By now, you’re probably well aware of the many advantages of having great company stories posted about employers on sites such as Glassdoor. Employees are a company’s frontline advocates; nobody can transmit an employer’s internal reputation as well as an employee can.
My colleague, Sarah Clayton, EVP of Weber Shandwick’s Employee Engagement & Change Management practice, recently co-hosted a Glassdoor for Employers webinar session, How Employee Storytelling Differentiates Your Employer Brand. I thought that one of her most powerful points was that it’s not just what employees say, but how they say it.
There is a big difference between a post that reads, “Great company. Lots of opportunities,” and a story about an employee’s experience with the company that hits an emotional chord, that captures the essence of working for the organization and engages the reader enough to want to learn more. A story, versus a post, can be worth its weight in recruitment gold. And reputations are increasingly built on what employees are saying about their employers online.
So how do employers cultivate storytellers? You might say the problem with expecting employees to become storytellers is that they aren’t necessarily professional writers, but that’s not really the obstacle. Today’s “social” workforce is largely comprised of Millennials, commonly defined as people between the ages of 18 and 34, and these digital natives are quite comfortable sharing their views and experiences online. The challenge to getting Millennial employees amped up to tell a story is how to effectively engage them so that they will publish compelling stories in their authentic voice.
First order of business: close the communications gap and engagement deficit
Employees Rising: Seizing the Opportunities in Employee Activism, a global research study released by Weber Shandwick and KRC Research last year, and which serves the basis of the remainder of this post, identified a Millennial Engagement Deficit, with only 30% of them feeling “deeply engaged” with their employer. In a related finding, just 42% say they know enough to explain to others what their employer does. Yet, a large 62% of Millennial employees report that they post messages, pictures or videos in social media about their employer or work at least occasionally.
In other words, you, as an employer, are already a topic of conversation, and many of those conversing aren’t even clear on what your company stands for! This lack of clear communications foreshadows a potent risk – that is, poorly engaged employees developing their own narratives about your company to be broadcast over social media. In fact, nearly one in five Millennials (17%) admits to posting something about their employer that they later regretted. This should make employers nervous.
Based on our research, here are some guidelines for engaging your Millennial employees:
1. Recognize what motivates them. It’s not surprising that regular pay increases are the number one motivator for more than half of Millennials, but greater leadership recognition and better communications could also go a long way in engaging this age group. The latter factors are mentioned by Millennials not only as motivators of performance but are also poorly perceived. An internal leadership recognition program might be worth considering as this would also be an excellent initiative that Millennial employees could build stories around.
2. Put trust and transparency on top of your leadership to-do list. Only one-quarter of Millennials deeply trusts leadership and even fewer sees leadership as transparent. Perhaps more town meetings or face-to-face encounters between leadership and Millennials would foster greater engagement and trust. CEOs who use social media might find that Millennials regard social CEOs as more transparent than non-social CEOs and help create better word of mouth about the company being a good place to work. Fostering positive feelings makes it easy for Millennials to open up and describe the positive things about their organizations.
3. Have social media policies in place or communicate them better. Have social media training to make sure policies are understood. Just over half of Millennials say that their employer has social media guidelines and, of this segment, only six in 10 have a firm understanding of these guidelines. Employers should consider recruiting Millennials to help refine their policies for clarity and relevancy. Millennials would love the opportunity!
A highly regarded social brand or reputation is important for many reasons. The value of having that reputation relayed effectively via employee stories through their networks will only grow as employees become more reliant on brand narratives to make job decisions. Now is the time for employers to begin leveraging and empowering Millennial advocacy, but first they need to address their internal practices to ensure the social dialogue is authentic and engaging.
Please note all sources in this article came from the report Employees Rising: Seizing the Opportunities in Employee Activism.
