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.

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,