7 signs your organization is mishandling employee advocacy

Employee advocacy might be a hot topic, but many business leaders fail to ensure that it delivers real benefits in today’s workplace.

The key to its success is empowering, training and encouraging employees to collaborate, share and build communities and to help amplify the brand’s content, culture and story through social media channels.

Employee advocacy is essential for successful efforts such as social selling, marketing to key audiences and customer service. Too many leaders are just going through the motions or automating employee advocacy to the point of eliminating the human element. This takes the social aspect out of social business, and that does more harm than good.

Here are seven signs a company is handling employee advocacy poorly:

1. Leaders talk about “employee advocacy” but have no active part in it.

2. Your organization has social media accounts with employees’ names on them, but they’re managed and automated by your social media team.