Gamification and Employee Advocacy

What is Employee Advocacy?

Employee advocacy is the act of working together with your employees to help foster community and engagement by letting them participate in campaigns that are important to the company. It's taking advantage of both the wisdom of the crowd and the power of the crowd. And of course, that's what I like about employee advocacy. If you've got a good message to share, you can leverage the power of your network in a way that makes it easy for employees to share, and then everybody wins. This can range from sharing vacant roles with their network, through to amplifying content created on social media, to supporting employer branding initiatives.

What is Gamification in the Context of Employee Advocacy?

Gamification in the context of employee advocacy, refers to an approach that rewards an employee ambassador who does something for the company e.g. gives input on an idea, or shares something on a social media platform, and they receive points in return.

You can then align points with a leaderboard, which works particularly well amongst the more competitive colleagues on the team. But fundamentally, it is about offering rewards in return for hitting certain goals. While these rewards can be individual rewards like company swag, they can also be rewards linked to sustainability initiatives, which is also very powerful.

It is also a great way to build an inclusive culture and to engage colleagues who then may speak about their position on the leaderboard for example when they are waiting at the company coffee machine for their daily cup to brew. Similar to people discussing how their fantasy football team is performing.

When should you use Gamification?

When we look at our customer base,  70% + of companies use our gamification feature. We also note that the companies who use it are more successful, in terms of fostering community.

We also see that most employees do not go for the personal rewards anymore, particularly younger demographics. They are often very keen to support other initiatives, for example, supporting blood donation initiatives like setting up a goal of 5 blood donations per team and work towards that or supporting the Red Cross. So that paints a completely different picture around gamification in terms of individual rewards versus the collective (donating to good causes). 

Gamification can also be useful to align with wider initiatives linked to Health and Well-being. For example, some clients use it as a means to incentivise and track employees to become more active e.g., incentivising them to run every day. This is a slightly more advanced form of gamification, where you have leaderboards aligned with specific goals. For example, you could set a company-wide goal - we expect our company to run at least 1000 miles per week. You can then see the personal progress of every employee who participates, which is highly motivating to other employees as well, encouraging colleagues to prioritise activity (which is naturally very important given the ever-growing number of desk-based roles).

Gamification also plays into several things that we all like as humans. We like competition. We like goals. We like to participate in communities. And I think that's very powerful, particularly, with more and more people working remotely. These tools and approaches are becoming a lot more important.

Here at Ambassify there is a great example with Pink Ribbon, the national charity/ organization leading the fight against breast cancer. Because we have a Strava integration, employees participating in fundraising for Pink Ribbon were able to sync their data, and everything was automatically tracked. So every 10 minutes, we have a real-time update on what our people are doing towards a common goal. And that's very motivating. You might not feel like going for a run yourself, but if your peers are doing it, you feel more inclined to do so as well. 

So if everybody's working at home and you want to motivate people to be more active, Ambassify can function as a really good tool to help employees become more active, which also benefits the company naturally due to less sick days and more engaged and motivated colleagues.

It is also worth noting that Ambassify doesn't solely focus on physical activities. 

Another pertinent example could be a company-wide goal of attending 50 courses related to well-being in the next quarter. Again, this is easy to track in Ambassify. It can be as simple as checking in or uploading a picture (selfie) of an employee attending a course (or a screenshot if online). The employee generated content can then easily be curated and put together nicely in a social media post.

What are your top tips to ensure that employee advocacy programs are a success?

1. The first thing is to get the right people involved. If employee advocacy programs live in just one function at a company (like marketing), it is hard to make them work. It is important to get wider C-suite level buy-in. As an aside, we empower social media managers to connect the social media accounts of time-pressed C-suite so they can distribute content easily themselves via their personal accounts.

2. It is also important not to make it a push channel only. Facilitating the sharing or resharing of content is not enough. After 12-18 months, what we typically see is that social share fatigue will kick in and employee engagement drops off. 
   
   One way to solve that is by broadening employee engagement beyond sharing content on their personal socials. This could range from concept ideation to responding to surveys. 
   
   
3. In short, empowering employees by making it easy for them to contribute to the organization is the key. Let's say a new company logo is proposed, and the Marketing Director likes three of the shortlisted options. Again you could utilise Ambassify to tap into the wisdom of the crowd and have employees upvote their preferred options. 
   
   Even if the logo they preferred is not picked, they'll still appreciate the fact that their voice was being heard. So when you subsequently ask them to share stuff for the company, or provide pictures from an event, the chances that they keep on doing it are much higher, and the results will be much better. 
   
   
4. The community feeling that we touched upon earlier should be fun. In the end, you're really building culture for a company. You start with the basic stuff, and gradually you can move towards greater engagement and fostering community within the organisation. It's much more collaborative. 

How does Ambassify help companies with their employee advocacy? 

The alternative is using Excel or Microsoft Teams and asking people, 

“Hey, we've just released this interesting blog. Please share it on your social media.” 

This is quite a tedious request and not easy to manage in bigger companies. Similarly, with a manual approach, you don’t get any analytics. It is not easy to quickly know how many people commented on those posts, or even shared them. In short, it is not a content strategy when there are no trackable KPIs, so companies deviate from this approach quite quickly.

You don't have any variation in the campaign. So some people will likely see the same message on all channels, which looks more like an advertising campaign than organic sharing.

In some channels, you cannot play with the scheduling times or schedule posts, etc. All you can do is tag people. You can tag it directly in a post, but that takes a lot of effort, or most people don't know how to do it.

With Ambassify, the social media team (or marketing team), can just click on a button and it's out there so there are significant efficiency gains for those looking to lean into the power of social. 

Finally, with the increased use of AI it is easier than ever to create campaigns automatically, to learn from them and to improve them based on the data.