Part of the communication plan around the realignment project involved using a 30 day challenge to engage employees in “micro-actions” each day for thirty days. The goal of the challenge was to focus on helping the Foundation establish a more open environment for communication and problem-solving.
Setup
To help drive traffic we posted a widget in the upper right corner for the duration of the challenge which linked to an area of the site with a deeper explanation. |
| Intranet homepage |
 |
| 30 Day Challenge area |
We chose to use a discussion forum to post each challenge in order to keep responses organized and to make it easier to track engagement.
Results
| Forum... | May | June (month of challenge) |
| Hits | 299 | 2,848 |
| Visits | 199 | 1,857 |
| # Threads | 16 | 37 |
| # Posts | 23 | 779 |
| # Likes | 5 | 1958 |
Lessons Learned
30 Days: Calendar or Business?
Our first struggle with the task was the literal interpretation of "30 day challenge".- 30 business days
- then should it just be called a 6 week challenge?
- 30 calendar days, including weekends
- would staff really participate on a weekend?
Having already decided to kickoff the project in June, and call it a 30 day challenge, we went right down the middle and posted challenges on the 22 business days in the month (4 1/2 weeks). In hindsight, this is something you probably want to put quite a bit of thought into well before your launch date and be extremely clear in your communications, because it was a source of confusion for our staff.
Tagging & Email Notifications
Our intranet software includes tagging capabilities where you can tag individuals or groups of users, and they are then notified via an email and system message on our site.Using the challenge to promote this feature was a rare opportunity to educate staff on what had been an under-utilized tool. By the end of the challenge nearly every forum post included a tag to a users, department, or physical office location.
Email notifications, generated from tagging, helped keep daily challenges on everyone's mind and fostered a herd mentality where those tagged quickly joined the thread.
Example of one of our forum threads with a few tags, click to expand
Email Overload
Our intranet allows users to subscribe to entire forums, or to individual threads, and a thread reply triggers an automatic thread subscription. I love these subscription features, but in heavily utilized threads, the quantity of emails can cause some staff to get frustrated.From the start it would be recommended to provide clear instructions about any email subscriptions your system has and ways to handle overload. We took this as an opportunity to educate our staff on how to utilize Outlook email rules to maintain an organized inbox - an invaluable lesson that many staff were unaware of. We also provided opt-out instructions.
Gamification: Leaderboards & Badges
Let's face it, competition is fun. So why not post a leaderboard of your most engaged employees, departments, offices - or award badges to users upon passing certain milestone!We didn't implement leaderboards because of concern about quality of engagement over quantity, and to be sensitive to those users that were taking part off-line. In hindsight, I feel that a leaderboard would have been helpful and that its value trumps other concerns.
Load Testing
We weren't sure how many users would participate in our challenge, but assumed it would be a manageable enough number that our intranet platform would be able to keep up. We were wrong.On the second day of the challenge we noticed that we had the same number of posts as the first day - which seemed very unusual and soon after were informed that some users were unable to post. It turned out that our software had an IE specific bug which was preventing the display of >72 posts.
How to get around this? When a thread reached 50 replies, we edited the thread and marked it closed. This locked the thread, preventing additional replies. Then, we created a new thread, using similar title, and the same thread copy to capture additional responses. Problem solved!
Challenges
Below is a brief description of the challenges we posted, and the amount of engagement they triggered. Why am I providing this? When constructing our 30 day challenge we struggled to find ideas for what would make a good challenge - so consider this us paying it forward!| Day | Challenge | Responses |
| 1 | say hello to one person you do not normally interact with | 72 |
| 2 | share with a colleague what you value about them | 72 |
| 3 | volunteer to do something that is out of your comfort zone, or normal scope of work | 28 |
| 4 | encourage those around you to think of themselves as part of a team | 51 |
| 5 | post one word that describes the team that you work with | 72 |
| 8 | complete an employee satisfaction survey | 42 |
| 9 | seek out a perspective different than your own by inviting a colleague, volunteer or partner to participate in a conversation or meeting, and seek out this person’s input and ideas on the topic being discussed | 20 |
| 10 | congratulate a colleague, volunteer or partner on a success | 26 |
| 11 | keep an open mind all day long | 16 |
| 12 | post one word that you feel best describes <the company you work for> | 60 |
| 15 | ask a colleague, volunteer, or partner, for their input on a problem or challenge you are facing | 19 |
| 16 | consider your team members involvement before making a statement that begins with “I” | 13 |
| 17 | redirect any conversation that becomes exclusive or siloed | 13 |
| 18 | share the title of a song that you think of when you think of your work team and the work you do together | 55 |
| 19 | share the Olympic sport, or event, that you think of when you think about <the company you work for> | 29 |
| 22 | contribute to a culture of “yes” by maintain a positive attitude in all conversations or meetings | 19 |
| 23 | take 5 minutes and offer to help a colleague with whatever they need | 20 |
| 24 | provide encouragement to someone around you | 21 |
| 25 | describe your favorite “team” moment | 20 |
| 26 | share the tool (from a toolbox), that you think of when you think about your team of colleagues, volunteers and partners at <the company you work for> | 29 |
| 29 | have lunch with someone who you don’t interact with on a daily basis | 19 |
| 30 | what are you coming away from after 30 Days focused on open environment? do you and your team have plans to continue on the path towards a more open environment for communication and problem solving? | 22 |
Here are additional challenges which we considered:
- Fill in the blank (Mad Libs style)
- Example: The company I work for reminds me of _____ and inspires me to ______.
- Share something you are looking forward to happening this year
- Share something about yourself that most people don’t know
- Share something funny (joke, picture, etc)
- Share your favorite inspirational quote
- Repeat one of the challenges that you especially enjoyed
- Share your thought on the 30 day challenge – what worked well, what could have been better?
- Take your 15 minute breaks and unplug on at least one of them – walk, stretch, meditate
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