I am beyond thrilled to announce Renee Austin, Executive Vice President and Global Co-Lead, Employee Engagement and Change Management at Weber Shandwick, as keynote speaker for Social Media Today's second annual Employee Advocacy Shake-Up on June 8th in Atlanta.
This all day event will be diving deep into this powerful topic of Employee Advocacy and how to effectively enable and activate your employees. We've assembled Adobe, Whole Foods, IBM, Coca-Cola, Nestle Purina, Dell, Kelly Services, and many others to share inside view to how they have enabled successful programs.
We asked Renee to kick off this powerful day, as she led the Weber Shandwick team to develop cutting edge research on the concept of advocates - and how organizations can leverage employees to be advocates for their brand. This concept is more important than ever now that everyone is super-powered to be global broadcasters for their organizations.
In Weber's research, Employee Rising, the team found three trends that create a "perfect storm" of employee advocacy:
- Employees are in a state of upheaval - the majority - 84% -- have experienced a change event in the past few years such as a leadership change, new product introduction, change in business strategy, financial slowdown.
- Employees are on the defense. More than half had defended their employer to friends and family (56%) or where others could see or read it (34%).
- Yet, employees are not getting the message. Four in 10 can't explain what their company does and nearly 4 in 10 don't understand their employer's goals. Only 25% say their employer keeps them informed.
When experiencing times of tremendous organizational change, your success will depend on your ability to engage employees and activate them as advocates on your behalf.
In this keynote, Renee will share best practices on:
- Aligning people and purpose around the company's vision and mission
- Fostering a culture consistent with your brand
- Driving organizational change
So the time to activate your employee advocates - in the right way, in an informed way, is now!
Join us on June 8th in Atlanta to learn, discover new strategies/tactics, and contribute to rich networking discussions to build the ultimate Employee Advocacy program.