How Crowdsourcing Can Improve Internal Communication and Teamwork

From a leadership perspective, CEOs need to rely on the knowledge and experience of their internal personnel. But it’s also equally crucial for employees to not only understand what is happening inside their companies, but also why it’s happening. Crowdsourcing with your employees can provide a successful way to achieve both goals.

I know that internal crowdsourcing works, based on a recent painful experience at my own company, Trace3, an IT tech company. Our business was growing very quickly two years ago, when suddenly things started to break inside our management chain. The president and a vice president quit within a two-week period because they disagreed with our growth strategy.

I thought the best way to distinguish ourselves in the market was to invest heavily in building a services business. My colleagues felt it was better to keep our top engineers on the sales team, rather than assigning some to the services team.

In an exit interview with the president, he admitted that he would go along with my suggested changes during management meetings, but then he would turn around and tell his team that I was crazy, and to disregard my ideas and just keep doing what they were already doing.

LESSON LEARNED
This duplicity was my wake-up call to know that you can’t possibly lead without a cohesive team, and everyone has to be running in the same direction or it just won’t work. Soon afterward, Trace3 implemented an internal crowdsourcing portal to engage our staff around upcoming change initiatives. We developed a new software tool called, “Portal of Pain-Internal” (PoPin), which allows employees to submit their best ideas for how to focus a company’s initiatives and solve real client problems.

PoPin gathers the inputs from employees, and then applies a mobile application to aggregate and report those messages back up to management. Our results were impressive. Within one year, Trace3 had achieved 30% sales growth with no sizable increase in headcount. To get there, we simply harnessed our people’s insights and opinions for managing through change and remaining innovative.

In the past, the real brawl occurred when groups or committees tried to determine how to roll out a new business initiative across the company. The management team often launched this process by holding strategic offsite meetings to define annual objectives, before cascading those objectives down to the workforce. Next came town hall meetings to build a groundswell of support among the staff around decisions that were already made.

But there was an inherent problem with this approach; namely, that management had no way of knowing if the right people with the right questions and concerns were really speaking up at those companywide gatherings. Surveys can be helpful, but crowdsourcing software allowed us to garner direct feedback from all affected employees and partners.

This method makes all participants feel relevant to the strategy because they can see their best ideas turned into defining objectives for the company. But the real trick to internal crowdsourcing is to go back to the employees after the objectives have been established, and ask everyone about the best ways to implement the plan. In this way, the entire group affected by the initiative will be heard.

CAPTURING THE RAW TRUTH
Input is anonymous and their ideas stand on their own merit, rather than depending on someone’s lofty title or popularity in the organization. Everyone has access to the system, where the best ideas rise to the top. Management then creates a rollout plan via from feedback loop. As a result, the initiative’s intended audience gets greater buy-in and more relevance to the initiative’s overall success.

We first developed this product as an internal tool, but once we realized the software’s power, we introduced it to our client group to help them address their own challenges. That resulted in highly-motivated employees and better-aligned teams, as well as healthier, more productive organizations.

Red Robin Gourmet Burgers has deployed PoPin as part of a company-wide push to glean critical insights from managers in more than 400 restaurants. Other companies that have adopted PoPin include F5 Networks, a global maker of application delivery networking products; and The Table Group, a specialized management consulting firm.

Platforms for employee crowdsourcing allow everyone in an organization to become a champion for change, not just the C-level executives and senior VPs. In this way, change is not just about a lonely leader onstage pitching his or her heart out to everyone, or a management team guessing how to roll out an important initiative. It’s about real teamwork, with everyone running in the same direction.

Through the use of internal crowdsourcing, we now have a surefire way to flatten the organization, bubble up actionable initiatives, and make everyone relevant to the future of the company. After all, change needs real champions, and the best champions are usually the ones who will be implementing the change.