Chapter 3
Share Stories Around, Up, and Out
“People are tied together by anecdotes, impressions, observations,
and narratives, which together map the shape and substance of
their world. Then community becomes a diverse garden of connected
stories; the more deeply people know the stories, the more deeply people know the community.”
—Dan Pontefract
Senior Director of Learning, TELUS
Up you climb. Fixing the telephone line for a customer who has been without service for hours. He’s called customer service twice. You’ve done this a hundred times. But this time the weather is worse than usual. A tree is precariously close to the pole. Something just doesn’t feel right. It’s not as though there’s someone else who could get to this remote site whom you could ask how to proceed.
You walk back to your truck, get out your handheld video camera, point it toward the pole, and narrate the situation. Three minutes later you upload the digital footage to your company’s in-house learning and collaboration system, and you ask for eyes. You’re feeling a little better already, knowing you’re not alone. If two minds are better than one, why not thousands?
Within 10 minutes, colleagues from across the country have commented. One pointed out a wiring issue you hadn’t noticed. Another suggested a new technique she’d used that you hadn’t heard about. The third reminded you of a similar sticky situation you’d been in and how your instincts helped you through.
Imaginative serial or on-the-job, real-time learning? If you work for TELUS, the Vancouver, Canada–headquartered telecommunications company, this is more than science fiction.
By equipping technicians with a media mindset and a culture of collaboration, everyone shares responsibility for educating one another and giving each person an opportunity to seek focused help. The workforce becomes the organization’s lifeline to what’s happening in the field right now.
Dan Pontefract, senior director of learning and collaboration, was hired by TELUS for the express purpose of modernizing the training function into a media-rich and customer-focused change engine. Rather than develop an expensive proprietary system, he sought out publicly available technologies and spent his budget creating a useful and highly usable system—TELUS Xchange.1
At its core, it is a means for the 35,000 people employed by TELUS around the world to tell stories that instruct and to seek assistance from their peers. The TELUS market consists of four categories of telecommunications access: landlines, wireless, satellite, and digital. They service 11.8 million customer connections across Canada and 12 countries around the globe.
The frontline workers need quick information nuggets, accessible from their trucks while on site with customers, to learn quickly as they change routers, set up home phone systems, and perform custom installations they may never have done before.
By equipping technicians with a media mindset and a culture of collaboration, everyone shares responsibility for educating one another and giving each person an opportunity to seek focused help. The workforce becomes the organization’s lifeline to what’s happening in the field right now.
No one expects the videos that employees create in the field to be spectacular Martin Scorsese productions. Value comes from their timeliness and ability to capture setting and context. People can easily upload their films, including bits of text and a few tags that let others find them easily. In cases where the video could serve a larger or more specialized audience, a small team can do postproduction editing, turning the videos into glossier shows.
People can make and review comments, rate the videos “thumbs up” or “thumbs down,” and offer recommendations to other team members.
The learning and collaboration system also has the capacity to archive and serve other content including documents, recorded broadcasts, and simulations. At TELUS they also use Microsoft Live Meeting for live webcasts and virtual meetings that are then recorded, WebEx for virtual instructor-led sessions, and Cisco Telepresence units to give the sense that people are in a room together. These technologies are used most for team meetings and virtual coaching sessions.
Videos and non-video content created by Pontefract’s team can be searched by topic, category, or keyword. There is a formal taxonomy and an informal “folksonomy” (a term coined by information architect, Thomas Vander Wal, combining the terms “folk” and “taxonomy” to convey an organic, ad hoc, and friendly way to tag, categorize, and locate content based on the terms people use themselves).2 For example, a video of a TELUS TV installation could be tagged as relating to the satellite TV business, installations, TV, and wiring.
This defies any preconceived idea of who is a producer and who is a consumer of learning at TELUS. The organization’s goal is to build workforce competence and acumen, enabling everyone to make good judgments and quick decisions to better serve customers.
Pontefract’s organization is responsible for this vision under the banner “Learning 2.0.” It supports TELUS staff when and where needed and includes virtual schools of technology, business, and leadership where all content is readily available in an easily contributed and consumed format.
Videos are used often in the TELUS school of technology and have begun being used for business and leadership training. They include those made in house and those from external sources. For example, inside TELUS Xchange is a video of John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, discussing the benefits of a networked and connected organization, which is used as part of the core leadership–learning path. Prior to creating the Learning 2.0 vision, TELUS training was predominantly classroom based or delivered through e-learning. Seventy percent was developed or delivered by outside vendors. Several business units also had their own independent training teams, precluding any chance for a cohesive vision of change.
