Challenge

I am a member of the leadership team in a Project Office for a large financial company. The leadership  team works with highly driven professional business analysts and project managers who are responsible  for delivering on both business and technology enhancements, improvements, regulatory and end of life  projects across the enterprise. A key challenge we face is maintaining our associate engagement in a  relatively flat structure (3 roles within the job family) across three locations (all within the United  States), with a variety of educational backgrounds, experiences, cultural influences and expectations.

Selection

We used a variety of tools to understand associate engagement gaps and perceptions to include:

•  Feedback gathering sessions – we pulled all associates together by site. We used a more senior,  tenured associate to facilitate these sessions. The goal was to capture site specific themes and  we wanted to ensure open dialog which is why we did not include any members of the  leadership team. After the sessions, we reviewed the feedback for commonalities and themes.  •  Ideation Session – we solicited interest to participate in a cross-site Ideation Session. We wanted  to ensure that the associates had a desire to participate which is why we solicited for  volunteers. We selected from the volunteers to ensure that each site had representation.   •  Visualization – we facilitated the Ideation Session virtually using a Miro whiteboarding tool. We  used this tool because it was easy to share ideas on sticky notes virtually and it is a very  interactive tool.

Application

We began the Ideation Session by using different techniques to ensure the team was ready to  collaborate and their brains were ready to be creative. We started by reviewing the Muda – The 8  Wastes - to identify activities that do not add value to a process. We set some ground rules for  brainstorming such as, defer judgement, all ideas are welcome, build on ideas from others, be visual, go  for quantity. We warmed up our brains by playing a game called Disruptus – we shared a visual that was  telling a story and the group was challenged to come up with ideas to create, transform, improve or  disrupt what was displayed in 1 minute. We then used the Miro Board to conduct a brainstorming  activity where the group used sticky notes to capture as many problems (not solutions) as they could in  5 minutes.

Examples:

Following the brainstorming we conducted a show & tell + Affinity Group – each participant shared their  ideas in 1 minute. We grouped interrelated ideas to identify themes and used a multi-voting,  prioritization exercise to vote on the most compelling business problems. We came away with 3  opportunities:

The Miro board was very effective in our virtual setting and the team was highly engaged because the  tool is very interactive.

Insight

All participants came away from this session feeling that they were able to share all of their opinions and  all opinions were valued. The tool created a very open, collaborative environment. It also allowed for  the group to prioritize what is most important to them. We achieved a lot in two hours and came away  with specific opportunities to drive engagement.

