voices in the first place. If the employees themselves are complete non-entities online and rarely participate online, suddenly sharing positive views on their employer is a terrible idea. The point is to help them build their own online profiles in a way that helps their confidence and career, and while they do so, they merely use the content about their employer as one of the many content buckets. If they talk only about their employer, it would make them seem like a brand brochure.
Employers do need to care for the chosen employees’ online profiles and how they carry themselves online. Most employees don’t give much thought to such things and helping them understand the different perspectives of their own online persona is a way to gain their trust and help them do better.
These days, anyone sharing anything positive about any product, service, or organization is usually seen with suspicion 🙂 I’m asked to disclose my association with most brands I write positively about, on Twitter. (My personal policy is to never create content for a fee on behalf of a brand even if I’m a user and the experience is my own. The bottom line is that my words or opinion are not for sale.)
But with employees, the equation is different. I have had great things to say online about the organizations I have worked in, while I was working in those organizations. If employees don’t have a positive view of the company they work for, who else will? That leaves us with the contours of how to handle those opinions since it is easy to find if a person works for the organization she/he is praising, using LinkedIn or any other source.
It’s not very different from a happy customer of a restaurant willingly leaving a positive review on an online service like Zomato. The key is to work on the employee experience and aid in the process of sharing views online – the employees would then express or articulate the views on their own, where appropriate.