Voting is definitely one of the most simple ways to engage people. In just one click, you can get involved in the discussion. In corporate environments, voting can be a very powerful social instrument to get colleagues engaged. And once they are in, they will post, comment or criticize - which makes them even more involved. Dell has a wonderful example of this: the internal improvement platform called “Employee Storm”. To  put in their words: “Employee Storm is an innovative forum where the employees of Dell can communicate their suggestions and discuss and vote on major topics”

Using the wisdom of the crowds is a concept usually implemented to involve customers in innovation. But can we use methods of crowdsourcing to gather the best ideas from employees as well? Many of my relations are also interested in internal best practices. The first case to share is Dell. Dell is well known for it’s brilliant case in customer participation, known as Dell Ideastorm. When I visited the Corporate Social Networking Conference in London I heard about the internal version called Employeestorm. Thanks to Trish Hunt I got in touch with Christa Semko who is the community manager of Employeestorm.

Results
Let’s start with the figures first. If the results aren’t good, why bother, right? We’re in a recession!
This is what Employee Storm brought Dell:

Participation    55% of global workforce (of 77.000 employees)
Posted ideas   4.100
Votes                225.000
Comments      18.500                                      (source: post on socialmediaonline.com by DELL)

These numbers surpass the initial targets by far and have also changed the internal culture.  Employees learned about social networking and crowdsourcing in practice and are much more active on internal blogs. Internal blogging existed before Employeestorm, but the idea generation tool accelerated the acceptance of blogging as means of internal communication.

Openness and transparency
From the start the involved Dell management aimed to use the collective knowledge of the smart people that work at Dell, to solve internal problems and help the company innovate. Open communication and transparency in the idea generation process have been critical factors. It proved very important for people to feel safe about the consequences of their ideas; expectation management turned out a key factor. People are involved knowing that being involved in Employeestorm could not influence their evaluation.

Activity drivers
Dell employees are a pretty active audience. Before Employeestorm, internal blogging at Dell also took some time to take off. This is a challenge for many companies: how can we prevent an internal community from collapsing from too little activity? Direct feedback from the voting system makes it easier to react to an idea. A big difference from blogging is that a reaction can be more simple – voting is just one click – thus getting more people involved is much ease
At Dell the idea of recognition turned out to be the main activity driver. Good ideas are not rewarded in awards or salaries. Just the fact that people get direct feedback and recognition from colleagues is enough to get broad engagement.

Seeing Employeestorm at work is not possible, but this video of Ideastorm explains the principals:

What does the community manager do?
The main focus of the community manager is the moderation of ideas: scanning new ideas, merging similar ideas and making sure that the vote counter reflects the general feeling best.
But also the correction of wrong or missing tags, choosing the right categories and answering questions are amongst the community managers tasks.
A good relation with business owners is important because the community cannot work without periodical feedback from the management.

Is it a full time job?
So how many time does a community manager spend on a platform like Employeestorm? Believe it or not, on average Christa spends only 1 hour a day on the tool. She may spend one day on it in one week, or some quick checks everyday throughout a week. So what exactly does she do when she logs in? Sometimes it’s just a quick check to see if anyone is communicating outside the rules. Or she spends 15 minutes rearranging content. It’s hugely self moderating. The social control by colleagues is strong. It happens that she’s tweeted directly by a colleague reporting an error.

On average, Christa spends 50% (of this average 1 hour a day) on moderation and the other 50% on staying in touch with business owners and experts.
Outside of community management, her function as part of the corporate internal communications team is to manage other instruments of global corporate messaging.
Because she is very connected to the pulse of the community, she often quick-searches Employeestorm when she’s in a brainstorm. Apart from the community manager, there is no one dedicated involved in managing the system. But then again that may not be necessary because thousands of Dell people are fractionally involved in it! A few IT staff have become internal experts on the storm software and occasionally help out to improve features.

Closing the feedback loop
On a monthly base, the community manager will take popular ideas into a management meeting where a choice is made of  ideas that will be implemented.
When the report about implementation of ideas is out, the usage doubles in the week after, in visits as well as new ideas! This clearly shows that closing the feedback loop is extremely important: showing that ideas are actually implemented makes people come back. Of course it’s necessary to explain why ideas that were popular weren’t implemented. Not every popular idea is implemented. Transparency on the motivation for the choice is very important.

How does it work?
Since the software of Employeestorm is similar to the external Ideastorm, please check this link in Ideastorm, showing an idea to upgrade Dell Ultralight model D420, that was implemented.
Also see this very informing interview with Dell’s Vida Killian by Ragan Communications:

What kind of ideas do people come up with?
Surprisingly many ideas of employees are similar to ideas of customers in Ideastorm when it comes to product innovation. That at least tells you that employees at Dell have customer satisfaction on their minds. Other ideas are about benefits or better ways to reach sales targets.
For instance an idea to make the retirement savings plan work better was implemented.  Another idea was the improvement of the corporate directory. This used to be flat and without context. Now the who-is information is enriched with organization part, skills and report-to information.  In this way it  helps finding out what people are working on, location of peers and stimulates cooperation.  Of course the menu offerings in the cafeterias around the world are a popular idea category too.

Software and functionalities
Employeestorm is using the same functionality as Ideastorm. The successful external version served as a starting point. Dell is using the Salesforce platform since 2006 (more on Sales force: see this post by Menno Braakman in Dutch). Difference for an internal concept were mainly in managing the process of feedback and moderation of topic categories.
A report tool keeps track of management information such as popular keywords.
Employee storm is a category as well, so people will come up with improvements for Employeestorm as well.

What’s the big secret?
The big thing is acceptation: the simple fact that ideas come from within the community. It’s not the manager that has another new idea, but the colleagues.
Although Dell keeps looking for more hard numbers, quantifying the advantage of Employeestorm even further, continuing the tool is never a question.

With many thanks to Christa Semko and Trish Hunt at Dell!