Nobody's Left Behind: Getting Companies on Board with the Groundswell

Source: Bell Canada

Social media is a simple tool that brings ordinary people together. By making these technologies as accessible as possible, everyone is able use it in their daily lives. It’s power to the people as Li & Bernoff would explain in Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Companies are realizing that they also need to adopt these groundswell technologies to reach their customers on the platforms that they are already on. Although social media is so easy to use, companies face two problems: 1) how to use it strategically without looking like an ad and 2) getting the rest of the company on board.

For change to be successful in any organization, it needs to be accepted and valued from within the organization first. This poses a challenge for employees that are already thinking at the groundswell level. Convincing other departments and senior leadership that tapping into the groundswell is a worthwhile investment is not that easy despite many of these people being present on social media in their normal lives.

In her book review, Deirdre Breakenridge summarizes key points from Chapter 10 to help your approach to getting your entire organization on board.

Bell Canada, ID-ah!

Bell Canada, a telecommunications company was able to successfully change its organizational culture through the groundswell. Starting with a series of informal coffee sessions with small groups of employees, Rex Lee, director collaboration services, found that employees were often complaining and not taking a problem-solving approach regarding the company. A common response he would get is “it’s not my problem” and the pressure was put on Rex to solve it all.

Source: On Camera Audiences

Inspired by American Idol, Rex developed ID-ah! which is similar to salesforce.com’s IdeaExchange. On the platform, employees could submit ideas and vote on them. The result of ID-ah! was fifteen thousand employees visited the site and six thousand voted. In 2007, twenty-seven of the top ideas were considered for review and twelve were eventually implemented.

Rather than just being a hub for ideas, ID-ah! was changing employees’mindset about their ability to solve company problems and the importance of their input. Rex states, “We wanted each person to be personally invested in Bell, to feel a sense of accountability. And we saw ID-ah! as one of the key ways we could do this.” Executives were nervous about ID-ah! because it could generate false information and negative posts. Rex reassured them that it was necessary for them to let go of that control and give more power to the employees by getting them involved early in the testing phase. Before rolling out ID-ah! to all employees, it was tested in smaller groups to show that this investment would be worth it for the entire organization.

Sometimes change is hard to accept and implement, no matter how clear the evidence of its effectiveness is. To get people on board, it’s necessary to take it one step at a time and to slowly integrate it at different levels of the organization rather than enacting change suddenly.

Has a major change happened in your workplace recently? How did people react to it? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see you in the next post!