Videos are used often in the TELUS school of technology and have begun being used for business and leadership training. They include those made in house and those from external sources.
Like large and even mid-size organizations, TELUS had an array of technology related to learning: knowledge management systems; several learning management systems; an ERP system; performance review systems; and technology for wikis, blogs, podcasts, vodcasts, intranets, extranets, and other information-sharing tools.
Pontefract’s first point of change was to create a common unified interface in the organization where people could tell their stories, learn, and collaborate. After 12 years of running large organizations, he knew that the first things to prompt cultural shift are the stories people tell one another. It’s why media sharing is so central to his plans.
He knew the culture transformation would require more than adding an interface and tools. His team needed to change their own practices, too. For example, they decided to shut down their standalone learning management systems (LMS) because it equated learning with instructor led and e-learning events. Instead they added LMS-like features into TELUS Xchange. It is a storytelling, learning content engine, created by the organization and its members, with video as its face.
The broader TELUS community self-selects what’s valuable and relevant and what’s not. This is where the new journey begins.
Pictures Make Progress
Sharing stories using visuals isn’t new. Pictures on rocks and cave walls date as far back as 40,000 years. Even before our predecessors congregated in communities, they drew pictures to tell narratives that conveyed movement and meaning and passed on wisdom across space and time. These stories allowed us to evolve by communicating key details and messages not as easily carried along through other means.
With quality video cameras dropping in price and video capabilities now built into more mobile devices, our ability to share still and moving images has expanded from down the path to around the world. We can now see faces and activities almost as easily as we can hear voices over the phone. Storytelling, which has always been central to the human condition, now travels across new forms of media to help us learn from one another and connect.
Anything that can be digitized can be accessed and distributed on the Internet or an intranet. Videos, audio files, podcasts, slideshows, and digital pictures can all be used to improve business processes and collaboration. As bandwidth increases and compression algorithms improve, a migration from text-based content to full-motion video ensues. At the same time, more powerful, compact, and mobile access devices make it easier to find and learn from relevant content whenever it’s needed.
In the past, only businesses with deep pockets and the right technology could bring corporate stories to life, broadcast time-sensitive news to all employees, reach people in far-flung locations, and generally increase the impact of what they convey.
Organizations of all sizes can now afford the technology to stream video directly to employees’ desktops. No longer do they need to rely on business satellite networks or on distributing content on VHS tapes or DVDs in the vague hope employees will make the effort to watch them.
They can be full of rich stories and ad hoc video clips from the field, or they can be little online updates throughout the day—Headline News Network style—replacing a daily newsletter as stories are blogged, tweeted, and commented on online, by anyone.
Media sharing is more than a tool or a broadcast medium. It’s more than the multimedia CD-ROMs of years past. It’s a way to foster interaction and sociability, another way to cultivate community—a community that extends to co-workers, partners, suppliers, customers, and other people interacting in the workplace. Media sharing opens new opportunities to interact, share, produce, and collaborate.
Videos communicate in a powerful and succinct way. Images work better than print or digital text to convey vision. Watching a mechanic assemble an engine can be more valuable than reading 10 books on the topic. Video engages your eyes, ears, and imagination to help you picture yourself solving a problem.
Videos communicate in a powerful and succinct way. Images work better than print or digital text to convey vision. Watching a mechanic assemble an engine can be more valuable than reading 10 books on the topic. Video engages your eyes, ears, and imagination to help you picture yourself solving a problem.
People-powered content provides buzz and insight. As more people walk around with camera-enabled smart-phones and install webcams and microphones, employee-generated content will offer great insights to companies.
Phyllis Myers, producer of the NPR radio show Fresh Air, characterized viral video as a “sharing experience” instead of the old “shared experience” that broadcast networks and publishers typically offer. Rather than waiting for interesting content from media giants, people increasingly reach out to pull content they want.
They can find a broad assortment of free videos from commercial sites, including YouTube and Vimeo, and your organization’s clips from inhouse–focused software such as Altus.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, moving pictures on an endless array of topics are priceless. A bottom-up approach to employee-generated video means that just about anything related to your organization can and will be captured and shared. Furthermore, the YouTube factor, where people celebrate wacky and compelling stories, means as long as video is interesting and authentic, homegrown will often do. As many podcasters have already found out, content is more important than presentation. If you have something to say that is relevant and genuinely interesting, people will watch.
