The Success of Blue Shirt Nation
Posted March 4th, 2008 by Adam
In a recent post, Gary Koelling of Best Buy talks about Blue Shirt Nation, an employee community he developed with counterpart Steve Bendt. The idea was to create a place where employees could talk to each other. Through the chatter, they hoped to tap into insights that would improve customer service and marketing within the stores.
With little funding behind the site (built for free with open source software), Koelling and Bendt set out upon building the community. Following the June 2006 launch, they visited Best Buys around the country and talked to employees about the site. They used employee insights to improve the community. They encouraged users to join and post about what they liked (and disliked) about the site. In facilitating the dialogue, they began to address the biggest complaint that employees had: “My opinion doesn’t matter”.
The community now includes 20,000 members and has been influential in affecting changes to the email policy, improving enrollments in the 401k program and setting up systems for employees to communicate between shifts. In his post, Koelling calls the success a “fluke”. Building a community is not easy and it takes time. Even then, not every community will succeed. But Koelling and Bendt made the most of the opportunity by listening to employees and treating them like valuable members of the Best Buy family. By empowering them to get involved with their feedback (positive or negative), it addressed their biggest concern – that their opinion did not matter. Employees now felt a sense of ownership in the community; it wasn’t just another form of “corporate-speak”.
And it paid off. Best Buy now has a community teeming with opportunities to improve the customer experience and employees engaged in helping them get there.
