Employees talking about their companies within their social graphs is a source of considerable consternation among business leaders. What if make an inaccurate claim? Say something contrary to our official position? Misrepresent a product? Violate a regulation?

Make no mistake: People are being asked about their employers within their social communities, whether that’s Facebook, LinkedIn or some niche network. One company where I was involved in employee research found that more than 80% of employees had been asked about the company where they worked, from job queries to questions about CSR efforts.

There are companies out there that try to deal with this by simply telling their employees not to talk about work online. Most set policies. While policies are important, there’s a step most companies are missing. It’s the same step that’s missing in organizations that have empowered their employees to talk about work online.

The process these companies envision looks something like this:

Phase 1: Employees engage on behalf of the company in social channels
Phase 2: ???
Phase 3: Credibility, transparency and a heightened reputation leading to market share and profit.

Unfortunately, missing that second phase can be a killer. Just ask the underpants gnomes, characters from a classic second-season South Park episode who snuck into Tweek’s bedroom at night to steal his underwear. They, too, had a plan:

Even progressive organizations with well-communicated policies often miss that middle step between authentic employee engagement and improved brand reputation.

The missing step: business literacy.

The level of business, brand and product literacy among frontline employees in most organizations is appalling. They know the products or services for which their own departments are responsible, but beyond that, most employees would be hard-pressed to talk about…

The company

Can the average frontline employee in your organization articulate the company’s vision, mission and values? Do they know who the organization’s key customers are? Competitors? Can they talka bout the marketplace in which it competes? Do they know how the company is viewed by the analyst community? How customers perceive the organization’s customer service and other attributes? Do they know how the company has been performing? Can they read the company’s annual report (the front of the book) and understand what it says?

The brand

Do employees know the brand promise for the company and its various products?

The product line

In some organizations, employees should be able to speak intelligently about every product the company makes. Of course, there are companies that make thousands of products; intimate familiarity with every one of them is impossible. In this case, they should be able to talk about the primary product lines.

Raising business literacy

If employees had this kind of literacy, employers would worry a lot less about what employees might say in an online discussion.

Last November, I offered eight ways internal communications departments can help elevate brand literacy:

• Include it in new-hire orientations
• Tell brand stories
• Curate brand content
• Host internal trade shows and product launches
• Use multiple media and employee-generated content
• Provide training opportunities
• Share customer feedback
• Host polls and quizzes

To this list, I’d like to add a few enhancements and additions:

• Put all employees through training that leads to a basic understanding of balance sheets and profit-and-loss statements. This could be classroom training, online distance learning or some combination of the two. Employees can’t appreciate what contributes to the company’s performance if they can’t read the annual report.


• Feature a product or product line on the intranet home page. Change it up every week.


• Develop a product database that allows employees to find the core information about each product, the team responsible for it (the product manager, the brand manager, etc.), the current advertising and marketing plan, non-proprietary sales numbers, the customer segment at which it is aimed, etc.

What does your company do to improve employees’ business literacy?