Social Media Is Compelling
In an age of too much digital noise and not enough value, getting and holding attention is pivotal if you want people to learn. If you can’t get people’s interest, what’s the point in even trying to connect with them? Old-school ways of communicating with employees and customers are often ignored altogether in the engaging and entertaining social media world.
Although some argue that social media keeps people from paying attention, research shows that it can be a big part of the solution.
A survey of more than 60 executives by Thomas Davenport and John Beck at the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change looked at what got their attention over a one-week period.3 Overall, in rank order, the factors most highly associated with getting attention were
1. The message is personalized.
2. It evoked an emotional response.
3. It came from a trustworthy source or respected sender.
4. It was concise.
Social media excels at all of these factors. Messages that both evoked emotion and were personalized were more than twice as likely to generate a response.
The best ideas for improving your business often come from employees, partners, and customers because they have a vested interest in your success and know your organization best. Harnessing their collective wisdom through videos is both compelling and attention getting.
Media sharing encourages and enables a community where people can see and learn from one another and get contributions from everyone. Video messages that allow for comments help bridge the gap between leaders and the larger ecosystem. People can provide feedback, ask questions, and send their own videos through the platform’s commenting, tagging, and sharing features.
For example, an employee who is planning to retire could create videos about her areas of expertise. A senior executive could create mentoring videos, giving advice to newcomers. A technical employee could create a step-by-step video to explain a procedure. The training department could ask employees to create videos to incorporate into a learning program.
Videos are especially good at presenting things sequentially (this happened, then that) and showing causality (this happened because of that), so they’re a powerful way to show people what happened (the sequence of events) and why (the causes and effects of those events). In a world of hyperlinking and twitter bits, seeing the whole picture, even a small slice, offers “what” and “why,” which are critical but often hard to discern.
Make a Case for Media Sharing
The Internet has enabled people to be just-in-time opportunists, getting information when they need it. Employees have that same expectation at work. Short video clips that can be watched on a computer or mobile device are sometimes the best way to deliver that kind of experience fast.
Large organizations have been using audio and video for a long time in marketing and training. What sets the new social media-sharing solutions apart is that they can be fast, broad, and free.
Media sharing, especially video sharing, can provide a captivating way to convey a human voice, rich with emotion and expression, that people trust instinctively more than words on paper or still photos alone. Following are some reasons organizations are turning to rich media.
Eliminate Physical Boundaries
An internal survey at Marathon Oil, with operations spanning three continents, showed that communications from executives weren’t delivering the personal impact desired to inspire and inform, and there were no effective ways to gather feedback.4
Marathon Oil also faced the challenge of effectively and affordably training dispersed workers on topics ranging from complicated IT issues to how to properly use a safety mask. For years, Marathon employees accessed documents and presentations over the company network. When Marathon wanted to assure a high level of participation, a trainer went to visit employees on site. This was expensive and resource intensive.
To address this challenge, Marathon originally decided to deliver live video broadcasts over satellite. Several expensive broadcasts later, the company switched to affordable and far-reaching streaming media.
Using an in-house production studio, two dedicated streaming servers, and rich media creation software, Marathon was able to provide live daily streaming webcasts and a library of archived presentations available on demand. The presentations are scalable and can reach all employees at once. Typically 1,200 to 1,400 employees participate in live broadcasts, and as many as 8,000 view on-demand content.
The technology is being used for training in business integrity, hardware operation, legal issues, records retention, wellness advice, health, driver safety, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, and instruction on software updates. Video brings Marathon executives’ personalities and inflections right to employees at their workstations wherever that may be.
Connect with Others
Nearly a decade ago, Nokia began an open discussion forum called Jazz Café where any employee could post questions for the human resources department to answer. The site became one of the most popular online destinations in the company and remains live and active today.
A few years later, the company rolled out wikis for the research and development team and then an online employee directory that allowed people to upload a photo, write a biography, import some data from the ERP system, and link to blogs.
Next Nokia rolled out News Hub, a portal that filters all corporate news. Every employee is able to comment on any news article and rate it, and when there’s a particularly controversial piece of news, there are hundreds of posts. Then came Blog Hub, an aggregator of the internal blogo-sphere, highlighting which blogs are most active, who’s commenting, who are the most-read bloggers, and what people are blogging about.
It seemed almost inevitable that the next hub would be for videos. In 2008, the company introduced Video Hub, where any employee who has recorded a video could publish it. It’s an aggregator with features for rating, tagging, and commenting on what’s been posted. The company has also trained several hundred people to make quality videos and tell stories about Nokia’s values in action.
