Creating excitement in the organization from the bottom up…

Published on February 12, 2014 by Guest Blogger

As with all other organizations, most initiatives for change at Acuity Knowledge Partners came from the top down; it involved several seniors driving the focus on customer satisfaction, new idea generation, profit orientation, etc. Given that we are a firm full of bright, opinionated financial analysts, we thought why not actively harness these resources for the change we seek? Why not build the frontline of the idea generation engine from these analysts? Eureka! We launched EnterpriZe – our new idea-generation platform!

EnterpriZe was created as a social media platform for our analysts to contribute ideas on how they earned client delight. The goal was to drive higher customer satisfaction while sharing best practices and ideas in a fun way. Towards this, we introduced the three key elements that drive analyst adoption – Gaming, Networking and Rewards.

The EnterpriZe platform uses a Facebook-like interface. An analyst can contribute an idea on how he or she engendered client delight in an account. The analyst’s peers can ‘comment’, ‘like’, or ‘recommend’ the ideas, and more importantly, ‘reuse’ them. This creates a lot of excitement because analysts get instant feedback on whether their ideas are being appreciated by their peers and being adopted in some other client engagements. Creating excitement in the organization from the bottom up...

Analysts are rewarded every week based on most ideas contributed, most visited, most liked, and most reused ideas. They further get to play in a game for top awards if the client acknowledges their ideas and it has resulted in a specific business benefit for the client.

Within 60 days of launching the platform, we have had 140 ideas contributed and 650 unique visitors. The previous month saw a daily average of 100 visitors on multiple days! However, sustaining the excitement is going to be key, and we intend to launch new themes to drive higher reuse of already-posted ideas. The ideas themselves are very interesting, and range from sector-related value-adds to ideas on automating earnings, improving the efficiency of databases, tips for modeling, editorial and publishing, and even ideas on how to deal with tough clients! The moment of truth comes when some of the junior-most analysts are recognized, and we see their joy in getting the recognition they deserve. Then, there are always the ‘pizza parties’ and ‘coffees with the boss’ that help keep up the buzz!

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