Company: IBM, Armonk, NY, USA
Company Description: IBM is a values-based enterprise of individuals who create & apply technology to make the world work better. Today, more than 400,000 IBM employees around the world invent and integrate hardware, software and services to help forward-thinking enterprises, institutions and people succeed on a smarter planet.
Nomination Category: Event Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Corporate & Community - Team Building Event
 Nomination Title: Kaizen Olympics – New Way to Collaborate, Innovate and Engage
- Which will you submit for this nomination, a video of up to five (5) minutes in length or a written essay of up to 525 words? Choose one:
Essay of up to 525 words
- If you are submitting a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, provide the URL of the nominated video here, OR attach it to your entry via the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above, through which you may also upload a copy of your video:
- If you are providing a written essay for this nomination, submit in this space an essay of up to 525 words describing the event: its genesis, goals, development, and results:
Total 525 words used.
To overcome the challenges created by the COVID19 and renew our teams' energy we were in need of an exciting activity. We created an initiative named Kaizen Olympics, comprising four events which aimed to drive collaboration, innovation and continuous improvement in our transformation into a Premier Cognitive Enterprise.
- Kaizen Tournament: Teams competed against each other at organizational level, coming up with ideas and prototypes to transform our processes.
- Data-thon: Employees discovered new business insights from datasets, applying data analytics skills to create Minimum Viable Products.
- Process-thon: Employees tested their process knowledge by cross-validating our processes across markets and ideated together for process improvement and new ways to work. This event was gamified through our process library where users collect points for every accurate validation or submitted idea.
- RPA Clinics: RPA enablement sessions for citizen developers to come together to troubleshoot RPA development-related issues and advance their automation skills.
Measuring Success
We had a lean creative team and a tight timeline. In order to measure the success of Kaizen Olympics, we focused on Deliverables, Participation and Results.
- Deliverables
To make Kaizen Olympics engaging and accessible, we used creative multi-media communications and drew simple analogies to relatable examples. For instance, to promote Process-thon, we explained the critical need for process improvement by using a relatable situation of making a peanut butter sandwich. We wrote a rap song to explain the competition background and mechanics. We also created a step-by-step guide for Process-thon gameplay to make it easy to participate. The communication materials created for Kaizen Olympics include videos, posters, infographics, mailers, presentation decks, logos, posts for our internal messaging tool Slack, Kaizen Olympics emojis to be used on Slack and a microsite, all to keep our people engaged and informed as well as to recognize their contributions. We planned and executed a comprehensive communication schedule, releasing communications three to four times a week throughout the campaign. For all events, we had a promotion phase, the event itself, and a wrap-up. It was sometimes necessary to overlap phases, for instance, promoting Process-thon while Data-thon was ongoing. We also specially designed medals for the winners of Kaizen Olympics, along with digital certificates and virtual badges that winners could display on their IBM profiles.
- Participation
We tracked participation by events as well as by markets. We sustained active participation from over 1000 employees across our markets in all the events throughout the 4+ months of the initiative.
- Kaizen Tournament: 155 participants with 34 new projects garnered.
- Data-thon: There were 136 idea submissions and 5283 votes for the top ideas.
- Process-thon: 1205 games were played and 52898 validations received.
- RPA Clinics: 73 participants over 2 live sessions, with good feedback from participants.
In total, we awarded 60 winning medals.
- Results
Kaizen Olympics generated 871 total ideas and realized benefits of more than 200K productivity hours and a substantial pipeline of opportunities ahead. We also received 52,898 validations and 97% of our processes were confirmed accurate. In addition to tangible outcomes, we improved employees’ capabilities in innovating, problem solving, business presentation, data analytics and automation. This successful initiative was replicated to other global teams and was showcased to our external clients.
- Optionally, you may list creative and production credits for your event - a list of the people and organizations that contributed to its development:
This exciting and successful campaign was delivered under the creative leadership and active involvement of the followng team of professionals: Susan Handayani Atmaja, Wen Rui Siow, Melanie Sim, Muhammad Faizal Bin Mohamed Ali, and Norfaezah Binte Abdullah. Through Kaizen Olympics, we overcame the challenges of COVID-19, adapting to a new way of working and bringing together our workforce globally to boost our organization capabilities. This team made it easy and fun for employees to contribute ideas, garnering an incredible 871 new ideas over the course of the initiative, realizing benefits of >200K productivity hours and substantial new opportunities.
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