Growth Hacking Employee Engagement

A growth hacking strategy relies heavily on creativity, social tools, and data. Instead of blindly adopting one strategy in lieu of another, growth hacking backs up every move with data and testing in a social environment. At the core, it is all about learning. Learning comes from testing, collecting data, monitoring results, and deriving insights. Combine these with creativity and your organization will thrive. 

This approach is obvious for Silicon Valley startups because they need to drive engagement, maximize brand awareness, sell products/services, and show results to their venture capitalists. Growth is their badge of honour. 

Growth hacking is also relevant to the Global 1000 because growth is what drives and sustains the enterprise. Growth engages the stockholders. Growth helps engage the workers in those companies to improve. So why not bring growth hacking to Human Resources (HR)? 

Why Should HR Care? 

Just like marketing and sales, HR departments need to deliver results. The metrics may be different for marketing, sales, and HR, but associates still need to be engaged in their work and in the corporate culture. And there are all sorts of statistics demonstrating how engaged employees deliver better results and higher profits. HR also understands that the metrics used to identify engagement are changing. Laser focus your metrics on creativity, social tools and learning, and build a database that will help you drive growth.

Here are some ways growth hacking techniques can be applied to engage your employees:

1. Onboarding

By growth hacking the onboarding process, the objective is to maximize early and effective engagement of every new hire. HR can refocus the onboarding process toward social interaction with supervisors and co-workers. (We're not talking about pizza parties and the bowling league. We're talking about online recognition, chat streams, online work forums, etc.) In other words: build and measure the social exchange for new hires. Take the pulse of the social capital of the organization. Create an environment that reinforces the corporation’s values through measurable social touch points.

Also, HR can demonstrate the company’s values by regularly recognizing new hires. Researchers conclude that people with higher engagement during the onboarding process are more likely to become engaged tenured employees. Get new associates off to a good start by leveraging measurable social tools.

2. Relevant Content

Growth hacking and content go hand-in-hand. In the HR world, the old school tendency has been to give everyone at the company the same big group hug. While one-to-one messaging is hardly practical, a group-segmentation approach could deliver excellent results. Sales reps and accountants have different information needs, so why not tailor your content to align with their personas and their business needs?

Given today’s technology, there’s no excuse for presenting your corporate content without segmenting your audiences. A single smart-technology source can streamline the communication process and increase retention of the desired messages because of relevance. If you want to grow engagement, segment your audience.

3. Learning

Integral to growth hacking is testing, observing, tweaking and repeating – and then learning from all of that. These tools are used to validate good ideas for the business and shut down the ineffective ones before they become “I’d like to see you in my office” issues. Marketers and salespeople need different tools to do their jobs, and, to some extent, they learn differently.

We all have our own bag of tricks full of webinars and emails, yet we know, intuitively, that relying on old stand-by approaches get us the same results we had in the past. In order to grow, we need to be testing new models and learning from them. Don’t stop testing, tweaking, and learning ways to engage different segments of your employee population. Create a culture of experimentation that thrives on “what if?” rather than “that’s the way we’ve always done it.”

4. Analytics

Foundational to growth hacking is analytics. Big data is alive and well in marketing, so why not apply it to HR? Growth hacking doesn’t just look at metrics as a reporting function, but rather as inspiration for process enhancement, data-driven segmentation and better decision-making.

HR already considers self-reported data to be valuable (note the annual employee satisfaction survey). However, more frequent pulses on happiness and job satisfaction are gaining momentum. We see insights coming from regular employee satisfaction polls (not monster surveys). Combine these self-reported data points with measurable activities and a dashboard becomes a source of insight.

Because we know there’s a high correlation between manager involvement and employee productivity, you might monitor how engaged your managers are at recognizing their team members’ and others’ contributions.

They are a critical group that could be sinking your ship. The point is to use analytics to weed out what isn’t working and double down on the initiatives that are successful.

5. Virality

Without virality, growth hacking wouldn’t thrive. By aligning messages that drive action among audiences, your content increases in credibility and at a low cost. Having content that your employees want to share organically is optimal. Give them something to Like, Tweet, and Share. (And by the way, good messages rarely end up on Glassdoor.)

Imagine the power that social recognition can have within the boundaries of a safe corporate social exchange. You’ll be surprised at how well regulated the employee base can be when it’s operating on the social fabric of the organization rather the calculative financial side.

The social fabric of the organization is exquisitely powerful and can be tapped for building your culture. Today, there are platform tools and apps that facilitate the non-monetary aspects of life at your enterprise, help engage your workforce and build a workplace that is desirable in the communities you serve. Go viral for more growth.

Growth Hack It

Bring something fresh to your next HR meeting. Bring an idea that leverages the power of virality, analytics and relevant content to your team. Discuss how impactful a campaign to engage your employees in healthy behaviour might be if you tested a creative concept before rolling it out globally. Consider how your employees might feel if they were treated to an onboarding process that not only focused on them but also integrated them into the enterprise’s global culture. And when all of this is packaged together under the moniker of learning, you’ll experience growth as your own true north.

Enjoy your new life as a Growth Hacker.

To learn more about BIWORLDWIDE Canada and our Social Recognition Platform, DayMaker, click here or email us at canada@BIWORLDWIDE.com.