Employee engagement is a metric that most companies have become fixated on. But measuring engagement isn’t always easy…or the right thing to measure in the first place. Internal communication professionals need to start thinking about employee activation.

What is Employee Activation?

Employee activation is when an employee takes a specific, desired action as a result of a program or campaign directed at them. So they aren’t just engaging with content (e.g. likes and comments), they’re actually doing a behavior. 

For example: you send out an open enrollment email. An employee might engage with that content by opening it and liking the post in your app, but acting on it would be if the employee took the step to enroll in benefits.

What is the Difference Between Engagement and Activation?

Employee engagement often measures how an employee feels about the company or the act of engaging with communications. 

Employee activation is the measure of action they take as a result of that initial engagement.

So, an employee might be engaged but not activated. But activated employees are almost always also engaged. And activation is more important to measure for ROI than engagement because it measures tangible actions rather than feelings.

Why Measure How Activated Your Employees Are

When you’re putting together communications plans with activation as a focus, you present yourself as a strategic partner within your organization versus just being the writer, the editor, the email sender. You become the strategic communicator within the organization that knows how, when, and why to deliver messages a certain way in order to achieve business results. And that’s a big shift for a lot of people within their companies. 

Today, many of you may have departments coming to you last minute and asking you to send a message out ASAP. But when you position yourself as a strategic advisor, you can take a step back and say, why next week? What happens if I don’t send it today and I wait until our regular cadence? You show stakeholders that it’s not just about the delivery of the message. It’s about the results.

What Our Guide to Employee Activation Includes:

• A comprehensive explanation of what employee engagement and employee activation are.
• Why activation is a more valuable metric for internal comms pros than engagement at this point.
• How to start measuring and improving activation today.
• Tips for creating a strategy that both engages and activates your teams.