As a business owner or a relative senior role you play, what your employees say about you and your organisation is crucial.

In part because you have done your job of embedding the culture, values and work ethic you want your organisation to follow, but how that is spread  – wide and vast – depends on your employees.

Be it your customer service reps, to sales reps, to brand managers , among others – everyone has a role to play in creating a likeable working culture that best defines your organisation’s work motto.

When you notice the way LinkedIn employees have diverse ways of expressing how they manage and lead talent in the new-age  digital leading world [that’s my way of putting it] – you get the point. You’d be charmed by the way all of the LinkedIn employees, not matter how much culturally diverse, are so synched in with one common purpose of making LinkedIn so inclusive and educationally enriching in binding global talent together on one platform.

That is how singularly you can lead your organisation to create a culture that lets your employees ‘speak up and be listened to,’ to really feel a part of something purposeful and inclusive.

Every employee – irrespective of the role or designation – has a personal, unique voice that spreads faster on the Web that you can think. Think Glassdoor (particularly), and other forums (like Quora) where people can air out their grievances/ professional/ cultural glitches – and you will be left with an unending array of painful voices that could have rather been listened to and parlayed into constructing something through a positive narrative for your organisation.

As per a study conducted by MSL Group, social media posts shared by employees reach 561% further than the same post shared by the company. Takeaway? Let your employees chime in with their opinion on your products, services and culture – and you can build your own version of ‘LinkedIn-inspired’ platform though consistent employee brand advocacy.

That said, is building employee advocacy all that easy? It’s simple, though.

It goes down as deep as the soul of your brand: to how the brand’s value systems, attributes and persona communicate to the external ecosystem from within the contours of your brand’s story. Each individual who starts the brand journey with or without counterparts becomes a significant signpost of the overarching brand message you want to create, share and advocate for. As consistently the message forms  and moves through each signpost, the message becomes the very reason for your brand’s existence and manifestation. And this is precisely how employee brand advocacy is built.

All companies – small or legacy corporation – are built from within : their soul, their message, their resilience, and their story. This, then, translates into a steady stream of content that you consume on the Web – and employees are a huge part of that positive brand story-telling through their own personal experiences, personal branding strategies and overall meaning they deduce via working for your organisation.

So, pay heed to what your employees say: perhaps the project where your client wants to learn how you can build thought leadership better for them or not rests on how well your employees have build a solidified brand narrative internally. Now isn’t that a ready proof-point to showcase how well-churned out advocacy program is run in your organisation?

Never underestimate the power of employee advocacy: it’s not just mere documentation of what your company performs on various levers – internally and externally. It can get tangible business results for your company – in the form of external funding, new partnership opportunities, new customers and even upending the existing ones, and relevant PR as well.

How crucial is employee advocacy in your organisation?

And how are you harnessing it to see people and business results?