Learning Launch

By: Abbas Hernandez

Challenge:    Problem:

• At company X we have an ongoing issue with employees complaining that their ideas

are not being heard. This is due to a lack of transparency with ideas that are submitted.  The current process includes submitting an idea via an online form and receiving an  email confirmation that it has been received. Another issue is the backlog of ideas  received cannot be processed by Management. This has led to decreased morale within  the organization.

Project Scope:

• I am the project manager for the Change Management department implementing a

transparent ideation tool that will allow management to quickly evaluate ideas based on  the following scope:

o Goal: Implement a new ideation tool to provide transparency and boost morale.  o Audience: 4000 employees from various departments within the organization.  o Budget: $300,000  o Completion: 3 months  o Resources: internal and external  o Departments: Communications, IT, Legal, Compliance, Human Resources, and

Change Management.

Selection:    The team conducted 40 interviews across the organization that included every department.  From the interviews personas of the entire employee base was established. Using those  personas, the team felt the learning launch tool would have the most impact. It would provide  transparency and boost morale even if the ideation tool was a failure, at least the employees  would see that the company is trying to fix the issue quickly.    Application:    Our learning launch was the pilot implementation of a 3rd party crowdsourced ideation cloud  based SaaS platform called Faucet.   Faucet had several benefits that made them the obvious choice.

• Deep understanding of our industry.  • Cloud based platform. This made implementation very fast. 3 months exactly.  • SaaS (software as a service) platform allowed us to keep costs at a minimum. $250,000

total cost.

• Crowdsource ideation challenges: This was a process where the Senior Management

posed a challenge question to the 4000 employees. The employees then could have the  option to submit an idea, vote on an idea from their peers, or comment on their fellow  employee’s idea. Based on the voting a commenting the great ideas rise to the top.  Then Senior Management selects the winning idea from the challenge.

Expected metrics were recommended by Faucet:

• Employee participation: 30%  • Number of idea: 400  • Active employee participation: 50%

Insight:    By implementing the learning launch of Faucet our team saw the immediate impact in real  time. In the first week of the challenge we had 30% participation and over 300 ideas submitted.  During the life of the challenge the final metrics were as follows:

• Employee participation: 45%  • Number of ideas: 476  • Active employee participation: 75%

After the challenge a survey was conducted with the participating employees and the  management team. The employee hailed the transparency of the platform, they liked being  able to see idea get voted and commented on. They also enjoyed being able to expand an idea  via commenting. Management also enjoyed the reduced workload. Having employees vet a  majority of the ideas provided gave an immense relief. Using the old idea vetting process those  476 ideas would have taken over year to analyze. By testing our assumptions of crowdsourcing  an idea challenge the learn launch was a huge success.    Approach:    Given the deep understanding of the employees via the personas the team felt the learning  launch was the right tool for the job and based on the overwhelming response, those  assumptions were correct. Hopefully the continued use of the personas will provide the  homeruns on a regular basis. The team will revisit the personas on a quarterly basis by  conducting in refinement interviews.

