Imagine such a situation: your company negotiates terms of cooperation with the new client. You have a standard contract template but there is a necessity to make few corrections in it. How to do this? You should ask for opinion colleagues who negotiated it before. Maybe the legal department could speak something new about this contract? The financial department may also say something significant.
After a lot of e-mails and phone calls, you have a final text of the contract. But is it satisfying? Not really – many important opinions had no chance to be expressed.
Another example: the management bought new furniture for the office. Unfortunately, they aren’t comfortable. Employees complain and ask why nobody consults this purchase with them. The firm has no funds to buy new desks and chairs. There is no idea what to do with just bought furniture. It just must stay as it is.
Both situations are troublesome to the company but there is a simple way you could avoid them – talk to the employees!
Easy to say that. Large companies employ a lot of people and organizing a meeting for all of them is a big challenge. Of course, it’s important to know employees’ opinions, doubts, and ideas to solve the problem. But the bigger firm is, the more difficult is to learn about them.
Any ideas to make this discussion happen? E-mails and phones may be useful but as you can see – they take a lot of time and effort. Maybe social media? A closed Facebook group could be a good solution but for security reasons is out of the question.
Management of our client wanted to give their employees an occasion to talk about company issues. They know that an exchange of experience and ideas could help with solve problems and use the methods which worked in the past.
To do that employees need a tool that is available to all of them, simple, transparent, and safe. The last one is important – documents and data mentioned in the discussion should be available only to people involved in the discussion. According to these guidelines, Vialutions created a tool to discuss firm topics via the intranet.
The eVetting – solutions which Vialutions designed for customer – bases on the SharePoint platform. It means that every employee who uses the company intranet has easy access to it. The authorized workers can start a conversation by sending a question, document, or picture to the specified group of recipients. A requester selects them on his own so he can be sure that all of them are interested in a topic. It’s important also because of security: documents were sent only to the authorized employees.
A first step is an e-mail with a discussion request. A person, who gets it, can take a part of the conversation – answer the question and comment on other answers. He is also able to share a draft of the question to other users who can modify it until the author will publish it.
A discussion goes on to the point where disputants consider a problem as solved. It doesn’t mean that all outcomes are immediately put into practice – if discussed issues are particularly important superiors have to approve reached solutions. It’s a necessity especially when the question concerns finance. In that case, the report goes to CFO.
When the discussion ends and conclusions are explicit, the report is generated automatically and goes to archives. An eVetting user can read the conversation again at any time. The archived discussions are knowledge base to our customer’s employees. Thanks to this they know which solutions worked well, what difficulties can be encountered, or just what coworkers think about a particular idea.
Knowing the experiences and opinions of other employees allow to save time and have a fresh perspective on some issues. Thanks to eVetting employees know they participate in the company’s decisions and they are more willing to get involved.