How to keep employee engagement high, when staff are working from home

Now more than ever, employees are shifting working practices to their home office.

 

Whether this works for your business or not, it is a process that all companies will have to adapt to if they are to be successful in the coming years. 

 

The ‘Work from Home’ environment is a logistical challenge for both company and employee, with some making the changes more seamless than others.

 

While success is partly dictated by your business vertical, there are things that you can do to help get better employee engagement, that really benefit your brand.

 

Predominantly, the responsibility of keeping employees engaged falls to HR, whose managers have never had a bigger task until this major shift to ‘Work from home’

 

Keeping employees engaged should be taken seriously. As a ‘one size fits all’ miracle cure, simply doesn’t exist.

 

It is evident however, that initiating an Employee Advocacy program will improve employee engagement significantly (Raddon survey).

 

So what is Employee Advocacy?

Put simply, it is any company-brand promotion made by an employee. Employee Advocacy can be exercised in different ways, both offline and online.

 

However, the most common and effective way is when an employee promotes or endorses your business content on social media.

 

Which preconditions are needed?

The idea is basically to ‘Leverage what you already have’ Which simply put, means a mechanism to invite your employees to share the content your business already owns.

 

The preconditions for starting a professional Employee advocacy program are as simple as combining:

 

• Your company’s digital content
• A distribution system
• Insight led results

 

What are the benefits of starting an Employee Advocacy program?

• You make it easy for employees to engage and promote your company content through their social media
• You get real-time insights about employee engagement informing you of what works
• You get real-time insights about audience interests on these social media channels 
• It’s free, as the ‘Earned Media Value’ will exceed your investment many times over

So let’s consider digital content

As a business, we know you will already have a catalogue of images, articles and videos, sat on multiple channels. By giving your employees a way to access and push this information easily across the web, you achieve several things:

 

• You educate the employee about both new and existing aspects of the business
• You make them feel a part of what is happening, even at a distance
• You empower them, to promote your business and in turn feel satisfied that they are doing their bit to help the company succeed 

 

 

Get all content available in one place

The Sociuu Employee Advocacy platform, allows you to simply gather all your digital content automatically, by:

• Integrating your company Linkedin and Facebook accounts 
• Activating any other source through an RSS feed

 

These are aggregated into the ‘Content Hub’ enabling you to overview all your content, in one centralized place. The types of content that you might find useful to centralize are:<

 

• Job posts
• Thought leadership articles
• Product information and news
• Company announcements
• Use cases and testimonials
• Blogs

 

How Sociuu solves the distribution task

Now you have your content in one place, how can you activate it, using your employees? Put simply, through a distribution system, in this case, the Sociuu platform. 

 

It’s important to point out how making content easily accessible to share, will really boost employee engagement.

 

We all know that in this day and age, we have become desensitized to the information that is put in front of us. This is just as true for an employee, as it is for a consumer. So, its critical to break down these barriers and supply your company content to your employees for distribution in a way that is:

• Simple to understand
• Easy to implement
• Works seamlessly across multiple devices
  

By doing so, you will empower your employees, increase their engagement with your business activities and ultimately, turn them into advocates of your brand.

 

The process of using Sociuu

The Sociuu Employee Advocacy platform enables company administrators to easily create posts to be shared by employees. To do this, you simply select relevant employee groups or departments and invite the members of these to share the content.

 

The selected employees will get a company email, where with one-click, they can share the content to their social networks, such as Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter. Post creation is a guided process, where the creation and invitation usually takes only 5-10 minutes.

 

 

Use insights to optimize

Once content has been posted to your employees to share, how else can you increase their engagement?

This is where we turn to insights. By understanding how well certain content has resonated with both your employees and in their wider networks, you can start to plan campaigns that really work, as well as incentivize your staff. 

Using insights to incentivize is a great way to increase engagement, as it often generates the following amongst your employees:

• Friendly competition – Employees like bragging rights as to who performed best
• The satisfaction of doing their part and being rewarded for going above and beyond
• Singling out specific employees who are real advocates, who have the most effective networks – Which in turn makes them feel highly valued within the business

 

The Sociuu Employee Advocacy platform provides the real-time insight you need to optimize your Employee Advocacy program. From it, you will gain deep insights into what is shared, who is sharing, the engagement statistics and the Earned Media Value (EMV) attributed to each post and individual.

 

 

So hopefully you can see how useful the Sociuu, Employee Advocacy platform can be in helping you mitigate the effects of poor employee engagement. In fact, not only does it increase employee engagement with your brand… it also has a significant impact on your company processes and ultimate success. It stands to reason that happy employees make for a well performing business. Everyone wins! 

 

If that’s not enough, don’t just take our word for it… as according to a Raddon survey of 50 companies, it was found that employee advocates tend to be more engaged with the brand, be proud of their work, understand the company’s vision and how they impact the bottom line.

 

Learn how Employee Advocacy will benefit your organization