CASE STUDY

EMC

Insurance 

SWAE PILOT HELPS EMC INSURANCE REVEAL HIDDEN COMPANY IMPROVEMENT IDEAS

Post-pilot data and results reveal how EMC Insurance leveraged Swae in a 60-day pilot program to help their people express novel ideas, feel more included, and create deeper engagement across departments.

Swae is a platform where every team member can feel included!

EMC Insurance Swae Pilot User

In Q1 of 2021, US-based EMC Insurance Companies launched a pilot program to test Swae’s platform with a subset of the company’s 2,500 employees. The goals were to (1) determine the usability and feasibility of Swae within EMC and (2) identify if Swae was the right platform for sharing ideas, spearheading implementation of those ideas and engaging employees and leaders throughout the process.

The pilot also served as a learning opportunity for our Swae team to stress-test certain assumptions in a short 60-day timeframe of this pilot.

Swae’s mission is to unleash the unheard voices within organizations to ensure that leaders can identify problems, reveal investable solutions, and better prioritize with feedback in order to reduce potential biases in important strategic decisions—all at a faster rate.

During this pilot, the Swae team tested the following aspects of the Swae feature set:

• Would access to our platform and feature set impact EMC’s employee engagement, motivation, morale, and happiness rates?

• Would access to our platform increase the number of voices heard, and would it provide employees with feelings of inclusivity, allowing them to have more of a voice inside the organization (over and above the existing platforms)?

• Would more voices expressing insights help decision-makers reveal business value through crowdsourcing efforts?

It was a good opportunity to have my voice heard!

EMC Insurance Swae Pilot User

I want people to feel empowered and equal when presenting ideas and for all ideas to be treated with the same weight, not dismissed before review because of a preconceived bias about a person.

EMC Insurance Swae Pilot User

Pilot Totals

8.2x

Votes per User

How can help your Organization

How Swae contributed to an evolving-culture

How Swae contributed to improving inclusivity

How Swae helped further enterprise-wide collaboration

How Swae helped unearth hidden innovation ideas

CASE STUDY

Lifelabs

The solution sourced through Swae could help retain up to 10 Medical Laboratory Technicians and Technologists per year, helping solve a particularly challenging industry-wide retention issue.

In November 2020, Swae announced our partnership and pilot with LifeLabs to help crowdsource COVID-19 business and operation solutions directly from employees.

While remaining in full operation during COVID-19, LifeLabs had to continuously adapt to the ever-changing landscape with the health and safety of their customers and employees at top of mind. The team reacted swiftly by streamlining operational procedures, modifying their business model and services, and updating policies to remain agile and consistent. With great and persistent change comes the challenge of keeping everyone aligned. To support employees, the LifeLabs leadership team wanted to ensure they were hearing internal feedback quickly, addressing complex challenges collaboratively, and keeping an ear open for insightful ideas for improving the organization, all at the same pace of the changes required.

Swae was engaged to help them achieve these goals with a pilot program, formally launched in January 2021. The program was intended to help the LifeLabs team focus on the ‘Future of Work’ and understand how they could adapt processes at their labs and collection centers in a post-pandemic world.

The Swae pilot was initially sponsored by the company’s Lab Operations division. When it began, 28 leaders were invited to join a session to brainstorm, suggest, and collaboratively prioritize the most pressing problems and areas of concern while identifying potential solutions.

The top priority that surfaced through their efforts with Swae was the issue of attracting and retaining highly skilled Medical Laboratory Technicians and Technologists. This industry-wide challenge came from increased competition for these roles stemming from the global pandemic and existing long-term trends of increased scarcity for these roles that had been impacting the industry.

The concern of attracting and retaining trained Medical Laboratory Technicians and Technologists is not unique to LifeLabs. This is a challenge affecting the entire healthcare industry.

According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, the medical industry has an aging workforce that is retiring earlier than expected. Referencing a Statistics Canada study, they found that as baby boomers move towards retirement, the supply of medical staff has not kept pace with the retirement rate. The study found that the average retirement age for Canadians employed in health and social services between 1976 and 1980 was almost 65 years, but 10 to 15 years later the average dropped to approximately 62 years. This 3-year reduction and deficit significantly impacts the availability of Medical Laboratory Technicians and Technologists and other specialized medical staff to fill critical roles.

A recent study on the Fastest Growing Industries and Professions in Health Care by the Skilled Immigrant Infocentre also identified that Medical Laboratory Technicians and Technologists are among the highest in-demand professions across the country. In British Columbia alone, they estimate 1,520 new job openings by 2025. While there is significant demand for these professionals, the supply of Medical Laboratory Technicians and Technologists has not kept pace.

When Medical Laboratory Technicians and Technologists first join LifeLabs, they receive an investment in training and development within the first eight weeks of their employment. For LifeLabs to consistently compete and continuously improve as an organization, it was imperative that they continue to retain their in-demand and highly-trained employees.

Given the uncertainties in the market, this challenge proved very difficult to solve with simple solutions.

When in doubt, innovate!

This became LifeLabs’ motto as they addressed each organizational challenge head on.

By using Swae’s platform, the discovery and brainstorming process uncovered several brilliant ideas from participants to effectively address the various problems they faced. The group’s biggest area of focus was around talent retention and attraction. The idea that gained the most engagement and traction included offering a retention bonus and student loan subsidy or reimbursement to help newly-trained Technician students pay back a portion of their student loans if they remain employed at LifeLabs for a period of up to two years. This idea can be a major incentive at any point of a person’s career, but is a definite advantage during times of great uncertainty. In addition, they thought this idea could help LifeLabs improve the incentives for retaining talent while also attracting new applicants.

