Employee Advocacy: It’s a Methodology, not a Tool

Employee advocacy isn’t a tool, it’s a methodology. You what now? To understand more, I’ve spoken to Elizabeth Jurewicz of the the managed cloud computing company that is Rackspace.

Have a listen on iTunes, Soundcloud or keep reading for a summary of our conversation.

What is Rackspace and what do you do there?

Absolutely, so Rackspace is the number one managed cloud provider and we offer expertise and support across all the world’s leading clouds. And so Rackspace is known for its fanatical support meaning that we really want to go above and beyond in everything that we do. And that’s how we’ve really differentiated across from other hosting providers is this incredible support and, specifically, our culture. So we’re based on six core values including things like passion for our work and treating others like friends and family. So those values that sometimes you don’t see necessarily associated with technology and enterprise technology but are very important to our culture and how we do business here.

I am and I always jokingly refer to myself as The Social Enablement Strategist because I’m the only one. So I am responsible for our global employee advocacy program. I started at Rackspace in about 2011 so coming on five years now, which is incredible it’s gone really fast. But I started on the support side so I started as an enterprise account manager and then transitioned over to the social support team in 2013. It was there that we started to really see the opportunity for an employee advocacy program and so it was in early 2015 that I was actually able to transition to this full time.

What prompted Rackspace to launch an employee advocacy program and what were the primary goals?

First of all, I should say I’ve always had a passion for education so earlier in my life I got the opportunity to be a second grade teacher. A lot of people asked me where I came into adult education and I jokingly say that I’m not. I still, in my mind, I’m kind of teaching second grade and use a lot of those fundamentals. So I think I always naturally had a passion for teaching and when the need presented itself, I was just kind of quick to volunteer.

So there were two initial challenges that we were having on the social team. The first one is that, you know and this is sort of 2013, it was really easy for people to dismiss the social team as just watching Twitter all day. And so there was really an opportunity for us there just to internally start to educate employees about, what our team was doing, how the social insights and feedback that we were seeing across the business could really help impact customer support, product development. So I think there was just a need to sort of educate about the potential and the value that the social team was bringing to the business as a whole.

And then the second part of that was as the social team, we were in charge of enforcing social guidelines and policy. And that kind of gave us a bad reputation as the social police. So at the time we did have a social policy but it was a piece of paper that a lot of employees signed on their first day of work, you know, with hundreds of other pieces of paper. And so when it came to actually using social media, there was a lot of, we called them coaching opportunities. So there was a lot of coaching opportunities where employees unintentionally kind of crossed the boundary and so then my team would have to reach out and kind of correct that.

So we really thought, gosh, there’s an opportunity to really help give some context around the policy and guidelines so that employees not only understand what they mean and why we need to be cautious about them, but also understand what that means when they’re about to hit post or tweet. So it’s sort of on those two fronts that we really started to see an opportunity to bill out a training program and that sort of where we started with it.

Where is the social media training program now?

We’ve definitely evolved from there. So initially, when we started out, I’ll honestly say that the majority of the requests that we got for training was around LinkedIn. So a lot of employees, especially in sales and recruiting wanted to improve their LinkedIn profiles. So in all honesty I kind of wanted to go where people wanted me, so I started initially with this sort of 30-minute LinkedIn workshop that I would deliver as part of team meetings and then tried to sort of squeeze in some little bits about compliance and policy into that.

And after doing that for about six months, I realized that wasn’t working very well. I’m not scalable, so I was kind of running around going to lots and lots of different meetings. And then in the end, 30 minutes really isn’t enough to get down into the nuances of social media and how to use it on the job. So after kind of giving that a go and a pilot, I took a step back and said, you know, I actually need this to be formalized training.

And initially we built out two courses. So the first course is that foundation course where we get to take a deep dive into the business value of social media and into the policy and into the Rackspace strategy. And that’s the required course to then be able to go on and take our LinkedIn workshop. So I was able to build those out into two sort of proper courses. They’re both two hours each and it really gave employees an opportunity to ask the questions and get the clarification that they needed.

What problems did you hope employee advocacy would solve for the organisation?

That’s a really interesting, I think that use cases were coming to me. Again, those specific examples of recruiters wanting to use social in a specific way and sales reps wanting to use social in a specific way, and what I did is I actually had to take a step back and say, “Wait a second. All of our employees really need to have the same foundation before we can kind of get into those specific use cases.” And so that’s where the class that we call Social Advocacy came from is laying that foundation and part of what we had to do through training was really to create a vocabulary around social media for the business as a whole.

