How a consumer technology company used Synthetron to build support for the new strategy and management agenda.

Situation

A multinational consumer technology company wanted to engage their employees worldwide to build support for their strategy, goals and management agenda over two consecutive years. They needed a way to engage all these stakeholders efficiently.

Approach

In 3 virtual workshops each lasting 1.5 hours the employees of three Regions (Asia Pacific, Europe, Americas) were welcomed personally by the CEO in a conference call. Next was a short presentation of the new strategy.

After the presentation all employees returned to their PCs and engaged in an online synthetron discussion with 100- 200 colleagues of their Region. They discussed topics such as: the general strategic direction, alignment of employees, and several selected components of the management agenda on how to achieve the objectives.

During the 3 discussions more then 2500 opinions were shared of which over 400 became a synthetron (judged by the participants to be important).
After a quick analysis of the top synthetrons the employees received feedback on the session within an hour from the CEO in a second conference call.

The analysis report, together with the agreed actions by the management team, was shared with all staff by local management.

Results

The management realised the following significant benefits of the exercise:

• Collected insights and used the knowledge available throughout the organisation.
• Quantified degree of alignment with the intended strategy.
• Received quality insights, action list , prioritised by several levels of importance.
• Engaged a large proportion of staff directly in a way that would have been impossible to do physically.
• Demonstrated modern leadership based on a true dialogue.
• Interacted with staff worldwide in a conclusive, open, cost effective and environmentally friendly way.

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