Over the 30-day pilot, this specific idea gained over 50% engagement from the entire cohort, had an average vote of 82% from 14 managers, and allowed colleagues to collectively raise potential risks and easily discuss all facets of this potential solution in a constructive manner.

This idea graduated into an official management review by the Vice President of Operations and Human Resources leaders. Together, leadership from across the organization conducted a feasibility study to stress-test the idea and they now have plans to turn it into official company-wide policy.

This idea graduated into an official management review by the Vice President of Operations and Human Resources leaders. Together, leadership from across the organization conducted a feasibility study to stress-test the idea and they now have plans to turn it into official company-wide policy.

“Swae is a tool I have been hoping to see developed for many years. It dispels many of the implicit and explicit biases often seen in brainstorming exercises.”

Jamie Lepard

Lifelabs

Business Continuity Program Manager

How can help your Organization

Swae’s platform helps drive workplace improvement and innovation strategy which can transform the way leaders include others to prioritize challenges and source potential solutions from people that haven‘t had the opportunity to share their voice.

Please get in touch to see how Swae can help
your team collaborate and make smarter decisions

CASE STUDY

Etihad

Airways

Etihad Airways is the second-largest airline and the flag carrier of the UAE. The airline operates more than 1,000 flights per week to over 120 passenger and cargo destinations globally.

The airline company holds the distinction of becoming the fastest growing airline company in commercial aviation. With more than 20,000+ employees, Etihad Airways knows the importance of quality customer service, in-flight entertainment systems, and exclusive lounges.

Etihad Airways needed a faster and more effective way to leverage knowledge from all employees cross-organization to unleash powerful ideation and drive continuous innovation.

Senior leadership realized that their manual system and processes created an environment that limited their competitive advantage, and didn’t allow enough valuable input from the entire organization.

Etihad Airways was managing their company-wide employee innovation in an unscalable and inefficient manner to try to turn ideas into decisions, resulting in poor results and outcomes.

Etihad Airways’ superhuman two-member innovation team manually consolidated a series of tools – from suggestion boxes and forms, to Yammer chat rooms and boards, and surveys — to design the company-wide innovation process for turning employee insights and ideas into  investable decisions.

Their in-house innovation process was falling short of what management envisioned. This in-house process did not allow ideas from other team members or employees across the organization to add their insights or scrutinize the proposals.

The best ideas, as determined by the innovation team using a closed evaluation process and metrics, were presented at a Monthly Innovation Council’s “Dragon’s Den” to determine their fate. In the lead up, the innovation team would coach the proposal owners on how to turn their proposal into a compelling 5-minute business pitch.

The process, while highly valuable to those who had their proposals move through the process, used an enormous amount of already-scarce senior management time in an inefficient way. Many felt left out of the loop resulting in low motivation, engagement, and productivity. The program also yielded limited results organization-wide: It required 2 FTEs to manage; produced only 324 ideas, 10 of which made it to a decision-round and 3 of which were selected, resulting in a negligible 1.5% company-wide engagement rate.

Senior leadership realized that this manual, high-touch system and processes seriously impeding the organization’s ability to innovate at a faster rate and leverage powerful insight from their entire employee base.

Swae offered Etihad Airways a platform that integrates with their existing system and allows senior management to capture the robust knowledge and knowhow of their people,  Even within a fragmented and complex infrastructure.

The integration included successfully passing industry standard and enterprise level security assessments (Penetration Tests), as well as integration with OKTA/SSO, and strict protection of data. Three complementary functions were put into place: data Anonymization, AI, and crowdsourcing.

The integration provided the bottom-up expression for ideation and new methods to drive collective intelligence in a structured, efficient, and easy-to-use way.

We worked with Swae to pilot iFikra, an internal ideation platform for Etihad employees, and the results have been encouraging. What started out as an idea platform has now evolved to be a driver of employee engagement, allowing us employees from different roles, grades and locations to collaborate, share ideas and have their voices heard. It’s taught us that there are bright ideas waiting to be uncovered amongst our employees, and importantly, that they will share and engage, if provided with the right platform to do so.

The Swae team has been accommodating to our requirements, tailoring the solution to needs unique to an organisation our size, and have been an absolute pleasure to work with. We look forward to evolving the platform with them, introducing more features and improving the employee experience as they interact with iFikra

Kai ling Ting

Senior Manager Strategy & Innovation, Digital and Innovation

The platform offers Etihad Airways’ employees a way to anonymously craft well-written proposals for submittal to the company’s innovation board and to articulate their intentions.

The platform improves on their original ideas suggesting more convincing language,  uncovering potential biases, and helps them to propose supporting evidence from external or internal resources.

Before and after Swae integration

Swae supported the engagement agenda strongly and allowed all employees a change to submit ideas, regardless of location, work type or grade

Senior leader

Etihad Airways

Improvement

2400% Increase

360% Improvement

660% Increase

50% Improvement

2200% Improvement

100-500% Reduction

Integrating Swae’s platform internally supported an always-on, AI-powered, employee ideation and engagement tool.

I like how it was open to all ideas.

– Etihad Employee & Swae User

We cannot expect to be in business tomorrow with todays tools. We need tomorrow’s tools and Swae’s platform help us evolve and adapt

– Etihad Employee & Swae User

As an employee, it felt empowering to voice my opinions

– Etihad Employee & Swae User