Before Starbucks built a formal employee creator program, one of its baristas had already figured out the part most brands spend years trying to manufacture: what people wanted to watch.
Josiah Varghese worked at a Starbucks in Chicago and posted inventive drink videos under the handle @itsjoboi, gaining more than 1 million social media followers. In 2025, he was selected as one of the company’s Global Coffee Creators for a yearlong role creating stories about coffee, culture, and community around the world.
The bigger story is what Starbucks built around that behavior.
Starbucks’ TikTok Creator Network pilot gives selected employee creators briefs and ad-revenue sharing, with the potential to repurpose their content for paid advertising. The model is a step toward the infrastructure needed to find, support, compensate, and measure employee creators.
Other companies, like Dell, Gap and more, are moving in the same direction. Taken together, these programs point to a broader shift: employee-generated content is becoming a structured creator channel.
This requires a very different playbook from asking employees to share the company LinkedIn post.
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Why employee content earns attention and builds trust
The case for employee-generated content starts with a simple advantage: people want to hear from people who actually know the work.
An engineer can explain why a feature works the way it does. A coffee barista can show you how to order a drink. A B2B salesperson can unpack the question buyers keep asking. A customer success leader can spot patterns across dozens of accounts.
Employees bring three assets traditional brand content often lacks:
Expertise: They actually make, sell, implement, support, or use the product.
Proximity: They see the questions customers ask and the work behind the product.
Identity: They enter the feed as a person with a job, point of view and network rather than as a corporate account.
Kayla Monis, Social & Influencer Lead at Later, explains why this is so powerful. “At the end of the day people trust people, not a logo. An employee has a face, a unique point of view, and something to lose if they get it wrong,” she said.
“A brand post can come off as ‘here's what we want you to know.’ An employee post reads as ‘here's what I actually think.’ Employees who were a part of the process close a credibility gap that brand accounts can't.”
The trust data backs that up. Edelman’s 2025 Trust Barometer report found that 63% of people trust brand employees to give accurate information about a brand, ahead of journalists (59%), CEOs (58%), and influencers (58%).
Employees are also helping brands get seen. L’Oréal’s employee advocacy program generated 33 million organic impressions in 18 months, showing how employees’ personal networks can become an influential distribution channel for the companies they work for.
The result is a channel with two advantages: employees know more about the product than the average creator, and they can explain it with a level of specificity a brand account can struggle to match.
Employee advocacy and EGC can coexist. Advocacy distributes brand-created content, while EGC brings employees into the creative process and gives the audience a reason to pay attention.
Traditional employee advocacy | Modern employee-generated content | |
|---|---|---|
Employee’s role | Distributor | Creator or subject-matter expert |
Content source | Marketing team | Employee |
Typical ask | “Share this report” | “Explain this customer problem in your own words” |
Creative control | Brand-led | Employee-led within guardrails |
Common formats | Reposts, links, announcements | Video, POV posts, demos, BTS, reviews |
Incentive | Recognition, company participation | Compensation, affiliate revenue, skills, visibility |
Primary metrics | Shares, reach, clicks | Engagement, conversion, pipeline, revenue, applications |
Companies including Starbucks, Dell, and Gap are already showing what that can look like in practice.
EGC examples: What Starbucks, Dell, and Gap can teach us
A modern EGC program is a distributed creator network inside the company, but there isn’t one template to follow. These examples show different ways to build one, depending on the people, product, and audience.
Starbucks: find the creators already creating
Josiah’s story shows where a strong employee creator program can begin. Starbucks had a barista who was already making drink videos, building an audience, and learning what people wanted to watch.
Starbucks’ newer TikTok Creator Network builds on Green Apron Creators, the employee content program it launched in 2024, adding briefs, distribution, and compensation for selected employee creators.
According to Starbucks, its employees already post on social at roughly three times the rate of employees at similar-sized chains. Employees like Bridget Baron and Rashelle Habati have also generated millions of views for the company.
Dell: certification brings expertise to scale
Dell’s Social Media University shows why employee creator programs work in B2B, where the strongest content may come from expertise, especially when a product requires explanation. The internal ambassador program has previously trained roughly thousands of “champions” across the world.
Dell created a certification path for employees who wanted to learn how to use social media professionally, what they could say, and how to represent the company responsibly. The structure gives technical employees a defined way to participate without asking them to become full-time personalities.
Jessica Pettigrew, a tech reviewer and Dell cloud and edge consultant, shows what this looks like in practice. Her content takes viewers inside the technology, from product reviews to explanations of the servers, networking, and data center systems powering AI.
Gap Inc.: put employee creators inside the creator ecosystem
Gap Inc. is taking a blended approach, bringing employees into its creator, affiliate, and social-advocacy ecosystem.
