Business context

  • A national business had built and was actively supporting a cross-functional informal community of practice [“Pride-Builders”] as a key part of their culture change strategy
  • Over 1,000 front-line supervisors who’d demonstrated the ability to deliver results and engage and motivate their employees had volunteered to be part of the community of practice
  • Regular face-to-face conferences with the most senior leaders in the organization was a critical and valued part of the development of the community

Communication issue

  • A Pride-Builder 2 day conference in Montreal was weeks away when a significant cost cuts were announced including an embargo on travel.
  • Though the initial response was to exclude the Pride-Builder conference from the embargo due to its importance to the culture change 6 days before the event it was obvious that there was strong organizational push back
  • The CEO to ask the Change Management team to find out what Pride-Builders wanted to do and get back to him within 5 hours
  • How to reach and invite all Pride-Builders to provide their input in a way w could document and report easily

Solution

  • Articulate and translate the questions
  • Pilot a new online tool that IT was working on but had not yet tested to reach all Pride-Builders

Result

  • The Community responded within minutes [54% within 90 minutes, 60% said the conference should not go ahead as planned]
  • Report was on the CEOs desk within 4 hours from start to finish included important and insightful verbatim comments that led to a redesign of the conference so that it could be hosted and run at the three main locations over a few hours – reducing travel costs and time away from work
  • Feedback from the community on the process was very positive