Imagine if your employees love what they do and love where they work so much that they feel empowered to become natural brand ambassadors who share their presence, contribution and support for your company with the rest of the world.
You might be thinking to yourself, this sounds a lot like employee engagement and employee advocacy. Well, it’s actually a mixture of both – and so much more.
It’s employee activation.
The Importance of Employee Activation
Employee activation takes the best parts of employee engagement and employee advocacy and creates a new sustainable way for generating passion from employees so they feel empowered to endorse their company through multiple digital channels, including social media.
Basically, activating your employees means believing in your employees so they can, in turn, believe in your company. It focuses more on creating a strong foundation that encourages and empowers brand ambassadorship rather than the specifics that come afterwards, like employee social media policies.
For any business, employee activation should be the main objective because the high level of ambassadorship provides a resource of valuable and genuine content that will benefit a company’s reputation and business goals well into the future.
Along with the creation of high-quality content, employee activation also comes with the following advantages:
- Reduced absenteeism rates
- Higher employee retention rates
- 25% increase in employee productivity
- 18% boost in customer retention rates
- 21% higher profitability
So how exactly can you start activating your employees to improve your brand image and drive your business forward?
Transparency and Mutual Respect Activate Employees
The way your company goes about developing a successful employee activation plan depends on your company’s specific goals and available resources. However, the one commonality every business needs in order to successfully activate their employees is a company culture of transparency and mutual respect.
The most common ways companies are successfully activating their employees with their company culture is by providing the following:
- Growth investments with regular performance reviews, internal mentorship programs and leadership opportunities
- Customizable work, including a flexible schedule and work environments that focus on private spaces that enable collaboration
- Clear and efficient communication accompanied by a trusted feedback system and regular one-on-one’s with leadership
- Operational visibility along with optimized operational tools to enable continuous improvement
Regardless of your business, an effective employee activation strategy focuses on building trusting relationships with straightforward communication while cultivating internal talent and rewarding high performance. This can only be accomplished with a company culture of transparency and mutual respect.
In the end, when employees love what they do and where they work, they will become activated and passionate about helping establish your business as an authentic and trustworthy brand that customers will love to do business with.
If you need help developing a successful employee activation plan for your business, reach out to DeanHouston+!