How to foster idea sharing during a monthly team ritual

The challenge: find a way to engage teams in a hybrid workshop

Vincent's role is both central and transverse. On the one hand, as a performance coach, he must be able to unite teams working from all over the world in workshops focused on data and agility. He must therefore have a flexible, engaging environment that is compatible with a hybrid working style.

On the other hand, Vincent is also looking to relaunch a team ritual held once a month to share best practices, whose participation has been declining for some time. Indeed, the people involved in this ritual have found it difficult to access the information shared. As a result, as Vincent points out, "participants were struggling to value and make their initiatives accessible".

To address these two issues, Vincent used Klaxoon Boards. He created visual workspaces corresponding to each issue and succeeded in bringing together the concerned actors. He explains how this allowed him to simplify and stimulate exchanges again, and to give a new dynamic to these moments of collaboration.

The solution: a visual workspace structured according to the SQCDP method

Here, Vincent brings focus on how he deployed his Boards as part of his internal best practice sharing ritual. Every month, this ritual brings together a hundred or so people from different parts of the organization around the world, and allows for the cross-team dissemination of ideas.

Objectives and process of the ritual

The ritual of sharing best practices led by Vincent aims to centralize the ideas brought by different teams in one place. Vincent created an online whiteboard on Klaxoon, which allows them to have an efficient one-hour exchange every month.

During the workshop, the 100 participants connect to the Board thanks to the integrated Live video conferencing tool. This allows them to work together synchronously, while transforming the collective workspace.

Each month, the teams present 4 topics for 15 minutes. These topics are selected from one month to the next, and focus on good practices defined according to a color code and the SQCDP model:

• Safety
• Quality
• Cost
• Delivery
• People
• An additional axis dedicated to Improvement

As Vincent explains, "these 6 themes are themselves broken down into 4 items to have a finer mesh, and allow everyone to find a topic with a click and a glance." To make the exchange even more stimulating and visual, the topics are accompanied by a photo or a descriptive image, which participants can share very easily in the same way as ideas or text on Board.

Setting up a continuous improvement loop

Once the topics are shared, they remain accessible on the Board at any time asynchronously. Vincent uses the Board as a reference point to guide participants to the right source of information with controlled access, whenever they need it.

I use Klaxoon as a gateway: without storing confidential data, it allows me to redirect the user to a secure place on the network where this data is archived. 

As we go along, the best practices shared in the form of ideas are improved by the teams who contribute their expertise. Those who wish to do so can then simply copy and paste an idea after its first version, and make their own edits. This way, Vincent and his teams set up a virtuous circle of collaboration and continuous improvement, and keep track of the different evolutions made over time.

The challenge of the best topic

This ritual of sharing best practices takes place every month, during 11 months of the year. The 12th month is special because then, Vincent launches a challenge to select the most relevant topic that has been shared so far. This allows the teams to take stock of the reflections carried out throughout the year, and to realize concretely their progress.

To identify the winning topic, participants look at the topics that have had the most versions, and therefore that have been improved the most over the months. A second criterion is also the number of "likes" on the ideas. Everyone can react to an idea simply by clicking on it, and then on the "like" button.

By the way, there is another Klaxoon feature allowing to deepen this voting system thanks to dot-voting. The moderator defines a number of tokens per participant, who can allocate as many as they wish to an idea to enhance its value.

The result: a 50% to 100% increase in the number of topics shared, and a stronger cross-team commitment

Before practicing these team rituals with Klaxoon, Vincent had noticed that the presentations used then lacked organization. Teams could remember a topic discussed during these workshops, but they still had to find it in the shared space, "where all the presentations were in bulk".

With Board, Vincent has implemented a simplified and structured visual management system that allows all participants to centralize and instantly find the information they need, from anywhere. This means less effort for them, and therefore more chances to interact spontaneously on the online whiteboard. 

There is also much better engagement in terms of the number of topics shared. Vincent notes that there are between 50% and 100% more topics proposed by the teams each month, "whereas two years ago, we had many months where we didn't even have 4 topics". Moreover, these topics are much more qualitative, and have a better potential for improvement.

Finally, with the continuous improvement process implemented by Vincent, this ritual allows the teams to inspire each other. The result is great satisfaction, better collaboration, and the belief that we are moving forward together more effectively. It also allows managers to recognize and celebrate the performance of their teams.

As Vincent points out, "you start to see that the very first things that were shared have since been duplicated and improved by another team, and then taken up by the initiator who could look to go even further.” This is the very definition of a successful deployment of collective intelligence!