Social media enables any employee in any function to interact directly with consumers. This makes employee engagement more important than ever – both to limit reputation risks and capture new opportunities for employee advocacy (i.e., employees promoting the brand online).
As a very first step, companies should limit downside risks by implementing a social media policy (MLC members, click here for tips and examples). In addition to defensive guardrails, companies should also offer simple guidelines or training to help engaged employees make the best use of social media.
Beyond this, now is a good time to redouble efforts to measure and boost employee engagement. Indeed, 46% of executives agree that surveying employee satisfaction and acting on the results is the best way to protect online reputation.
Today, a number of companies use the Net Promoter Score® (NPS) internally to measure employees’ likelihood to recommend products/services to their friends or family on a scale of 1 to 10 (more info here). Although originally designed to measure customers’ willingness to recommend a product/service, many companies have recognized the NPS as a quick way to gauge employee engagement and simplify internal satisfaction surveys (though companies should note that employee NPS scores may be lower than customer scores).
Given the rise of social media, we see a host of new uses for Employee NPS. By combining the question “How likely are you to recommend our products or services to your friends or family?” with a few demographic questions, (e.g., location, function, work arrangement, tenure, age, gender,), companies can use the data to:
1) Identify teams/regions with high NPS scores and drive social media uptake in those areas of the company
2) Identify teams/regions with low NPS scores for extra guidance on social media policies (e.g., obligatory training and sign-off on the policy)
3) Isolate environmental drivers of engagement and use that knowledge to boost engagement, thus increasing positive employee involvement in social media
MLC members, see how leading companies manage employee advocacy and learn about the five major components of a successful Net Promoter Score strategy.
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