Webinar.
Creating a Humanized Culture through Employee Advocacy
Ambassify | Simone Bonnett
Join our conversation with Social Media Strategist & Employee Advocacy Expert Simone Bonnett as we unravel together the true meaning and importance of a well-developed and authentic employee advocacy strategy and program and its vital role in creating a humanized company culture.
Why a humanized culture is a business decision, not a soft one
Simone Bonnett opens with a definition that frames the whole conversation. A humanized culture means viewing your team as humans, not as cogs in a business. The effects of that view are concrete: higher engagement and productivity, lower turnover, easier access to high-calibre talent, stronger diversity and inclusion because everyone has a seat at the table, and a measurably better bottom line. Studies show companies with well thought out employee advocacy strategies are around 23% more profitable. It really should be a no-brainer. Value your people, the business grows.
"A humanized culture means viewing your team as humans, not as cogs in your business."
Why hybrid and remote work raised the stakes for culture
Hybrid culture brings access to a much bigger talent pool, which is essential for growth. It also brings distance, time zones, and the risk of a fractured work culture. The transition happened fast, which is what made it hard for many businesses. But it also brought the humanizing of culture to the fore, which was a positive nobody expected.
The solution is built into a real employee advocacy strategy: consultation and collaboration. No matter where someone sits or what time zone they're in, they get a seat at the table, they feel they're contributing, and they get to showcase themselves. The opposite, telling a team what to do in a way that makes them feel disenfranchised, is the fastest route to alienation in any culture, in-office or remote.
In offices, alienation was easier to mask with water cooler chat. In a hybrid setup it shows immediately. People can hide behind their screens, do rote tasks every day, and never feel part of the team. The fix is regular check-ins, real conversation about every campaign before it goes out, and bringing people along for the journey. The difference between a good and a bad culture shows up in how the team speaks about where they work. When the culture is good, being an ambassador isn't a heavy lift.
Why employee advocacy specifically builds culture
Consultation and collaboration give people the feeling that they're contributing. Contribution is where employees start to feel valuable. Training is part of the same package. Some people are nervous of LinkedIn or other platforms, so an advocacy programme involves upskilling them, which is a benefit in itself. Gamification rewards participation. The reward doesn't always have to be a bottle of champagne, it can be the chance to showcase your skills on the business's own channels.
The humans are central to a good strategy, which is why it works for culture. Look after your people, you're looking after your business. Good common sense, really.
What a real employee advocacy strategy actually involves
This isn't "here's the post, share it out". A strategy starts by being clear on what you're trying to achieve. Is it bottom-line impact without a big spend? Is it culture? Is it both? Is it brand awareness at scale? You need to decide before you build.
Then you set goals and KPIs that are actually measurable, get stakeholder buy-in at every level, design gamification and incentives that encourage even the quieter team members to take part, and put real training in place. Training matters not just because of platform mechanics, but because of how to interact authentically: when a casual caption fits, what hashtags to use, how to avoid the spam filters that trigger when forty people post the same thing word for word. Then there's the ongoing monitoring and evaluation: regular check-ins, fine-tuning, deciding what to add or remove.
There are a lot of moving parts. Traditionally the work fell under HR, but increasingly it sits with social media. Either way, it isn't a side hustle. It needs structure and it needs an owner.
Helping employees find their authentic voice
There's no one size fits all. Some teams have an absolute horror of using an emoji on LinkedIn because of preconceived notions about the platform. Others fear that posting anything will mean being judged. There's often a ball of fear around posting, period.
The approach that works is talking people through something they feel comfortable with. Done is better than nothing at all. If you get a previously nervous person to post something softer than you'd have liked, but at least they posted, they start getting a feel for the platform. From there it becomes collaborative. Sometimes it's literally taking people by the hand and walking them through it.
LinkedIn itself has changed. It isn't the staid, suit-wearing platform from years ago. People are now using the full spectrum of tone on there, from corporate to candid. The job is finding the comfortable place where each person can be authentic, then guiding them through it. That's why every advocacy programme needs someone leading it, monitoring it, collaborating. It's not an afterthought in your culture or your marketing, it's a pillar.
Measuring what matters and why a platform beats a spreadsheet
A real advocacy platform like Ambassify gives you the ability to monitor performance against KPIs like impressions, brand awareness, and traffic, while also tracking employee participation. Without that, you're guessing at who's really contributing. With it, you start to see which people are participating fully, which ones are becoming true thought leaders, and which ones could move into being key content contributors.
