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25 of the best quotes about Employee Advocacy

The other day someone reached out asking for advice on employee advocacy. ‘What are the best things I should read?’. The query I received was like a wake-up call.

A couple of years ago, I wrote my dissertation on this very topic: employee advocacy. I did a fair bit of research — over 100 journal articles, books, studies, etc. Lots of notes and late nights in the library. Needless to say, I have a fair bit of documentation on my Drive.

I thought: instead of selfishly keeping my notes, why not share them so they’re useful to other people too?

So here we go. I’ve collated 25 of the best quotes, stats, or facts that I encountered during my research. Enjoy!

Full references at the bottom.

On the necessity to empower employees:

• ‘People trust any type of employee more than the CEO’ (Boudreaux & Emerick, 2013)
• ‘Employees possess numerous tools to initiate conversations about the company in the public domain’ (Men, 2014)
• ‘Some brands spend a lot of money on research to learn how their brand is perceived by customers, but they spend very little time on listening to their employees, who are constantly in contact with customers and prospects’ (Khodarahmi, 2016)
• ‘Creating good customer experience always begins with creating good corporate culture and empowering employees’ (Khodarahmi, 2016)
• ‘People expect honest and transparent communication from brands, which lead to loyalty and advocacy’ (Khodarahmi, 2016)
• ‘Employees embody an organization’s corporate character and shape its reputation by functioning as powerful representatives of their organizations’ (Dreher, 2014)
• ‘An employee is one of the most powerful spokespeople for a company in the eyes of other stakeholders’ (Dawkins & Lewis, 2003)
• ‘Business leaders need to understand what motivates employees to join a business, what makes them stay and what encourages them to identify with organizational roles’ (Ind, 2007)
• ‘Advocacy will be the next imperative because of the accelerating growth of customer power’ (Urban, 2005)

Why employee advocacy is good for organisations:

• ‘Employees with good long-term relationships with their organisation are ‘likely to consider organizational problems as their own, and are thus likely to forward and share supportive information for their organization during organizational turbulence’ (Men, 2014)
• ‘The quality of employee-organization relationships is positively associated with employee advocacy’ (Men, 2014)
• ‘When your audience shares your content on social media, they do the work for you’ (Boudreaux & Emerick, 2013)
• ‘The brand exists in the minds of stakeholders — they, rather than the company, determine the nature of the brand relationship’ (Ind, 2007)
• ‘Customers can only build relationships with a business through the ideas and actions of employees’ (Ind, 2007)
• ‘Traditional marketing will be based on understanding customers’ needs and then convincing them to buy the firm’s products, but advocacy is based on maximising the customers’ interests and partnering with customers’ (Urban, 2005)
• ‘Sales correlate strongly with the number of people who advocate for a brand, not the number of online posts or messages advocating for a brand’ (Boudreaux & Emerick, 2013)

The social employee:

• ‘Social employee will become a basic fact of life’ (Boudreaux & Emerick, 2013)
• ‘Social media is far more effective when it flows through real people’ (Boudreaux & Emerick, 2013)
• ‘Individuals who exhibit average or less than average influence often proved to be the most cost-effective channel to disseminate information’ (Boudreaux & Emerick, 2013)
• ‘Social media empowered people to become an influencer in a way that historically was reserved for journalists’ (Boudreaux & Emerick, 2013)
• [Even without an employee advocacy program] 50% of employees already post in social media about employer often or from time to time (Shandwick, 2014)

The internal communication gap:

• ‘73% of employees would like their employers to communicate with them more frequently through written means’ (Shandwick, 2014)
• ‘Effective communication is needed for employees to understand the vision clearly and be inspired by it’ (Otaru, 2016)
• ‘Internal communication is the cruise of getting employee advocacy off the ground’ (Otaru, 2016)
• ‘Less than 3 in 10 employees report than they are being communicated with, listened to and kept in the loop’ (Shandwick, 2014)

References:

• Boudreaux, C. and Emerick, S. (2013). The most powerful brand on earth. Boston, Prentice Hall: Boston.
• Dawkins, J., Lewis, S. (2003). CSR in stakeholder expectation: And their implication for company strategy. Journal of Business Ethics, 44(⅔), pp.185–193.
• Dreher, S. (2014). Social media and the world of work. Corporate Communications: An International Journal, 19(4), pp.344–356.
• Ind, N. (2007). Living The Brand. London: Kogan Page.
• Khodarahmi, E. (2016). Character, 100% Character. Wroclaw: Amazon Fulfillment.
• Men, L-R., Stacks, D. (2013). Measuring the impact of organizational leadership style and employee empowerment on perceived organizational reputation. Journal of Communication Management,17(2), pp.171–192.
• Otaru, Y. (2016). The Smart Sceptic’s Guide To Social Media In Organisations. Milton Keynes: Rethink Press.
• Urban, G. (2005). Customer Advocacy: A New Era in Marketing?. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 24(1), pp.155–159.
• Shandwick. (2014) Employees rising: seizing the opportunity in employee activism. London: Weber Shandwick.