No one moderates the videos, the blogs, or the news. Once posted, they are available to everyone. Fellow employees can report abuse, and if a video is determined to be outside the organization’s norms, it is removed, but so far that hasn’t been needed. People respect the opportunity to share.
Engage and Influence
Companies have filled their customer-facing websites with rich media, blogs, rating tools, and other interactive features for years. They do that to set themselves apart, stand out, and be memorable in an information-intense world.
Capital One, the credit card monolith, is always pushing the envelope of what consumers should expect from them, so the company wasn’t surprised when the rich media experience it helped pioneer influenced its employees’ expectations, too.
When employee surveys showed their workplace wasn’t as collaborative as it could be, Capital One revamped the corporate intranet to offer more ways to collaborate. It changed the site from a static tool—mostly housing human resources materials such as benefits forms and training schedules—to a lively forum where employees could post, share, and critique ideas, often in video form. My One Place allows anyone with access to the site to contribute and make changes instantaneously.
The need for collaboration and networking was further highlighted following Capital One’s acquisition of North Fork Bank of Melville, New York. When the acquisition was final, Capital One’s human resources team needed to quickly acclimate North Fork employees to Capital One’s culture. The company relied on blogs, podcasts, and informal “Man on the Street” video interviews to help smooth the transition.
Cultivate Culture
A Silicon Valley startup uses video blogging on its intranet for employees and employees’ friends and family members to post advice on everything from finding hotels to transforming their cubes into livable habitats. One video is a tour of local eateries, pointing out the specials and clocking how fast you’re served.
The videos provide immediate, actionable solutions to common issues facing a young and lean team working around the clock. None of the videos took much time to make, and they were mostly created when someone thought, “I bet my co-workers would benefit from knowing this.” The videos also give new employees a sense of the culture and challenges they’ll face to show them how to solve problems on their own.
They have also captured their founders talking about how they came up with the idea for the organization and followed people around on their first few days of work as a way to connect people to people and ideas to their originators.
In less than a year, nearly 100 videos were created for fewer than 50 employees. As the startup gains momentum and additional staff, the company plans to incorporate instant video making into its training, human resources, and technical development functions, in the hope of ensuring that the vibrant social culture stays that way, no matter how large the company grows.
Build Trust
As organizations switch to a decentralized or distributed model, transparency from company leaders is a refreshing approach that builds trust and imparts critical insights. When employees are geographically dispersed and “walking the floor” isn’t an option, companies use video to reach out in authentic ways.
Video allows leaders to connect more emotionally than a memo or an email, and it’s more personal. Videos can be documentary style, or they can be video blogs, town hall meetings, or even company newsreels that cut through corporate spin and deliver information without fluff. They can be quick talking points, questions and answers, or personal dayin-the-life narratives.
Employees often respond more favorably to a CEO’s unscripted comments, filmed by a member of the communication team on a flip-cam, than to a glitzy, professionally shot, heavily scripted, professional video. The more authentic and unfiltered the message, the more credible it generally is.
When two of the world’s largest steel manufacturers merged in 2006, Arcelor and Mittal used video to address employees’ concerns about the new 320,000-person organization. Short documentaries addressed concerns about layoffs and the merger. The videos became a catalyst for conversations about the changes both inside and outside of the organization, fostering additional support from the market, shareholders, and citizens. Over time, ArcelorMittal launched its own web TV network, loaded with videos and candid conversations with executives and the men and women at the heart of the company sharing their own experiences, challenges, and aspirations.
Establish a Common Identity
ACI Worldwide started as a small company in Omaha, Nebraska, and grew quickly by mergers and acquisitions to 2,200 employees around the globe in 35 countries. Quality standards are taken very seriously; customers in every country on the planet expect software and services to deliver reliable, scalable, and secure payment services every second of every day.
As the company grew, it focused on customers’ needs without giving enough thought about infrastructure to integrate facilities, companies, and people around the world—or creating a culture that shared a set of values.
While the company wanted its coders across continents to apply a consistent approach to code development, it also wanted each employee to benefit from the knowledge and experience of other ACI employees. It wanted to drive a profound change, to make ACI functionally and culturally one company.
ACI turned to media sharing through podcasts and videos to capture the knowledge of employees in a way that would allow it to be more easily shared and felt rather than just read. The company showcased the diversity of its people while introducing people’s skills and interests, attitudes and perspectives, all aimed at creating products and services everyone could stand behind.
