Growth Hacking Employee Engagement

A trend is sweeping across the marketing landscape and re-defining businesses; it’s called growth hacking. Blogger Sean Ellis is considered to be the originator of the term “growth hacker” and he defined it as “a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth.”

Growth hacking takes old-school playbooks and throws them right out the window. 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 honor.

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 HR?

Why Should HR Care?

Just like marketing and sales, human resources 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.