The latest Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) Labour Market Outlook states that 7 out of 10 (71%) employers are intending to recruit in the next three months.
That is a lot of potential movement in the UK employment market. It is potentially a lot of people weighing up the pros and cons of a current or prospective employer, and a lot of people forming or sharing opinions on employers.
That is why employee advocacy really matters. We want our new joiners and those leaving us to be talking positively and proudly about their experience. Whether that is a new joiner sharing a brilliant candidate and onboarding experience or leavers leaving for positive reasons and doing so on great terms.
Employee advocacy is defined as the public support for, or promotion of an employer. It originated as a marketing strategy where it was deemed that employees would be an excellent source of brand, product/service promotion. It also has significant advantages for attraction, retention and the formation of a reputation as a great place to work.
People talk to their friends and family about who they work for and their experience of working for them. With social media and the advent of platforms such as Glassdoor, employees’ opinions on their employers are amplified across wider audiences.
It makes sense then to be intentional about nurturing employee advocacy. A forward-thinking Chief People Officer of a fast-growing tech company said recently…’people leaving is an inevitability. We would rather people leave us as advocates so they become future clients, referrers of work or hopefully, future colleagues again’. This is a smart philosophy yet so many organisations do not think like this.
One of our MI-Say clients worked for a large UK supermarket chain in senior finance and operations roles for over 10 years. When she resigned to take a career sabbatical, her manager did not speak to her throughout her notice period. She speaks very negatively and candidly about her leaver experience, not the 10 years she enjoyed there. This experience isn’t unique, how many of us have been ignored, cast aside or made to feel disloyal for deciding to leave a company? It is a very naive strategy that serves no-one well.
Being intentional about creating employee advocacy starts with measuring it. Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) is tried and tested and has been around a long time. It is a simple measure of the extent to which an employee would recommend their employer to others. At MI-Say, we’ve extended the use of NPS to starters (sNPS) and leavers (lNPS). Through our surveys and interviews, we report and track the extent to which starters and leavers would advocate for their employer.
Establishing a baseline of advocacy using Starter, Leaver and Employee NPS means employers can easily see the progress they are making in their efforts to create engaging workplaces that attract and retain good people.
Back to our forward-thinking Chief People Officer who has set an aspirational target of achieving an lNPS that is equivalent to their current, excellent eNPS. We think this is brilliant because it will really focus the whole company on delivering an incredible employee experience, right throughout the employee life-cycle, even when someone is in the departure lounge.
Building employee advocacy is about us genuinely, consistently and tirelessly creating employee experiences that engage and support people. Employee engagement and advocacy isn’t something you achieve and move on from. It takes time, investment and a need to continuously listen to employees’ feedback on their experiences of work and then acting on them. If people feel listened to, valued and supported, they’ll be the best advocates.
