Story:
Embracing the talent and perspective

Social media in the workplace sounds like a great idea since people use social media in their private lives. While it is a big part of our private life, workplace integration is not easy. There are often other challenges, like risk, perception, and employee engagement.

In July of 2013, we welcomed our new group of interns. As part of their 11-week assignment, the interns are provided a stretch project. Each of the projects has a sponsor. I was one of the sponsors and my project was harness connection (Jive) – improving employee engagements. I came up with the idea because of the slow pace with which social media is embraced at our workplace.

My idea was to introduce the team to Jive/connection and let them play with it. I gave them the background of social media usage and challenged them to come up with ideas on how to make it stick. Over the next five weeks, the team did their day job and at the same time worked on the stretch goal. They used the tool and applied it to their daily work life. They figured out the best-use case on how to use the tool for collaboration and exchange of knowledge amongst people across the enterprise without the worry of geographical boundaries.

To help them make progress, I taught them Agile. Agile enabled them to break the work into sprint, or shorter segments, and focus on a deliverable at the end of the sprint. A couple times a week, we would meet and discuss their ideas and I would challenge them to extend their ideas and encourage them to stretch outside of their comfort zone.

We called ourselves Tiger Team 3. The team focused on three main areas: Marketing, Engagement and Redesign. The redesign team came up with the following:
1) Various template layouts
2) Frequently ask questions collection
3) Video tutorials
They put their creativity into creating their video tutorials. The Marketing team came up with the following:
1) Marketing campaign
2) Created new hire one-pager on how to use Jive/Connections
The engagement team analyzed the historical usage to provide the marketing and redesign team the inputs it needed to prepare their deliverables. They also worked with some of the power users to understand their usage and interview them on their experience, with the tool aiming to improve collaboration and exchange of information in the enterprise. They came up with recommendations on how to better use the tool to enable your team. The video tutorials they created were commended by the power users.

At the end of their rotation, Tiger Team 3 presented to the committee and was able to wow the committee on the depth and their creativity and approach. As their sponsor, I took an existing challenge, engaged and fostered an environment that allowed them to apply their creativity and perspective to help us harness the use of connection/Jive. I took a problem and let people who have not seen the problem or the environment and let them interact with one another to come up with new ideas of addressing the challenging. While the team total enjoyed their experience and exposure, I also was also rewarded with a result that I was not so sure would work when I first came up with the idea, but I stretched outside of my comfort zone to give it a try. By taking a risk, I was rewarded.