I worked with a company a few years back that had just launched its first employee advocacy program.
They were excited, and so was I! They’d built a content library, even got an Employee Advocacy content tool, and hired me for guidance and training.
Then the legal department stepped in and demanded that every employee’s post be approved, or that they post the scripted and approved posts from the library.
Word… for… word…
You can guess what happened.
A few people shared some stuff out of obligation. The ones who did share got zero engagement, because their readers could smell corporate content from two screens away.
Six months later, the program was declared a failure. But the program wasn’t the problem. The approach was.
People aren’t distribution channels
Most advocacy programs start with the company’s needs: more reach, more impressions, more brand awareness. So they build a system to push corporate messages through employee profiles: templates, approved copy, polished marketing speak.
It sounds logical. It doesn’t work.
People don’t engage with corporate messaging from personal profiles. They engage with real people sharing real perspectives. When you post someone else’s words, everyone can tell.
Ownership over obligation
There’s a better way to think about this. There’s a concept called employeeship.
The idea behind it is that everyone in the company acts as a co-owner of their own professional growth, not an executor of the company strategy. They take responsibility for their own visibility, their own reputation and their own career.
That does not mean everybody is going rogue. It’s companies creating the conditions where people want to share, rather than being told to share.
Give people strict messaging guidelines and approved posts, and you get compliance. Give people clear boundaries and help them find their own voice, and you get ownership.
Ownership is what makes advocacy last.
How boundaries work
Boundaries and control sound similar, but make no mistake, they’re not.
- Control: “These are the three posts you can share this week. Don’t change the wording.”
- Boundaries: “These are the topics we care about as a company. This is what’s off-limits. Everything else? Go ahead!”
Control makes people dependent. With boundaries, people know what the playing field is, and within it they have room to play and develop their own voice. The difference looks small, but it’s exactly what 80% of employee advocacy programs get wrong.
The backstory is the starting point
I’ve written before about identifying your professional backstory and the six questions that uncover what you stand for.
Your backstory is yours. You built it over years of experience, mistakes, and hard-won insights. No company created that for you. And no company should replace it with marketing messages.
But a good company should help you use it.
The best advocacy programs I’ve run don’t hand employees content, they give them the tools and support to find their own. And that starts with their backstory.
In my training programs, people answer those six questions and turn their expertise into a clear POV. The employees who find their own voice become far better advocates than those who get a script, because they’re sharing from experience instead of repeating someone else’s message.
Everybody wins!
For the individual: Stop waiting for permission to be visible. You own your career path, and you build a reputation that goes with you, to the next project, the next role, wherever.
For the organisation: You get real advocates. Posts from personal profiles reach 10 times as many people as company pages. Companies with visible employees are 58% more likely to attract top talent. And the advocacy lasts, because it comes from ownership, not obligation.
Most companies I start working with think it’s one or the other: help employees build their own brand, or keep the message controlled. Employeeship says it’s both.
A question worth asking
If you’re an employee reading this, does your company help you find your voice, or do they try to replace it?
If you’re a leader, are you activating what your people already have, or asking them to distribute what marketing created?
The answer tells you more about your program’s future than any engagement metric.