Employee voices drown out brand voices in B2B – so how do you orchestrate them? Rida Oyebade of Workday on employee advocacy

Why is employee advocacy so often mistaken for a content strategy? Rida Oyebade, Senior Social Media Manager at Workday, explains why handing employees “ready-made content” isn’t enough — advocacy only works when it still sounds like the person sharing it, not the brand behind them.

In this episode of Trust & Influence in B2B, host Joel Harrison talks to Rida Oyebade about employee advocacy — the discipline of turning colleagues into credible, willing voices for the brand. Rida traces her own path into advocacy, breaks down the different tiers of an advocacy programme, and is candid about what she’s learned building one from scratch at Workday: why participation has to stay genuinely optional, why no programme survives without real buy-in from leadership, and why the whole discipline is really about borrowed trust rather than borrowed content.

In this episode

• Why brand-originated content is losing ground to individual voices in B2B
• Why handing employees ready-made content isn’t the same as earning their voice
• The three tiers of employee advocacy, and why each needs different handling
• Why employee advocacy means borrowing someone’s “personal real estate” — and why participation has to stay optional
• What actually makes advocacy programmes work, and why persuasion alone isn’t enough
• Whether employee advocacy is a specialism worth building a career around

Guest

Rida Oyebade is Senior Social Media Manager at Workday, where she leads employee advocacy — working with colleagues, or “influencers” as she prefers to call them, to carry the brand into places a corporate account can’t reach.