Reading Reflections #3: The Groundswell Powers Through Your Company

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Tapping the groundswell inside of your company is extremely critical for the success of a business, as illustrated through chapters 11 and 12 of Groundswell. The Best Buy case study does a great job showing how the internal groundswell successfully touches upon all five objectives which includes: listening, talking, energizing, supporting, and embracing. The employees are imperative to a company’s success, as shown through Blue Shirt Nation, by making employees feel more empowered, connected, and more committed on a daily basis. By tapping the groundswells of ideas among employees (who best understand how your business operates) though connections on social networks, collaborations on wikis, and contributions to idea exchanges, this drastically helps organizations run more smoothly and efficiently.

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Essentially, Blue Shirt Nation was created to listen to what Best Buy employees had to say. In terms of listening, this enabled management to openly listen to their employees and rapidly fix any rising problems before they escalated. By talking, corporate had the ability to post any policy changes so that any person who was part of Blue Shirt Nation had the ability to read this. Additionally, for energizing, positive employees had the capability to spread their optimistic thinking to the entire employee base which drastically affected a number of stores. By supporting, this meant that employees helped out one another and some stores even promoted employees within. “The online forum on Blue Shirt Nation is a natural extension of that mentoring culture, where employees can find the support they need from around the company, not just from within their store or district” (Groundswell, 220). Lastly, by embracing, this gave employees and upper level management the ability to generate and carry out ideas.

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The groundswell thinking through Best Buy reminded me of our earlier class reading about Mini Coopers and how they created a community. Happy owners of these cars spread their enthusiasm through online forums, blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. More specifically, on Facebook, 204,023 people “Like” the Mini Cooper page and these fans have the ability to openly ask questions, post photos/videos, have access to promotions, and much more. This in turn, gives employees (or anyone behind the scenes from the company) the opportunity to respond to one another, bounce ideas, and essentially utilize the groundswell that is taking place. This helped to energize the groundswell and resulted in a successful campaign through the employees.

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It is equally important to talk about Avenue A/Razorfish and their internal intranet site; a wiki with blogs and collaboration spaces. This gave their employees a communication channel and the chance to interact directly with the CEO. “When the wiki started in January 2006, pages in it were viewed fifty-seven hundred times. Nearly two years later, pages on the wiki had been viewed 1.8 million times. Over 90 percent of the employees have logged in, uploading three thousand files and contributing to seven thousand pages” (Groundswell, 222). This opportunity for nurturing the internal groundswell gave employees from the top down the chance to talk and listen to one another, thus empowering the organization as a whole.

In conclusion, the groundswell is extraordinarily effective since it is cheap, easy to create, simple to improve upon, and gives people the chance to connect to one another. Throughout Groundswell, the readers have learned that this connection comes from person-to-person activity, listening, patience, opportunity, flexibility, collaboration with others, and being humble. “These are the principles of groundswell thinking…you’ll be able to build on your successes, both with customers and within your company” (Groundswell, 241).