Employee Spotlights: A Marketing Strategy for Effectively Engaging and Connecting (Part 1/5)

AUGUST EMPLOYEE SPOTLIGHT

Do you love your job? We spend 40+ hours working every week, it’s important to not only love what you do, but enjoy who you do it with. Collaboration with co-workers is crucial to drive business results. And when you have a good relationship with your co-workers, life—and work—is better.

If you work for a company that has over 50 employees, you might not know every person, because you may only interact with a few people. And, if you work for a distributed company, you don’t even have the option of “bumping into co-workers at the water cooler.”  You probably need that interaction the most. There are several strategies for effectively engaging and connecting employees, even if remote:

1.            Company Retreats

2.            All Company Meetings

3.            Social Hours

4.            Group Meals

5.            Employee Spotlights

Employee spotlights are engaging and a simple way to connect people at your company. People always want to hear about other people. It’s human nature. andgreat recently implemented a monthly employee spotlight with one of our distributed clients. Each month, a different team member is chosen. The key is to not choose the people everyone is already familiar—but to choose people that are newer to the company, or work in a department or areas that are not afforded much interaction.

Questions. Some of the questions can be light-hearted and fun, and others can relate back to the company and their specific role. This should be a fun exercise for the employee. A good number of questions is 8-10, as a few questions may be “passed” by the employee. Here are a few sample questions from which you can pull:

Are you messy or organized?

What is your role at the company?

Where is your favorite place to eat?

Where do you go to unplug?

Where did you work previous?

Interview. Conduct an in-person/video interview so you can get hear real time answers with more detail. We use the caricature headshots as the featured image. It’s fun to have a visual of who you are reading and it lends to a more consistent look over the Blog as well.

Publish. Publish the Spotlight on your company blog and promote via social media. Key: Don’t forget to promote to the internal team, i.e., the entire company. They too should be sharing it on social media, re-tweeting, liking, etc. Employees should be your biggest fans.

Repeat. Be sure you are asking employees to comment internally on Spotlights. Slack is a great tool for that. It’s important to release Spotlights on a regular schedule so you create a culture of anticipation and recognition. The first of the month is a good time.

We’ll dig deeper into the other above strategies in future posts, so check back often. We’d love to hear what are you doing to engage and connect employees.