Reinforce Values
RentQuick.com has also turned to media sharing to bring people together and capture what’s important. To create fun in bad times, RentQuick .com, a small company that sends high-end audiovisual equipment across the United States and Canada for onsite and offsite meetings, decided to get creative after losing clients during the 2009 recession when meeting planners were laid off and events were cancelled or postponed. Rather than hang heads, lay off staff, or complain, employees kept their spirits high by making videos of funny things they were facing and showing their “make it work” style. They posted them on YouTube and created links to them in their monthly newsletters.
The lighthearted attitude and approach of those at RentQuick.com translated well in short clips. The videos demonstrated that happiness can still exist in tough economic times and that these people are a joy to work with. The videos found new audiences and demonstrated that working with the organization can lead to enjoyable and successful meetings.
Recruit Talent
Prior to being acquired by Accenture, 300-person Gestalt LLC, a software developer in Camden, New Jersey, that serves the defense and energy markets, ran a video contest to spark interest in the company among highly skilled potential recruits.
The contest was open to all employees interested in creating a video and posting it on YouTube. A companywide vote determined the winner, who could opt for an Apple computer or $2,000 in cash. John Moffett won the contest with a 90-second video called PatrolNET Woes about a mission through the nearby countryside to “find people.”
The video contest encouraged people to create messages that ultimately promoted the company and its culture and climate and was played for the world to see. In a company whose tag line is “value beyond the sum of its parts,” this was pushing even its comfort zone. The CEO, Bill Loftus, who admits he was initially nervous about the video contest idea, said “Bigger companies might try to control the message, but I believe a company’s true image comes from what people really are, not what spin the marketing department puts on a company.” In fact, Gestalt sent a link to the winning video to 16,000 people in its talent database and to various headhunting firms as well.
In the first weekend of sending out the links, the company received 4,000 hits from its candidate database and 750 people reintroduced themselves to the firm. The videos showed the employees’ energy and excitement, which positioned the company well in a very competitive market.5
The video approach shows, rather than tells, prospective recruits that the organization is willing to try new approaches and give employees a public voice to represent the firm.
Deloitte, as part of its ongoing campaigns to energize the workforce and recruit bright young people, runs an annual International Film Festival, a showcase of three-minute videos posted to YouTube answering the question, “What’s Your Deloitte?” Employees can create the videos themselves or work in teams. Everyone from first-year associates to senior partners has made videos, and treatments have included everything from dream sequences to great humor.
The program began as part of an overall strategy for reshaping and refreshing the company culture and specifically encouraging employees to share unfiltered feelings and opinions about what it’s like to work at Deloitte. The video approach shows, rather than tells, prospective recruits that the organization is willing to try new approaches and give employees a public voice to represent the firm.
Respond to Critics
As with any new initiative, there will be critics, often well-meaning people who want to keep you from doing dumb things. They have concerns based on their personal experiences or worrisome stories they have heard that they feel compelled to share. Here are the most common objections we hear and ways we believe you can address them.
People Will Post Inappropriate Videos
Giving employees unfettered access to post any videos to the company intranet raises some eyebrows among traditionalists. But concerns about employees posting hurtful, inappropriate, or inflammatory videos have so far been unwarranted at all of the organizations we spoke with—in large part because each post includes the contributor’s name.
Social media is generally self-policing. If someone posts something inappropriate, the next person to see it has something to say about it. Media sharing is successful in part because of employee feedback and because so many other people will be watching.
The Value of Media Sharing Can’t Be Measured
With any social software, someone usually asks, “How do you measure its value?” Unlike email, for example, media-sharing tools often come with built-in analytics. For example, you may be able to track the following:
How many visitors watched an entire video before logging off or moving on?
How many watched only half ?
How many watched only a minute or less?
How many watched it more than once?
The number and type of questions and comments prompted by each video may provide additional clues to how widely it was viewed and understood. The conversations generated by a video are as valid a measurement of its appeal as the number of times it is viewed, and may even be more valid.
Do you have a communications plan for certain videos that includes a discussion of what viewers learned? Do you provide key messages and questions to help with the discussion? Consider soliciting feedback through a survey to gauge people’s understanding and ask whether they found certain videos useful.
In Person Is Always Best
If something needs to be done in person, don’t try to accomplish it virtually. But many of the messages we have assumed to be best presented in person are really best done visually (seeing the improvisation, hearing the sincerity, getting a sense of a person through his or her body language), and video can make a lasting impression.