Gap’s existing public-facing creator program had already generated nearly 30,000 unique posts and reached 154 million users before the company expanded the program to employees in July 2026.
Across these programs, the common thread is structure: employees have a defined way to participate, content has a purpose beyond “post about work,” and brands have systems for training, compensation, distribution, and measurement.
LinkedIn is becoming the proving ground for B2B
B2B marketers have been discussing employee advocacy on LinkedIn for years. The change in 2026 is showing up in the standard of content companies expect from the channel, and now brands are paying more attention to original points of view, individual positioning, and measurable business outcomes.
A company page can announce a product launch, but an employee can explain why the feature matters, what customers have been asking for, or what the team learned while building it.
LinkedIn has reported that employees can have up to 10 times as many followers as their company pages, while employee-shared content can earn twice the click-through rate of company posts. Small employee groups across key departments can therefore create a larger and more credible surface area for B2B content.
The software market is moving in the same direction. According to Future Market Insights, the employee advocacy software market is projected to reach $1.18 billion by 2035. Employee advocacy now has dedicated software, analytics, compliance workflows, and budget conversations.
How to build an employee-generated content program
Making EGC repeatable requires more than a Slack channel and a request to “post about this if you can.” Here’s the playbook you should follow:
Write briefs that leave room for a voice
A great creative brief establishes the audience, campaign goal, key information, format, deadline, required disclosures, and usage plan, yet still leaves enough room for the creator to interpret the assignment.
That balance can be harder than it sounds. Later’s creator research found that 53% of creators consider clear briefs critical, yet only 10% feel they have creative freedom when producing branded content.
“Explain the customer problem this feature solves in your own words” gives an employee something to work with rather than regurgitating corporate-sounding copy. Creators are best at building an audience around their personality and POV, and can create content that their audience wants to watch and read.
Establish a clear exchange of value
Employee creators should receive clear value for the time and effort involved. Starbucks is using ad revenue sharing. Other programs might use flat fees, bonuses, affiliate commissions, paid time, professional development, event opportunities, equipment, or formal recognition.
As briefs, deadlines, deliverables, and usage rights increase, compensation should reflect the work.
Train for confidence and compliance
Employees need the creative fundamentals: hooks, video production, storytelling, platform conventions, and how to translate expertise into content.
They also need guardrails. The FTC considers employment a material connection. Employees endorsing their employer’s products should clearly disclose that relationship; simply listing an employer in a profile isn’t necessarily enough.
All internal teams should agree on disclosures, confidentiality, claims, customer privacy, content ownership, paid usage rights, and what happens to content if someone leaves.
Measure more than participation
“How many employees posted?” tells you whether a program is active, but it doesn’t give you a clue whether the content worked.
A mature measurement framework should move through four levels:
Program health: Active creators, posts per creator, retention, training completion, and turnaround time.
Content performance: Reach, watch time, completion rate, comments, saves, shares, clicks, and cost per asset.
Audience quality: Target accounts reached, job functions, buyer seniority, product-page visitors, qualified applicants, or whatever audience matters to the program.
Business impact: Pipeline, assisted conversions, affiliate revenue, conversion lift, applications, revenue per visitor, or brand lift.
Then compare employee content against something meaningful: corporate social content, external creator assets, paid creative, or a control group.
For B2B, UTMs, CRM campaign membership, creator-specific landing pages, self-reported attribution, and target-account engagement can help connect employee content to pipeline.
Your EGC checklist
Participation is voluntary, with a clear program owner and budget.
Compensation, paid time, disclosures, and usage rights are settled.
A small trained cohort has briefs, guardrails, and a baseline to measure against.
Success is tied to reach, audience quality, and business outcomes, not participation alone.
Employee creators are moving from experiment to expectation
External creator marketing became a serious discipline when brands built systems around the work. Briefs, rates, contracts, rights, reporting, and long-term relationships turned an informal tactic into a channel.
Now employee-generated content is going through the same transition, as more companies discover its power.
Starbucks is putting revenue sharing and TikTok distribution behind barista stories. Dell is showing how certification can turn technical employees into a global network of informed advocates. Gap is bringing employees into the same creator ecosystem as external partners. B2B companies are learning that their strongest voices may be the people already closest to the product and the customer.
In three years, a formal employee creator program may look as ordinary as an influencer program does today. The brands with briefs, compensation structures, training, rights management, and measurement already in place will be ready for that market. Everyone else will still be asking employees to share a post and wondering why the channel never took off.
If you’re ready to formalize employee creators with the same rigor you bring to external creator marketing, Later’s influencer marketing services can help you build the briefing, compensation, and measurement structure around the program.
