Provide a brief description of the Solution, Service Provided, or Initiative?
cafe (Collaborative Application for Employees) is a crowd-sourcing solution built on the SharePoint 2010 platform for Servus Credit Union. Servus is Alberta’s largest credit union and Canada’s first province-wide credit union. The solution was designed to address a need for a more effective communication environment. It empowers employees to engage in open dialogue aimed at improving the organization and establishing a sense of community across Servus. cafe is also used as a communication tool for personal subjects that allows employees to chat in a virtual environment about relevant topics that have common threads throughout the credit union.
Describe what makes this Solution, Service Provided, or Initiative original or innovative?
Servus went through an amalgamation of three separate credit unions and they needed to engage employees in a common corporate culture. A discussion board was launched on the credit union’s intranet to collect employee feedback, give employees an internal forum to discuss their concerns, and give the leadership team the ability to respond directly to employees. Traffic on the discussion board indicated that there was great interest in such a forum, but the discussion board became unwieldy, confusing, and was not being used to foster positive communication and contribution. The cafe solution is original and innovative in the way it has leveraged the new social media capabilities of SharePoint 2010. Employees were already familiar with using social media and the solution engaged them through a medium with which they already felt comfortable. The cafe solution includes ratings and rankings, blogging, and a faceted search interface. cafe enables Servus employees to submit ideas about how Servus can make positive changes within the company, and allows all employees to rate each idea. Habañero extended SharePoint’s rating feature to allow employees to give thumbs-up or thumbs-down ratings. In addition, Habañero created a custom algorithm to determine the top ideas, leveraging data such as the collective rating, posting date, and the number of comments. A really popular feature of cafe is the ‘Notes’. Notes are used as responses to specific Posts – in most cases in order to answer a question that may have been posed, or to complete the discussion when it becomes apparent that it needs to be elevated to either a different location or to a group that can continue it forward. Some great examples of how Notes have been used include announcing a new Staff Items for Sale system that was implemented internally, announcing employee winners of draws and contests, and announcing the naming of our new banking system. Because employees are able to vote and comment on notes, we gain insight into how the answers, new solutions, and corporate changes register with our employees and are able to adjust accordingly when needed.
Describe the improvement this Solution, Service Provided, or Initiative made to the customer’s sales or revenues. What changed?
The biggest improvement experienced through cafe was the increase in communication and collaboration of the employees over a diverse range of distances and corporate cultures. By allowing employees to engage at different levels – through Posts, Comments, and Voting – there is greater uptake at a faster rate than they had with similar solutions in the past. Some of the most surprising results have come out of employees using cafe in ways that would not have been imagined in the development process – things such as listing staff items for sale, calls for volunteers or for team/activity sign-ups, and using it for in depth discussions around our policies and procedures at Servus.
Describe the improvement this Solution, Service Provided, or Initiative made to the customer’s efficiency. What changed?
Customer efficiency has increased by the increases in the sharing of ideas, initiatives, issues, services, policies, and procedures across the entire organization. This has lead to increased engagement and organizational alignment. Furthermore, it assists with the identification and removal of low-value activities by staff, which increases employee satisfaction and decreases organizational cost. cafe allows employees to surface and communicate potential problems to the executive team, allowing the executive team to address issues and take appropriate action. Another great example of how cafe has been beneficial can be found in the system being used to post financial information like Bank of Canada Rate explanations, mortgage and interest rate information, and prime rate commentary which is really helpful to many of our staff. This also has a clear impact on our sales and productivity for staff as it provides them insight and information that can be given to back to our members – thereby assisting employees with the information they need to do their job, and members by providing them great service.
How did this Solution, Service provided, or Initiative improve the customer’s ability to serve its internal and/or external clients?
Servus has over 1500 employees using the application (over 50% or the company). Within the first two weeks of use it was clear that Servus employees really wanted a (i) staff directory and (ii) a classified ads environment. Servus was able to set these up on their Intranet based on that input and they were simple quick wins showing how employees can impact the organization’s culture and priorities. cafe permits the executive team to respond to the top ideas and move appropriate items into a separate notes area. The executive leadership team can communicate on the status of each noted idea and cafe enables employees to continue to comment on these items. It has fostered increased collaboration between the executive leadership team and the organization’s employees.
In what ways does this Solution or Service Provided go above and beyond industry norms and expectations?
cafe is architected for the future, allowing Servus to leverage additional SharePoint functionality as desired and increase organizational collaboration. For example, highly-rated ideas may be promoted to a SharePoint wiki to allow employees to collaborate on a new product idea. Another idea might be discussed and answered by the executive team, and be promoted to the questions and answers section of the Servus intranet. Individuals may also place a cafe dashboard on their My Site to monitor their posts, comments, and ratings. In the end, the true power of cafe lies in the fact that it allows our employees to begin to shape the corporate culture and the priority for internal processes and projects by providing a collaborative space that allows employees to post their ideas, questions, concerns, and discussion items, and opens these up to be commented on, debated, and voted on to see how it resonates with the organization – providing a measurement of employee satisfaction and internal issues or pain points for employees.
How does this solution further your customer’s green or environmentally friendly plans?
The classified ads directory allows employees to easily sell, trade or give away items that may otherwise have ended up in the garbage. It also allows employees to communicate about such things as car-pooling opportunities. Most importantly the system allows employees to bring attention to ways the organization can be more green and have those ideas surfaced to the executive leadership level.