Video Isn’t for Serious Businesses
Some people associate video with frivolity—the kind of distraction your high school teacher used on a Friday afternoon to control an unruly class. But images, especially when combined into a narrative, are a major component of effective communication. Think of the footage of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon and how that instantly conveyed NASA’s mission and purpose.
Videos Are for Fun, Not for Real Knowledge-Transfer
What important lessons have you learned from movies, TV programs, or even from someone telling a story? The power to instruct is inherent in video, too. Create a video of people not communicating well, getting on one another’s nerves, or using different communication styles, and you’ll quickly see that a visual can teach far more than talking when something goes wrong.
Recommendations
Get started with a media-sharing plan by considering what people in your organization and the ecosystem of business partners, contractors, and possibly even customers would benefit from seeing and hearing.
Start Where You Are
When employee-generated audio and video can be posted on content platforms the company already has, such as IBM Lotus Quickr, Share-point ECM, Cisco Show and Share, or Google Business Services, start-up costs will be relatively low and IT will already be versed in some of what you’re trying to do. If your organization doesn’t already use a content management system, consider beginning by creating a YouTube channel and posting a few publicly sharable videos to get the hang of it. Then look at some of the emerging media-sharing platforms to see which one fits your needs.
Clarify Your Intentions and Your Mix Your corporate technology culture, the application literacy of your work-force, and the number of people who have access to recording devices—be it smartphones, flip cameras, digital audio recorders, or a growing number of media capture devices—will determine how many people will be interested in contributing to and consuming your media collection. Add executive and training videos to that, and you have a critical mass. It’s unlikely, at least at first, that every employee will create and upload videos, but even when a small number of creators is responsible for the bulk of the content, a much larger number of people will critique it, and an even larger number will benefit.
Promote the Best Examples of Employee-Generated Video
When employees can comment on, share, and embed the best clips in their own emails, blog posts, wikis, and team sites, the most effective material will gain value. You can also jumpstart viral adoption by giving certain clips prominence around the organization. Consider asking for volunteers willing to spend off hours finding the best videos on the internal site and rating them to give them more exposure.
Pick Easy-to-Use Technologies
Look for technology where, once employees touch it, they understand it because they are familiar with the Internet; because they have used Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter; or because they have already made a personal investment in the learning curve and can immediately begin to use the tools, greatly speeding up adoption.
Give Executives a Direct Link with Employees
Turn executives’ messages into short video or audio streams. Post them on the Intranet, web portal, or online community; pipe them to screens in the entryway; and offer the videos to customers who want to hear the CEO’s perspective.
Celebrate Wins, Train Salespeople, and Showcase Team Spirit
When the sales team has a big win or the development team passes an important milestone, someone inevitably captures the celebration through video and shares it far and wide. At large meetings, encourage people throughout the event to use flipcams to videotape almost everything. Then show onstage how the event met the expectations and objectives set out at the beginning. This rallies the troops; shares lessons from those practicing their sales pitches, such as presenters in sessions talking about an important upcoming product release; and showcases a group of people deeply interested in helping their organization succeed.
Use Video to Communicate Privately with Business Partners
Instead of posting that confidential clip on YouTube, post it safely on a protected extranet site and invite your partners to view and comment on it. This makes video a great tool for agencies to share with advertisers, for insurance companies to train independent agents, or for a manufacturer to show problems to suppliers.
Capture Corporate Knowledge Through Expert Interviews
As some of the longtime gurus of a company head toward retirement, solving big problems and focusing on what they do best, newer employees have little opportunity to learn from them. When a senior developer gives notice, have a new member of the communications team trail him or her for a week, discovering everything he or she does, asking questions, and capturing for others to learn from in the years ahead. Through interviews or even simply capturing them in action, media sharing can transform people’s experiences, stories, and living examples into easily consumable knowledge before it walks out the door.
If you do something very simple, such as implement a system in which your people know where to go to get the information they need to get their jobs done, you can save people a couple of minutes a day. You generate savings when your people don’t need to search through their email because they can go to a community and search easily through media clips on topics that pertain to them. Right there they also find news about the organization and tips from their teammates, which is more time saved. You can calculate that a couple of minutes per person per day adds up to 45 minutes per employee per month. That equals nine hours per year. These are very conservative estimates of the time saved. That little calculation does not even include the benefits you can realize from the improved quality and customer service. It’s just that simple.