It all starts with a banana. At the Social Business Forum in London, tibbr’s Director of Product Management Srini Vinnakota tells a story of how large-professional-services-company KPMG realized the real ROI of enterprise social networking.
Srini Vinnakota – Employee On-boarding: The Real Value of Social from SocialBizForum on Vimeo. Transcript:
How many of you actually remember your first day at work?…
Remember this fresh faced, eager beaver, starry-eyed, 22-year-old graduate. If you had a chance to go back to that graduate and tell that person that “This is how 2013 would be,” what would you tell him? …
The first thing I would tell him is Socrates and Aristotle are dead.
Before you roll your eyes and tell me that they’ve been dead for many years, what I mean is that the concept of Socrates and Aristotle is dead. The concept of a single teacher, of a mentor, of an elite group of experts that would guide the society or that would guide an organization, that is dead. And instead, they’re actually everywhere now.
The idea now is you have experts everywhere in the organization and they’re not experts on everything that matters. They could be experts based on the subject of conversation, based on the time of the conversation.
Case and point at KPMG we have the story of the brave banana…
KPMG as you know is one of the big four consulting and advisory firms. One of their clients came to them with a unique question. How do you peel a banana without touching it?
This client happened to be a smoothie manufacturer and so they have to peel millions of bananas everyday. So the client told the consultant that if he employed lots of people then it’s slow, it’s time consuming, it’s costly. If he tried to use a sort of a machine, than it essentially means that the fruit gets spoiled.
The management consultant was puzzled. He did what everyone would do, he went back to the office. He first reached out to his manufacturing experts, then he reached out to his retail experts then he went to his technology experts. After hearing for the hundredth time that there should be hundreds of intelligent monkeys in the room peeling the banana, he realized that he would have to go back to his client and tell him it was just not possible…
But, he had posted this question on their internal social network that was based on tibbr. Then this 22-year-old graduate came forward. It was her first month and she said “You know I’ve actually done a degree in food processing and we were actually experimenting with something like this. The answer is you put all of the bananas in an airtight chamber, take all of the air out, and then put the air back in, and as you repeat the vacuum and reverse vacuum, the skin loosens and comes out. But the point of the story is not how we can peel bananas successfully, but that expertise can be anywhere within your organization, and you have to be willing to bring your own expertise as you come into the organization.
For KPMG the challenge is compounded because now they not only have to retain these experts, but they’re growing at a fantastic pace. 100,000 new employees over the next 5 years. Like in every service industry, 1 in 5 of those employees actually leave every year. So when they were asked to justify the investment, the ROI of their social platform, this is what they came up with: the notion of being seen and heard, being able to contribute from day one, being able to establish diverse connections, that’s the real ROI, and the ability to onboard and retain your experts from day one, that’s the real ROI.
