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Employee Empowerment

Blue Shirt Nation

+The Beginning

  The creators, Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt, had an idea to launch an internal social network to gain deeper insights into customer wants to develop more effective advertisements.

  The site would be used to connect sales associates with the advertising department.

  A social network was chosen to satisfy this goal because it’s more efficient than travelling and talking to many employees and it allows these conversations to take place on a massive scale.

+Hack Slams

  The Koelling and Bendt had 20 employee volunteers come in and try the site.

  The volunteers explained why they’d use the site, why they wouldn’t, what the social contract had to be in order for them to trust it.

  The feedback they received made them realize the their idea for the site (to understand customers better for advertising purposes) wasn’t exactly what the users wanted.

  The let their idea evolve to meet the employees’ wants and needs, a connection to Best Buy’s philosophy “to be more attached to what we’re learning than to a specific idea.”

+ The Launch, 2006 The creators travelled to 130 stores nation-wide and talked to employees one on one to generate buzz about the site. They told employees they created a social network similar to Facebook, Myspace, and Digg for them to use.

+ 3 main goals of BSN:

Be believable Bring people together Try things

+Community

  The site enables employees to engage one another on a platform they are comfortable with and in a setting that is convenient to them.

  BSN connects employees that have common interests and gives them a place for conversations, forming an online community.

  Employees can post jokes, photos, and almost anything they want, but the conversations usually come back to what everyone has in common- working for Best Buy.

  The terms of use are simple, a minimal extension of employee’s preexisting rules about mutual respect and being appropriate, “Don’t be stupid.”

+Learning

 The company realized that the open conversations with their employees gave them knowledge they wouldn’t have otherwise- the executives were learning from the bottom level employees.

 BSN flattens the traditional hierarchical structure- connecting store employees with upper level management directly, enabling two-way conversations without organizational barriers.

+ Culture Connection Evolving the original idea continued to push Best Buy’s culture of focusing more on learning than an idea.

It also helped push the culture to embrace ideas from anywhere, giving all employees a meaningful voice.

+Problem Solving

  Connecting one employee to another employee directly, exchanging information, and resolving the issue.

  When an employee had an issue setting us a display, he posted a picture to BSN. Within a few hours the display designer at corporate saw and contacted the employee to say he sent the wrong display and sent the correct one.

  A discussion that turns into a groundswell to change corporate policies or procedures.

  A store employee posted a message on BSN arguing why store employees should have access to email at work, a conversation continued, and within a few months all store employees were given access to email.

Connected Conversations Groundswell

There’s two patterns for how BSN has been used to solve problems that otherwise wouldn’t be addressed:

+  

“The result is that the social contract is being rewritten. The nature of our relationships to each other is being redefined. Organizing as a hierarchy is no longer enough. A network is no longer defined as names in a rolodex or an outlook address book – it how we organize, connect and collaborate.”

- Steve Bendt

+Wirearchy vs. Hierarchy

  A hierarchical organization pyramid is based on the premise that management understands the customers’ needs and wants better than the lower level employees that interact with them on a daily basis.

  A Wirearchy is, “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust, and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology.” A Wirearchy structure acknowledges that employees may know more than management about customers and the environment.

a new social contract

+ 401K Challenge A video contest hosted on BSN to promote enrollment in the company’s 401K.

The assignment was to create a video in your words that tells others about the benefits of the 401K program.

The buzz and impact of the contest resulted in a 30% increase in 401K enrollments- 40,000 employees signing up for the 401K that hadn’t before.

+Results

  20,000 employees use the site.

  Around one-fourth of the conversations are direct knowledge exchanges between employees at different stores.

  Provides staff with a safe ground on which to communicate with executives; the CEO is a regular contributor- flattening effect on the organization.

  Improved the employees’ sense of engagement, collaboration, and innovation as well as improving corporate culture and employee buy-in.

  Best Buy’s Employee turnaround rate enterprise-wide is 60%; for the BSN community it’s 8-12%.

+ Branching Out Best Buy wanted to apply the principles of BSN to its other areas of business. They wanted a similar dialogue with customers, an exchange of ideas, opinions, and knowledge.

+Twelpforce

  "a collective force of Best Buy tech pros offering tech advice in Tweet form”

  Customer service via Twitter- 2600 employees interact with customers, answer their questions, and handle their concerns.

  Has responded to over 40,000 customer inquiries

  ROI- paid for itself many times over through extensive PR coverage, enhanced brand perceptions, and potential savings to the call center.

+Social Media at Work With a young, geographically dispersed workforce scattered all over the country, social knowledge sharing was a perfect fit with Best Buy’s existing corporate culture.

+Works Cited

  Bendt, Steve. BlueShirt Nation Evolution- Staying True to the Learning. 24 December 2009. http://www.stevebendt.com/?tag=blueshirt-nation

  Bernoff, J., & Schadler, T. (2010). Empowered. (cover story). Harvard Business Review, 88(7/8), 94-101. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

  Best Buy Case Study. (2009). Training, 46(5), 21. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

  Blackshaw, Pete. What Best Buy Learned About Service as Marketing and Empowering Employees. Advertising Age: 24 November 2009. http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=140708

  Dunn, B. J. (2010). Best Buy's CEO on Learning to Love Social Media. Harvard Business Review, 88(12), 43-48. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

  Grensing-Pophal, L. (2009). SOCIAL MEDIA Helps Out the Help Desk. EContent, 32(9), 36. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

  Falls, Jason. SME-TV: Discovering The Best Buy Blue Shirt Nation. Social Media Explorer: 19 March 2009. http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/sme-tv-discovering-the-best-buy-blue-shirt-nation/

+Works Cited

  Haugen, Dan. Welcome to Blue Shirt Nation. Twin Cities Business: April 2009.http://www.tcbmag.com/peoplecompanies/companies/115772p1.aspx

  Hein, K. (2009). Why Best Buy's CMO Judge Sicced His Blue Shirts on Twitter. Brandweek, 50(39), 27. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

  Koelling, Gary. Breaking It Down for Internal Communicators. 30 January 2008. http://www.garykoelling.com/?q=node/370

  Neisser, Drew. Twelpforce: Marketing that Isn’t Marketing. Fast Company: 18 May 2010. http://www.fastcompany.com/1648739/marketing-that-isn-t-marketing

  Shelton, T. T. (2009). Best Buy's New Role: Employees star in appliance and electronics retailer Best Buy's new Results-Oriented Learning Environment, which lets them choose their training method, time, and place. TRAINING -NEW YORK THEN MINNEAPOLIS THEN NEW YORK-, 46(5), 24-29. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.