Reflection – Mind Mapping

Challenge

I am member of my organization’s Marketing department and our challenge is to develop our  Employer Brand within the organization. For many years the company did not have an identity as for  who we are as an organization for the employees and what could we offer them. The main goal is to  create that internal identity and promote it to attract future employees that really connect with the  brand.

Selection

We already had information about the company and, quantitative and qualitative data about the  employees company’s perception. So now our goal is to establish criteria for the “what if” idea  generation. Using mind mapping tool we are able to represent the minds of our employees.

Application

We invited employees from different functions, regions, age, company seniority and hierarchy, in  order to have group and thinking diversity. We created 5 different groups, each with 4-5 team  members. The information that we had previously collected was spread out through the room in  different boards. The first activity was to individually evaluate that information and with sticky notes  mark and write what is the key message. The second activity in groups was to cluster and aggregate  the sticky notes. Next, they needed to develop insights about those clusters and propose design  criteria for an Employer Brand.

Insight

By applying the mind mapping tool, we were able to create criteria in order to start the generation  of ideas, which later on we could test. Although all the groups had different clusters, the main  message and the core of the criteria were very similar. For us, that meant that we as an organization  have a strong identity however until now did not speak about it.

Approach

Given that at the time we already had the information, such as employee’s perceptions, employee  journey mapping, the mind mapping was the most appropriate tool. Although we already had  information from the employees, we found important to still use the same stakeholders in this  phase, since they could really read and connect with the data available.

For a next time, we should start with a Visualization tool in order to start to have a discussion and to  achieve a shared understanding of a problem among a diverse group of employees before  attempting to define the criteria.

