How to Design & Implement Effective Employee Activations

How to Design & Implement Effective Employee Activations

Now more than ever before, it is critically important to have employees perform at the top of their game as they work for your business. Your staff has probably experienced challenges in delivering customer service during the COVID-19 pandemic and could benefit from a refreshing initiative designed to increase their engagement with your brand and enhance their job satisfaction. An employee activation program achieves these goals and more.

When properly executed, employee activations build your brand internally to make the most of your employees’ role as brand ambassadors externally. They are formal, employee-centric programs that encourage your staff to organically and authentically create and share content that covers a wide range of topics that interest them on a recurring basis. To be motivated to execute on this strategy, employees need to feel as though they have a meaningful experience at work, share your vision of success, and are engaged with what your brand represents.

They will ideally share news of their passion projects, goals reached, milestones and performance awards, and examples of their impressive expertise with their audience. Engaged employees deliver astonishing results, according to recent research conducted by Gallup – businesses with engaged employees outperform those without by up to 202%, they outpace others in productivity by 20% to 25% and can increase their customer retention rate by as much as 18%. 

Here are some suggestions on how to launch an employee activation program and what tools to use in the process.

- Understand how you communicate best with your employees and how they like to communicate with their audience. Make sure that your methods are in sync with how they like to receive information and how they like to send information to those who are important to them.

- Consider holding a “town meeting” on the topic of increasing company communication as a way to find answers to these questions, launch your employee engagement program, and set a schedule for these meetings regularly to stay in constant contact.

- Make sure that employees know all of your brand’s social media accounts and understand all current advertising and marketing initiatives. Provide them with templated messages they can share on behalf of the company and make sure to tailor each to specific social media platforms. 

- Make sure that you are sharing your employees’ accomplishments and other relevant news on all of your company’s social media accounts and other brand channels – such as your business’s website.

- Consider announcing new skills training with the objective of investing in your employees’ knowledge and career growth – and making certain they understand the value you are providing them with the training/skills initiative. Launch this at one of the company’s town meetings.

- Create a mentorship program within your organization that involves every staff level – including top management. This connects employees with a common goal, encourages camaraderie, and provides support and accountability for performance and best practices. 

Launch and maintain your employee activation efforts with effective branded promotional items

Branded promotional items go a long way toward creating excitement around the launch of your employee activation and keeping the engagement current at every phase. Acting as long-lasting reminders of your brand, its goals, and ways employees can support it, these products can be imprinted with your business’s name, logo, motto, and social media information.

According to branded promotional item research conducted worldwide by the Advertising Specialty Institute, the most popular branded merchandise includes:

Your Local Fully Promoted is Where You Can Find Creative Branded Merchandise to Support Your Employee Activation Program

If you need ideas for branded promotional products to support your employee activation program or any other initiative, your local Fully Promoted team can make expert recommendations based on your goals, timetable, and budget. The possibilities are truly endless in the world of promotional items – we can brand almost anything – so we encourage you to make a statement and choose something truly unique and memorable regardless of your industry or company size.

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