IBM - Creative Team of the Year

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: Creative Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Creative Team of the Year

Nomination Title: Employee Experience Team - Helping Employees Stay Active

The Employee Experience team was established in October 2018, with the intention of influencing and engaging the employees within the IBM Quote-to-Cash (Q2C) EMEA. But rather than just focus on engagement the team is focused on experiences. The reason is: on averagea person will spend 1/3 of his/her lifeat work, so ensuring that time spent isn't just goodbut it's great is really important!HOW the team does this? Throughevents, education and activitiesto boost employee experience at Q2C.

The Employee Experience Team workson building important moments that create and impact company culture where people want to show up in work. Throughthose moments theteam influences and creates happier, more fulfilling and effective employee experiences. This way, the team supports executive management, team leadership and their teams, not-work-related communities and proactive individuals.

This year, their role was more important than ever. Due to the global pandemic starting in March, most of the employees and leaders were forced to stay and work from home. The situation required from the team to re-define how to do things. Based on that, the team worked on several programs to help people adapt to the new reality. Together, they have run over 170 sessions, with average NPS over 81 and had over 8000 interactions with employees.

The team started with immediate help by running daily morning boosters covering physical and mental health of employees. Daily more than 80 people visited morning virtual sessions to get physical and mindfulness training, which later on was recorded and made available for replays. Later on, the team focused on how to keep social connections live and designed programs such as Network of Luck, What Matters NOW, Perspective NOW, Discover Q2C and multiple communities, e.g., Cancer support group, Skills and Fun, and more. These sessions were helping employees stay socially active, seek new connections and inspire others by talking about their way and mindset of handling the situation.

The team focused on enablement of leaders and individuals to better deliver sessions in virtual environment. Virtual meetings and virtual engagement started to play a very important role, therefore the team designed and run several micro-learning sessions on how to work with teams in virtual environment, such as Virtual team engagement, or education on video conferencing tools.

The team also organized 3-days-long IBM Perspective Conference which is considered the team’s greatest accomplishment of the year. The Perspective conference engaged almost 2300 IBMers across multiple European countries, 8 External Speakers, including Slovak citizens living in the US and endless new perspectives and experiences. The objective of the Perspective Conference was to provide employees with experience that could change not only the way they view reality, but also how they view their way of working altogether. The reason being that the way we view things in lifeis heavily dependent on ourperspective.

Our perspective can dramatically change the outcome of how weFEELand ACT at work. And thisevent was abreathof fresh air for all attending and allowed for new ways to look at work and life at IBM from adifferent perspective.Attendees had the opportunity towelcome and embrace the new reality of long-term home office work at IBM as well as life challenges connected to pandemic situationwhile hearing from multiple internal & external guest speakers. Without a doubt the Perspective conference succeeded in opening the eyes and minds of our attendees to see the world differently while having added motivation to reach their own successful paths. The event collected a totalNPS score of 84with 3500 views from participants, which gained the Perspective conference an above average world class result.

Organized and executed:
-Large (2,300 attendees/12 speakers/3 days long international) and small-scale virtual conferences with internal and external audiences covering variety of topics of welcoming the new reality.
-Weekly 15-min long What Matters NOW podcasts (NPS over 91). For 7 months, the team invited 3 speakers to talk about topic, which mattered the most. They’ve run almost 30 sessions, having over 70 individual speakers and over 500 attendees and over 5000 post session views.
-Physical and mental morning boosters to help people adjust to new routines and changes in their workplace. Team did 74 sessions with over 2800 attendees.
-Networking sessions called ‘The Network of Luck’ were organized to help employees expand their internal networks at work which has yielded acurrent NPS score of 79.
-Thousands of employees engaged during work hours with productive events and activities which has generated the team an overall NPS score of 81.