Implementing an employee advocacy program for any organization can come with challenges and hurdles. Couple that with implementing it in a regulated industry, like a bank, and the challenges are amplified, but far from being a deterrent. In fact, the financial industry can, and does, prove to be one of the best areas to implement an employee advocacy program because the end user needs to trust their financial institution, and their friends and colleagues are more trustworthy than a faceless brand.

In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, we meet Yvonne Boateng, the Employee Advocacy Director for Standard Chartered Bank, who championed her company’s employee advocacy program. Recognizing early on that the company social media policy needed to match their desires for employees to share, alongside executive buy-in, led to a successful implementation, increasing engagements by 180X. Yvonne explains to listeners how and why the program was a success as well as hurdles she encountered early on that others should be aware of when implementing their program.

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Transcript:

Glenn: Our guest today would like everyone to know that her views expressed on today’s podcast are her own.

Glenn: Welcome back to the show. Today I’m speaking with Yvonne Boateng. Yvonne, welcome to the show!

Yvonne: Hi, Glenn. Thank you very much for having me. I’m super excited to be here with you. So, thanks.

Glenn: Yvonne, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Yvonne: Yes. Sure. At the moment, I’m the Employee Advocacy Director for Standard Chartered Bank. So, at the moment, my responsibility it’s strategizing, executing, planning, deploying, scaling, and it’s really, at the moment, a one-man-band. So, there’s a lot going on at the moment with the program. But so far it’s been super fantastic. We’ve had excellent results and just before that I was the Social Media Director Lead as well at Standard Chartered Bank. So, I was doing the same thing but globally for our social media channels – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and we just started Instagram. And then, before that, I was at LinkedIn for four years. So, I’ve been, you know, technology-side, and then I’ve been client-side as well. So, it’s really been great to have that other angle.

Glenn: You know to me – and I mentioned this before we started the show, I am thrilled because you have employee advocacy in your title. And I’m also thrilled by the fact that it’s in a bank. So, how did that happen because you were on the social media side but then you were given a title which is very, very specific. So, you’ve gone from, more kind of broadly, social media to very specifically employee advocacy. Can you tell us a little bit about that journey?

Yvonne: Yeah, absolutely. And just to apologize for my voice, it’s a little bit croaky. So, I was at LinkedIn, I moved to Standard Chartered a little bit earlier than I planned. And that was because I was given masterclasses on, you know, social media, how to do LinkedIn, how to do social in general, what kind of process, etc. And one of the directors who worked at Standard Chartered reached out to me a few months after that to, you know, offer me a position at the bank. And as you do, I was quite okay at LinkedIn, but after kind of looking into the opportunity then it was one that I really couldn’t pass up. So, I started doing broadly social media for the bank. And I was in about, I would say, eight months in, and thankfully, after much preaching and educating, we, the bank, realized that this is important. Employee advocacy is important. You know, we educated on the benefits to leadership, we have to get their buy-in, that was absolutely crucial.

And if I kind of take you a step back, the bank has always said, you know, stay away from social media when it relates to the bank. So, it’s been a whole 360 transformation and it’s been a beast of a task and I’m just glad that I’m able to make a difference and bring that to the bank. And a lot of people are really excited about the opportunity, they are really onboard. And it’s so humbling to see that people have been looking for this, colleagues that have wanted something like this for a long, long time. So, that is my single focus, employee advocacy planning, executing.

So, we just launched in September so it’s still really early days. But amazingly we’ve had super, super results. You know, 180X engagements versus before we had the platform implemented. And my role is seeing how fast or how quickly colleagues are picking this up. It’s now about scaling – bearing in mind it’s one person managing the whole program globally. So, that’s been quite a challenge, but it’s been interesting and I’ve loved every single moment of it.

And being a bank, it was that much harder to convince senior stakeholders, compliance, we love them, they have their challenges and their concerns, which are really fair concerns. And what I say to people is, because I get that question a lot – how have you done this in a bank? The single most important thing was educating the leaders and taking them along the journey so that they can understand why this is important. And then once you have that, you have their buy-in, then you need to tweak it when you’re speaking to colleagues and show them the benefits to them first as professionals. There’s no way, you know, you’re going to sell this in to colleagues and they will do this willingly, post about the bank on their own personal social media, if there is no win for them. So, for me, the training and all the education material has been showcasing the win-win-win scenario.

Glenn: Did you find that you had some preconceived notions that you had to change with the senior leadership or was it just the – this is how we’ve always done it, we haven’t said anything online, we’ve been, you know, we’re highly regulated, everything, and that is certain – that mindset. But did they have a preconceived notion of what employee advocacy or even social media would be like if you started to bring it in-house and started to actually execute it?

Yvonne:  I wouldn’t say they really understood employee advocacy or the concept. It’s such a simple concept and it’s simple yet powerful. So, it was really about just removing that word ’employee advocacy’ and explaining and letting them know, social media is not going anywhere at the moment. So, we need to use this to the brand’s advantage, because no matter what we do in organic or paid it won’t really make the impact or have the impact that we want if the brand kind of – the brand isn’t there, it hasn’t been built up in a certain way. And how do you do that effectively, you use your colleagues, who, you know, if we combine all of them – I’m preaching to the choir here – but, you know, all of them combined can have greater impact.

So, for us, we removed employee advocacy as a term and I was talking about champions, you know, brand advocates, people who are telling the story and that clicked with them and the penny kind of dropped. And now they are fully onboard. There are still other stakeholders that were taken along the journey, but, for example, our CEO, who didn’t have LinkedIn, we activated him this summer, which was a really big win, a really big win for us. And, yeah, we’re happy that he’s on there. It’s been about two-and-a-half months or three months and his follower growth has been exponential, it’s been quite crazy.

And that’s the power, we have as a brand, posted something, and then the CEO has posted the same thing and the engagement was far greater – it was double, the numbers were double when he posted the exact same video. And for me, that was the cards, to say, guys, look this is what we’ve been telling you, people trust people. Now, yes, it may be a CEO, so, you know, it’s kind of slightly different to just the normal colleagues. But the fact still remains, two videos, this is the difference when it was posted by us as the brand whereas as posted by the CEO as an individual person.

Glenn: Yeah. I mean, it makes sense, right? Because people engage with people. They don’t necessarily engage with something that isn’t going to engage back with them.

Yvonne:  And that is it. People now expect a presence, you know, they want to know who are those people behind the brand logo. And with social media, no one can hide anyone, unfortunately, so we need to own it. And if we want to own it ourselves, as opposed to letting anyone else own it, then we need to make sure that, you know, colleagues understand the benefits and the story and then telling that story for us.

Glenn: Now, being in a highly regulated industry such as banking, and you mentioned it before, there’s people who are involved in just making sure, you know, all the t’s are crossed, all the i’s are dotted with anything and everything that the bank has to say publicly. How do you have conversations with those folks and how do you put them at ease that this is actually going to be an alignment with what they’re trying to do rather than cause them probl