One of our challenges that we saw is if I say social media to you and you’re thinking about Twitter and somebody else is thinking about LinkedIn, we’re going be having very different conversations and expectations. And so a lot of what we had to do was just create a baseline of, “Hey, the value of social media is the ability to connect, share, get feedback, network in real time.” And that can be done across a wide range of platforms. And so we really had to just benchmark people and say, “Hey, this is how we’re going to talk about social media here at Rackspace. This is our strategy. This is the opportunity that we see.” And from there sort of build upon that foundation into these specific use cases.

So that was really the strategy that we took and we found it to be working really well as in employees, once they have that foundation, we find them reaching out and making connections across different orgs, you know, thinking more strategically and holistically about social media and really building up into those use cases such as social selling and social recruiting in a much stronger way.

Do you provide your employees with content to share on social media? If so, what content is performing the best?

That’s a good question. So at this moment we’re not actually sort of funneling content to employees and that comes for a multitude of reasons. Our program, actually, we don’t currently have an employee advocacy tool and that was for a number of reasons. Initially, again we were very much solving for that compliance, social compliance reasons and so content sharing was a little bit further down the line. And then also time and budget to really set up and manage the tool at the time just wasn’t sort of in our scope.

And so the neat thing that we’ve done now is we’ve really set this foundation mindset conversation around social media internally and I think we’re actually have evolved enough that we’re ready to start exploring a content sharing tool. And I’m actually excited for that. So in the meantime, in the interim, what we’ve been doing is really giving employees agency over what they share and how they share it.

So, absolutely, we’ve got different newsletters that come out internally. We’ve got our internal intranet. We have our social ambassadors which is a group of social experts that actually are creating content and have an impressive presence online. And so they are great examples across the business of how to integrate social. And so what I do is I really highlight these opportunities for employees and say, “Depending on your topic, depending on your product, here are some different avenues for you to get content.” And really give employees agency over where they go get that content because, honestly, we’ve got some sort of niche products and markets across the business and I wouldn’t want employees to get overwhelmed with having to be plugged into one content funnel, if that’s not what was really relevant to their job.

Do you have a way where you can track this content, a specific hashtag for instance?

So I would say we recommend that they, if they’re talking about Rackspace, absolutely, we go through that in our training of talking about proper disclosure, meaning that if they’re going to be sharing a piece of Rackspace content that they have to put that context in there that, “Hey, I’m an employee and I’m sharing this because I have a relationship to the company.”

And we talk about doing that in a very authentic way so it’s not necessary that we encourage employees to use like a hashtag #rackspace or anything of that such but because we’re really encouraging them to create that relationship and that disclosure between the company. Often times we find that they do end up using a corporate hashtag or one of our corporate handles in their posts and tweets.

What have the benefits of social advocacy been to the company and to employees?

One of the interesting pieces that I’ve learned from talking with other people that occupy an employee advocacy role in their company is that I actually get to kind of enjoy in the employee engagement piece of this as well because I’m not so focused on demand gen or driving content. I think that one of the biggest transformations has been in employees’ attitudes around social. So, again, the way we built the program out, we were really able to create a positive discussion around how to use social media. Employees really felt that the company supported them in doing this.

So it kind of took away that layer of fear or anxiety about if I say the wrong thing. So I think that’s really been helpful. And then, in addition, because we offered that LinkedIn workshop where I help employees really start to build a professional brand for themselves, I think employees have felt really a sense of loyalty to Rackspace that we’re investing in them in that way.

And so I think that that’s one of those unexpected fringe benefits of a program like this is having employees really feel like we’re helping them put their best foot forward. And I think that it’s one of those very hard ones to measure and again it wasn’t something that we anticipated as part of this program. But I’ve definitely seen that shift around the conversation employees now thinking social first, meaning that they’re already thinking as part of the product. You know conversations as part of the marketing discussions like, “Oh. Let’s get the social team involved in this from the beginning.” I think that that has increased our efficiency, it’s increased our effectiveness across lots of different organizations and so that’s probably I think the biggest value that we’ve seen as a business is just that social first mindset and how that’s kind of trickling down across the organization.

Looking back at your program, is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?

I love this question because it’s like in hindsight you can always look back with a different perspective. But honestly I’m really pleased with how our program has rolled out. And again, I think we started with the right pieces around removing barriers and obstacles for employees. I think it was really important that we initially gave them a lot of agency and choice over how they were using social. And so again, we don’t dictate, “You have to be sharing content,” or “You have to be doing it this way.” We kind of give them a range of options. We focus on good social behaviors. And so our challenge to employees is like, “Hey, just try it. Maybe try one or two of these social behaviors, see if it adds some value to your work.”

