How to Help Employees Become Genuine Brand Advocates

I’m a big believer that employees can be effective brand advocates.  After all, Edelman’s 2013 Trust Barometer shows employees are viewed as a highly credible source of information about their company – often higher than the CEO and always higher than the media spokesperson.

But I get concerned when I hear communications professionals talk about turning employees into advocates by giving them talking points and elevator speeches.

Certainly, I understand the temptation.  For most of my 30-plus year career, communicators have worked in a message-centric model:  We create the content, determine the audience and distribution channels and push the message out.  In other words, we control the communications process.

That model is still important, and likely always will be.  But it needs to make room for another highly influential model of communications – one that’s employee-centric.

The proliferation of social media technologies has put a giant megaphone in every employee’s hand.  And as a result, they expect to have a voice … to make a contribution … to participate in the process.

Our challenge is to figure out how to help them be confident, genuine communicators on behalf of their company’s brand.  The first step to take – and it’s a big one – is to stop trying to control the process.  Instead of thinking we know what people need to hear, and putting all of our energy into crafting perfectly worded messages, we need to understand what employees want to know.  What questions do their friends and families ask them about work?  What company actions would they like to better understand and be able to talk about?

Here’s a case in point.  Several years ago in a previous job, my colleagues and I were working on a system to help employees have better – that is accurate but still genuine – conversations about the company.  In a message-centric model, we would have created declarative communications such as “Our Company’s Strategy.”  Instead, we used a Q&A format and selected questions that we, as employees, wanted to be able to answer.  At the time, our company and its stock were stronger than ever, but the economy was at a low point.  So one question was, “Why is your company doing so well in this bad economy?”

We told the story of how the company had recognized a shift in the industry early on, and as a result had gotten out of certain types of business and into others, which led to stronger cash flow that enabled the company to invest when others were struggling to survive.  With that simple storyline, we explained the company’s strategy.

But the question wasn’t “What’s your company’s strategy?” because no one ever gets asked that.

Yes, we need to craft clear and compelling corporate messages.  But to enable employees to be advocates of the brand, we need to treat the employee as a genuine communicator, not a company messenger.

Jana Weatherbee is Principal at Jana Weatherbee Associates, LLC.