Content is the oil that makes the machine run. If you don't have something to say or a way to say it, the business stalls. As employees develop into content contributors, you start seeing the real success of the programme. The content becomes genuinely authentic, which is what people trust more than brand-led content. A jump in brand awareness shows up. A jump in traffic shows up, often driven more by employee posts than by brand posts. Engaged traffic produces leads, leads produce conversions. That's the ROI line.
"People don't trust logos, they don't trust companies. They trust people."
The biggest barrier to widespread adoption of an advocacy programme is the measurement of ROI. If you can't tie advocacy back to the bottom line, what is it worth? A platform that measures attribution accurately, integrates with the social platforms you care about, and produces real reporting solves that.
The other big advantage of a platform is ease of adoption. If employees have to jump between tools, copy-paste from a sheet, then head to LinkedIn to post, they drop off. If the advocacy lives in an app or on the desktop and the content comes to them, adoption stays high.
Co-creating content with employees, not just for them
In an ideal world, you co-create with everyone. In reality, you start with the proactive ambassadors, the people who are comfortable enough to jump straight in. Sit down with them, decide together what to create, how they want to be featured, whether they're more comfortable with a blog post, a video, or a short LinkedIn post. It has to be voluntary, and it has to fit their comfort zone.
Pure "here's the post, share it" rarely produces good results. Co-creation broadens out the thought leadership and broadens out the ideas. You also massively expand the content team, which any content lead knows is the real bottleneck. Everyone wins: employees feel they're contributing meaningfully, the business gets a wider bank of content.
Avoiding the social sharing fatigue trap
When companies tell employees exactly what to post and exactly how to post it, what they've actually built is a dictatorship inside their work culture. People don't flourish in dictatorships.
"If your team is communicating the same message word for word, that's a dictatorship, not advocacy."
The signs are easy to spot from the outside. A sudden wave of identical posts. No room for individuality. No room for contribution. It's a rote exercise. There's been no thought put into the strategy, and often there's micromanagement at the management level too. Copy-paste posts are sometimes a misguided one-off, but more often they're a key symptom of a bad company culture.
Gen Z and Millennials notice. They're much choosier about the culture they'll work in, and with hybrid work they've got the world to choose from. They check how employees talk about the company online before they apply. So copy-paste advocacy doesn't just look weak, it actively turns off the talent you want to attract.
Reversing a bad pattern means going back to the start. Sit down with the team, ask what they want to say, what they think would be meaningful, how you can help each other. It's not quick. It needs top stakeholder buy-in. But it's possible.
What employees get out of advocacy
The clearest personal benefit is profile. Employees raise their visibility on LinkedIn while advocating for the company. Nobody stays at one company for life any more, the average is two to three years. Most hiring now happens through LinkedIn profiles and on-platform interaction. Raising your profile increases your worth as a candidate and as a current employee.
Then there's the training itself, which is a transferable skill. There's job satisfaction from being plugged into a culture you spend six to ten hours a day inside. There's a real community benefit, especially in hybrid setups where loneliness in a crowd is a real thing. And there's the recognition that comes from contributing meaningfully to the company's growth, not just to the campaigns you happen to own.
People want to belong. They want to know they're doing a good job. Rewarding them for that is the second half of the benefit.
Why gamification works
A leaderboard between teams turns advocacy into a healthy internal rivalry. Sales versus marketing will go hard for the top spot regardless of the size of the reward, because the competition itself is the engine. Individual recognition like employee-of-the-month has a measurable impact on how people feel about work, for the same reason.
Closing thoughts and Q&A highlights
Three questions came up at the end worth flagging.
On employees going off-piste and posting natively, beyond the advocacy platform. Simone's view: it's a good sign, as long as it happens inside a real advocacy strategy where everyone has been brought along. It means employees are confident and happy enough to talk about the company in their own way, on their own channels. The caveat is communication: occasionally someone might miscommunicate a value or a theme. The fix is to keep the conversation open, not to clamp down.
On how to introduce advocacy in a developing-economy business with limited budget. Done is better than nothing. Consultation and collaboration cost time, not money. Start there. Begin contributing to content together, which removes a separate cost. Use the natural ambassadors on your team to help train the rest. Any business at any stage should start with the same basic principle: collaboration and consultation with the team.
Two final notes from Simone for the broader audience. Advocacy is becoming a pillar of how businesses are built, not a side activity. And the businesses that take care of their people are the ones that, very simply, still have a business at the end of the day.