How to share insights within your company so that they are not ignored but actually being consumed.
You’ve done your research. You put lots of effort in putting the findings to paper. And you now want your audience to understands what you uncovered and act on it.
I believe it’s common sense that we should include our stakeholders in our research. I’m not going to write about that. But what if you find insights via online surveys, data analytics, third party literature review etc and want to educate a large audience (ideally everybody in the company)?
My team and I have experimented around this question quite a bit.
We
- sent out insight reports via email or slack
- posted insights in confluence
- did all hands presentations
The results were as expected: Not too much engagement (hint: when using google presentations, you can actually track who opened the presentation to get some data on engagement).
We then started going a bit wilder: We used TV screens in the office to show our insights dashboard. This worked well when TV screens are close to social areas and/or when they are in the path major stakeholders take getting to their desk. In our case:
It comes in handy when the CTO has to walk by your insights dashboard which shows the aggregated weekly customer feedback…and highlights some tech issues.
We also experimented with formats and came up with the idea of “insights posters”. Why not list your top 5 insights on a nicely designed poster? Now, we again had the issue of: Where to put the poster?
We did some research around the office to discover areas which get lots of attention from the users. And discovered 2 places:
- Above the coffee machine. Right on eye level.
The colleagues stand in front of the coffee machine, push the button, and have to wait for 30 seconds for their coffee to be made. Just enough time to scan over your insights poster right in front of them . - Our all-time favourite: The toilet stalls
Yes, you read correctly. As with coffee machines, placing your insight reports on eye-level in the toilet stalls is a great way to engage your audience with your content.
And yes. Of course we thought about: Does putting the poster in the toilet stalls devalue our insights? From the feedback we got, the clear answer is: No. Our colleagues loved this slightly crazy idea. Our insights were consumed. Colleague came back to us with questions on the insights. We loved it.
Be brave and experiment. It takes some courage to do things out of the ordinary. And I’m fully aware that this might not work for every type of company. But I can only encourage you to try out more stuff to get your insights out.
As a positive side-effect, you also raise awareness for the customers, your work and your department. Which of course is always great.
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