How to keep your employee ambassadors engaged

How to keep ambassadors engaged

The hardest part of any ambassadorship programme is providing enough opportunities, content and encouragement for your employees to stay engaged. As one of the few employer brand initiatives that isn’t solely reliant on the employer brand team (or vendor) to execute on, you have to enable and trust your busy employees to keep it on the go over a sustained period of time.  

We asked Emma Lang, Founder & CEO at employer brand consultancy, Empower EB, to share her top tips on how to maintain employee engagement in an employee ambassador programme:

Boost, socialise and highlight 

To combat any potential encumberment, host regular drop-in sessions and socialise newsletters that reiterate the ‘why’ of the initiative and to thank them for their support. Include the results you are seeing by highlighting the strong pieces of content your employees are creating and sharing – this doesn’t mean only the content that’s received the highest number of likes or views. This includes items like an employee sharing a personal story, a day in the life, attendance to a company mental health initiative, an overview of a company event, or pieces that are simply fun and creative.

Don't forget to listen    

Remember every opportunity to engage with your employee ambassadors is just as much your chance to ask questions as it is for your employees to do the same. You need to listen and review what is being shared to determine what is going well and what roadblocks need to be mitigated. For example, some are unsure of what can and can’t be shared externally. Empower them by making sure everyone feels comfortable in what they are doing and the process behind it.

Active listening is also an important exercise to help you validate your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) in a localised way: what are graduates in different parts of the world saying about your organisation? Content to your sales department is going to look a lot different to that of your technology team. The exercise of listening to your diverse employee groups helps you model and retool your ambassadorship programme. If you know that you’ll be increasing volumes in your technology team soon but don’t have an active group of ambassadors from that team, it’ll be a good exercise to find out why and what you can do to stimulate them to help with your future recruitment efforts.  

Schedule pulse checks 

Read the content that is being shared and being engaged with – is the content and tone aligned with your company and employer brand? In a time of crisis, organisations are in reactive mode, with cultures morphing in response. And organisations EVP is likely to become irrelevant and needs constant review.  Annual satisfaction surveys will not provide timely data in order to make informed decisions. Consider getting feedback through monthly or bi-annual surveys. Tools like Workplace can be used to conduct quick pulse checks via its live poll feature. It’s always good practice to audit, edit and validate your EVP – especially when it feels like the pace of the world has been dialled up in the face of a pandemic.  

Ultimately, your employer brand is why people work for you. How your employees help you shape this perception among future employees is critical in your employee brand activation strategy.  

Research has shown that organisations who have invested in employee ambassadorship and employee engagement programmes saw a ten-fold increase in their audience outreach. Get more tips how to manage your employer brand in our latest whitepaper: Managing your employer brand in challenging times.