Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Employee advocacy is taking corporate communications by stormr.

Encouraging employees to be your organization's champions could be the perfect answer to journalists increasingly seeking real stories on social media.

Companies like Cisco and Danske Bank are already experimenting with employee social-media takeovers. Don't sack your spokesperson, but it's definitely time to give your employees the forum they deserve....

Concerning internal communication elements critical for employee engagement, we found that satisfaction with feedback, informal communication and communication during meetings are the most relevant ICS dimensions for employee engagement. Our results confirm previous findings that feedback (e.g. Bakker & Demerouti, 2008), open channels of communication (e.g. Caesens, Stinglhamber & Luypaert, 2014), communication between supervisors and employees (e.g. Agarwal, Datta, Blake-Beard & Bhargava, 2012), and sharing information with employees (e.g. Durkin, 2007) are vital enablers of engagement.

However, even though our results imply a causal relationship between ICS and employee engagement (and even though engagement is mostly conceptualized as an outcome of internal communication, e.g. Ruck & Welch, 2012), what matters most is that internal communication and employee engagement “feed” each other in a continuous virtual circle.

Our results show that internal communication should be recognized as an underlying influence of employee engagement (Karanges et al., 2015). This implies that internal communication strategies, when effectively applied, help organizations to create and sustain high levels of employee engagement, which leads to higher levels of performance....