And so I think sort of starting off really small like that helped us build momentum. And so I think if I could change anything I probably would have done a better job about benchmarking where we were before training and now be able to really show that delta and how far we’ve come in those two years. I also heavily have to rely on self-reporting. So I do an in-class survey as part of training and then I do 30, 60, 90 days check-ins, and as well as retargeting people that have been through classes to continue on with the subsequent courses.

So a lot of it’s very manual at this point and I think that’s been a challenge for us because sometimes, especially when you’re getting into higher leadership they just kind of want a quantitative report. And when you come with anecdotes it’s sometimes harder to paint that larger picture of the impact that we’ve had. So I think kind of those two pieces as being able to have a solid benchmark of like here is where we were across the organization two years ago and here is where we are now. And then being able to add some more quantitative data into the great anecdotes and self-reporting that we have. I think would have been some slight changes that I would have made.

Do you find that employees in this program are more engaged in their jobs?

Yes, absolutely. And I’m excited to add an anecdote from this morning. So one of the teams that I’m working with right now is one of our technical storage teams, and so intuitively you wouldn’t naturally think like, “Well, their storage team it’s very internal, they’re very direct customer focused.” You might not instinctively think that social media could have an impact on them but their manager came through training. We had a really fantastic conversation and we started to realize that these storage experts are just a wealth of information that they’re not necessarily documenting and sharing.

And so a project that I’m working on with them right now is how do we take all this wonderful knowledge that these storage experts have gained through working with customers over the years and start to document it and share it publicly to be able to educate customers proactively. And it’s been really exciting to see that the technicians are all on board with it. They’re already brainstorming ideas. They’re even eager to create content and so I think that that’s just an example of you know by giving them choice, by saying, “Hey, we want this to be a value add. Let’s figure out what works for your team.”

Again I’ve found that employees are really eager and excited to be involved in it. When they see the benefit, they see how it could tangibly help them in their day to day. I think that’s been an exciting shift so that’s just kind of one example that I hear over and over again of teams really creatively starting to think about how to use social media to meet their business objectives.

How do you measure success of this program?

Yeah, so measuring success has evolved with the program. So honestly, initially, when we were starting to launch training, it was just all about attendance. We were really trying to fill those classes and see if people had an interest for this. So initially, it was just tracking attendance, filling classes and then seeing if we could get a similar amount of people coming back to the second course. So initially it was just very much about attendance and marketing that. As I mentioned I do an in-class survey to get employees’ impressions about training while it’s fresh and then I do a 30, 60, 90 day check-in with them to see what’s working, if they’ve had any exciting changes happen or kind of what they still need help with. So that’s been a really great way to kind of keep training fresh, keep it, make sure that it’s addressing the needs of the employees.

On the sales side we’re actually able to measure the social selling index, so the SSI, for our sales reps, so that is another piece of data that we add in to sort of seeing the progression of the program. And it was really exciting I think just a few weeks ago LinkedIn highlighted our Rackspace UK team as one of the top ten companies in regards to our social selling index. So that’s been really exciting to see. But then we’re also able to, you know, in a macro level, see employee network amplification across certain platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter. They’re able to provide us with some of those analytics for engagement. So at this point I take those multiple data points and sort of wrap them into an overall view of what the program’s accomplishing.

What’s next for social employee advocacy at Rackspace?

Yeah, so I will say that our next step will be to launch an employee advocacy tool. So we’re already vetting options. And I’m honestly really excited at this point because again as I mentioned I think we’ve really built the foundation and I think it’s going to be an easier transition. If we had done it the other way, I think it would have been a little bit more challenging, like starting with the tool instead of the training. So I’m actually excited to launch this.

But I will say that I’ve heard from friends that are in employee advocacy and across the industry that there is an actual shift going from just content sharing to more of this strategic discussion around social. And so I’m excited to see that we’ve already been doing that from the beginning here at Rackspace is, you know, social listening is so critical and that doesn’t necessarily involve people having to get out and post things from their Twitter or Facebook accounts.

So social listening, having those meaningful one-on-one conversations, networking, listening to industry insights, these are all pieces of our social media training that have been there from the beginning. And I’m actually starting to hear from other companies that they’re starting to make that shift that as well like they had that initial focus on sharing the content and now they want to kind of expand to a deeper strategy.

Follow Elizabeth on Twitter @CreatingLiz.

More on this topic at Employee Advocacy: The Ultimate Handbook.