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SAP Business Trends: StrategyConversations: 10,000+ employees, 8 weeks,during the summer?

Posted by Nicolas Schobinger Sep 28, 2014

Here at the Services division of SAP, the world’s largest business software company, weare constantly committed to improving our employee engagement on Strategy. It's aboutunderstanding the particular overall strategy, translating it into individuals’ context and helpingthem to take appropriate action. We measure that as part of our employee satisfaction survey –due every September.

This year, we wanted to do something different than we usually have done. The idea of a comprehensive

campaign came up. I wondered about it myself: one campaign, 10,000+ employees, 8 weeks, during the

summer. How on earth could that possibly work out?

It did. Even considering the potential distraction of the FIFA world championship. But just whatmade our summer’s Strategy campaign a success?

Our intent was clear, the content (ie the strategy) at our hands, and we knew what we wanted as outcome. Our

main objective for the campaign itself was to reach all of our Services employees (yes, there are more than

ten-thousand of them), to actively and repeatedly engage with at least half of them, and to improve our scores

in the September employee survey.

We called the campaign Summer of Strategy, and it was built around four powerful building blocks:• enable: We knew we needed to recruit and enable strategy multipliers. This was done by careful

identification and selection of the multipliers. We equipped them with the necessary procedures andassets. To ensure one voice, we ran live broadcasts to all of them.

• engage: We provided networking opportunities in small-sized settings to discuss thestrategy directly with executives. This was done by holding regular, determined weeklysessions. Ours were each Friday – arranged for each time zone and no longer than 60minutes.

• learn: To provide outside-in views on what will disrupt the services landscape, we invited thoughleaders and analyst to talk to our people every Wednesday for 60 minutes

• have fun: As a gamification element, we launched a video contest where we asked foremployees to create and submit their personal take on our strategy. We combined apopular vote and judge’s decisions to award participants desirable prizes like 3D printers,Google glasses, and an iPhone6.

In addition, the campaign was supported by a rich library of assets (such as flyers, presentations, flip-books,

videos), a solid infrastructure and some rigorous program management experts.

What impact did we get? A stunning level of participation. Our first Summer of Strategy drove tremendous

traffic and conversations around our campaign, we had record downloads of the assets I described, and we

successfully engaged even more than the 50% we had originally targeted.

SAP Business Trends: Strategy Conversations: 10,000+ employees, 8 weeks, during the summer?

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Overall, the feedback we received was overwhelmingly positive with superb Net Promoter Scores. Below is a

dashboard we used (I only omitted the bits of internal proprietary information, so as to be able to share it with

here you).

So, now, looking back at the summer: What were the keys to make our campaign work? I think there were

some critical success factors.• A defined Campaign. We deployed higher density, richer content, more variety, for a defined duration

of time. That made people curious which promoted interest.• Strong Branding. Everything about SAP Service’s Summer of Strategy was branded by a

unique, visual identity. This greatly helped instantly identify the campaign separate fromthe information flood of everything else.

• Applied Proximity: This means we purposefully ensured our employees were exposed to leadersand content that directly relate and to which they can easily refer. This makes the action relevant, notdistant and disconnected.

• Gamification: We humans like things that a fun! And this approach works remarkably well evenacross topics you might not necessarily expect like strategy.

And now looking ahead to the future: What did we learn? We learned a lot. Specifically, the most important

take-away is that you have to give a campaign the proper time to develop momentum.

We observed this through the growth in traffic, attendance, and especially during our videocontest. Wisely, we had put the learning-track at the beginning of the campaign – which

SAP Business Trends: Strategy Conversations: 10,000+ employees, 8 weeks, during the summer?

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catapulted our success by helping us fill the time the campaign needed to build awareness andinterest.

Additional lessons learned included the need to create scalable platforms for audio and video feeds due to

the large size of our target audience; improved ways to successfully schedule and promote sessions; ways to

better manage the campaign websites and how to better engage by layering the campaign with social media.

Is this then, an experience to be repeated? Certainly yes. The format delivered and was run with minimal

creation and execution costs. A yearly cadence seems best suited, and I would not opt for a faster vacancy, as

the effect would wear out and participation likely would dip.

So, with the fine-tuning as I have described, I look forward to gearing up in 2015 for another engaging,

innovative and successful Summer of Strategy.

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