How to build an employee advocacy program

Enlisting employees to help promote the company’s brand, products, services and culture may seem more of a “nice to have” than a “must have” for some — but understanding how employee advocacy can be an exercise in building trust makes such efforts more essential.

During Ragan’s Strategic Communications Conference at Microsoft last fall, Microsoft Director of Employee Communications, Advocacy and Executive Social Eric Jaffe shared the steps taken by the company to work with employee influencers, and what he learned along the way.

Here’s what we learned:

Jaffe said that Microsoft follows Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer closely, and uses the report’s key learnings to justify its employee advocacy efforts

“While there have been a lot of changes… there are three themes that are true today or have been true all along.”

Those are: