When your employees are activated, they are engaged, more productive, and will help to establish your business as a trustworthy, authentic brand with whom your target buyers can get excited about doing business. Businesses who have put in the foundational work for a successful digital transformation are able to offer a better customer experience and live up to the high bar set by the customer-centric marketing model. Imagine how potent your marketing would be with 99 percent committed and connected employees, not 33 percent? Employee Activation vs. When you trust your employees by empowering them with the right platforms, tools, and encouragement, they’re more likely to trust you. Activated Employees Drive a Business’s Marketing Inspire your employees to become a part of your brand messaging, and your marketing takes on a whole new level of importance and reach. How you activate your employees will depend on what works for your organization and what specific goals you want to achieve, but here are a few strategies you can use: Invest in your employees’ growth with skills training Develop an internal mentorship program Hold regular one-on-one’s to give employees a chance to directly tell you what they need in order to do a better job (hint: this is 1000 times more effective than employee surveys) Set up and encourage individual social media accounts supported by your brand or web pages for your employees to share content and ideas and to showcase their own work and expertise Offer more opportunities for employees to take on temporary or rotating leadership roles Feature their stories, projects, and accomplishments on brand channels Trust that the efforts you put into your employees – from the intention of empowering their passions – will pay off, and you’ll get back way more than you put in. Or, you can upgrade your internal communication channels and empower your internal communicators in order to more effectively activate your employees. Look at this statistic – a study by Siegal+Gale found that a third of employees find their workplace complex and difficult to navigate because of a lack of transparent communication. Just like all the work you’ve been doing to engage your buyers – exploring new communication channels and then refining your delivery as you learn more about your customers, finding more effective ways to motivate your target audience, and developing more sophisticated content marketing strategies to empower your customers – it’s time to do it with the people who are the driving force behind your brand.
Want to run a more effective organization? Employee activation is the key to driving your business into the future with the resilience required to move further into the post-digital era.
When your employees are activated, they are engaged, more productive, and will help to establish your business as a trustworthy, authentic brand with whom your target buyers can get excited about doing business.
Let’s face it. Things are moving fast in workplace culture. Businesses who have put in the foundational work for a successful digital transformation are able to offer a better customer experience and live up to the high bar set by the customer-centric marketing model.
But, we’re not done evolving. Right now, visionary companies are seeing that the next stage is not forging a more intensive relationship with customers with all our sophisticated digital tools. It’s time to look internally.
Where the focus has been on empowering customers, now we’re seeing the benefit of empowering employees too. It’s a more dynamic level of the engineered serendipity I talked about a few years ago where you win, I win, the customer, employee, manager, marketer, brand – everyone wins because we’re elevating the connections with more technology and more information.
The next stage after digital transformation and customer centricity is employee activation. Managers and leaders, at both the executive and department level, need to create a more meaningful work experience for employees.
Better communication. Inspired advocacy. Alignment and shared vision. The results of engaged, activated employees are mindblowing.
- A boost in customer retention rates by as much as 18 percent.
- A 20 to 25 percent jump in productivity.
- The Workplace Research Foundation found that increasing employee engagement investments by 10 percent can increase profits by $2,400 per employee, every year.
But, just like accepting the hard work and multifaceted change that is necessary for digital transformation, this next business evolution doesn’t happen overnight.
Especially when we are currently working with some dismal statistics. The number of enthusiastic employees has been edging up slightly over the past few years but it’s still low.
Imagine how potent your marketing would be with 99 percent committed and connected employees, not 33 percent?
But, to get anywhere close to the ultimate engagement goal, you need to understand what employee activation is.
Where a lot of marketing leaders and managers get off track is they mistake employee advocacy with employee activation.
Employee Activation vs. Employee Advocacy
True activation goes far beyond the basic, two-dimensional concept of holding out a carrot to get your employees to become brand advocates. You want to activate your employees so they become advocates. But, the end goal…
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