Experiments in Virtual Knowledge Sharing | Jim Martin, CIO, Shepley Bulfinch

Um, so Jim Martin is the Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Shepley Bulfinch, a national architecture firm known for design excellence in healthcare, education, and urban development. Drawing on 25 years of information technology experience, Jim leads the development of strategies for technology tools that support and advance design, delivery, and collaboration. He's been particularly successful at creating an innovation center inside of Shepley Bulfinch's IT department. Focusing on new technologies and how they affect the design process. Fun fact: Jim is a Six Sigma Green Belt and holds a bachelor's degree in architecture from Roger Williams University. Those of you that have followed K-Connect over the last 5 years will recognize Jim, as this is his third K-Connect talk, and he's a longtime friend of our community. And I'm very happy to welcome Jim Martin back to K-Connect. Jim, the stage is all yours.

Thank you very much, Chris. It's great to see you. Great to be here. It is great to see everyone's names in the chat. I kind of wish I could see everyone's faces as well, but maybe, maybe soon. Chris, can you confirm that you can see my slides? Confirmed. Excellent. Great. Oh, premature click. Pardon me. All right, so Wanted to talk about experiments in virtual knowledge sharing, and my subtext here really is how do we connect people with knowledge management? There's a thread through here that I'll try and wrap up at the end. Hopefully you'll kind of see it as we go and it won't be a huge surprise to you at the end. A little bit about Shepley-Bullfinch. We are about 150 people at the moment. We have 4 offices. We have been around since 1874. We primarily serve the education, healthcare, libraries, and urban development project types. I've been at Shepley Bullfinch for almost 9 years, I think, at this point, somewhere thereabouts. And I was actually hired in part because I had some experience running IT across multiple offices. And kind of dealing with geographic separation and pulling people together and making them feel like a whole is one of the things that Shepley has been looking for me to do on IT side of things from day one. So it's something we've been working on for a while. It came in particularly handy on March 13th of— was it last year? I don't honestly know, to tell you the truth. I'm pretty sure it was last year when everyone went home and we have been virtual pretty much ever since. So the first kind of experiment I wanted to kind of talk to everyone about is Back to the Future. And Back to the Future is really a lessons learned play. And the Story starts with Jennifer Zagarella, who I think is actually in chat as well, and myself. We are kind of the firm's KA groupies. I come to all the KA Connect events that I can. Oftentimes, Chris is gracious enough to let me talk, so I get a free ride, which is nice. But we went to KA 2018, KA Connect 2018, and we heard a lot of really great lessons learned talks. So Nick of NOCO, Todd and James of Boulder shared their stories, which was great. And Andy shared his stories as well. And one of the things that really struck with me is Nick Milton's comment of lessons should ideally be integrated into the work process, not hidden away in databases or a checklist. Now, I am an IT guy and I love a good database, but that really resonated for me because sticking lessons learned into a database is really about lesson storage, not lesson management or knowledge management. So we identified— Jen and I identified a problem. We don't have an easy repeatable process for collecting lessons learned at Shelby-Bullfinch and come up with a SMART goal to design, run, and evolve, and document 4 lessons learned events by the end of 2019. So what we first did is we looked around in the rest of the business and tried to figure out if there was anything that we could beg, borrow, or steal. And it turns out that we actually found something pretty great. Angela and Lori had two different projects that were done out of our Houston office, and they were interested in 2017. So this is like 6 months before the, the start of the KA Connect, or we got inspired. They were looking to pull their teams together, which represented three different offices, and have what they were calling a Back to the Future exercise. So basically what that looked like was this, uh, and everyone submitted two things that they would do the same and two things that they would do differently, uh, and then they just went around and they talked through all that stuff. Uh, it's sometimes convenient being the IT guy because in order to facilitate, uh, this it really required some technology. So they came to me asking about, hey, can we use IdeaFlip, which is the tool that you're seeing with the blue background? You'll see it a lot. It was our standard for doing these kinds of things up until recently, in order to facilitate this kind of cross-office meeting. And everyone brought their laptop to the event. It was 100% virtual. It spanned across 3 different offices, as I said, And it worked pretty well. So we found out that it worked pretty well because we asked. If we were going to use this as the basis of this project, we really wanted to make sure that it actually was considered valuable. So almost a year later, we reached out to all the folks who participated and we said, hey, you know, hopefully you remember that Back to the Future exercise that you did back in 2017. What was it like? Did you find it valuable? What was the most valuable parts of it? And we got some really great affirmative answers from folks. So we felt confident, okay, great, we can kind of go forward and use this as a building basis. So fundamentally, it's not that complicated. It's a meeting, big surprise, because we all do meetings all the time. Back then, it wasn't entirely virtual, but it was, virtual-ish, I would say. So there's the intro. We had to introduce the Back to the Future concept to folks who hadn't been involved in it before. We also had to introduce them to the tool, the IdeaFlip tool. And then we took a couple of minutes and talked about the actual projects, because there's two projects involved in this thing. And we got two different project teams involved specifically so they could kind of talk to each other, get to know each other across different offices, as well as get to know some of the firm's work. A little bit more intimately. And then everyone went around the room and introduced themselves, what they did on the project and how long they've been with Shepley. And that was really, again, making personal connections with folks. Oh, I can now put a voice to that face, face to that voice, and get a sense for what people are working on, what they care about, hopefully find people who are like me that I can, you know, become closer to in the firm, which helps when, you you find yourself on the same project team for the next project with that person. Then, you know, we spend about 40 minutes sharing what would, what would we do the same? So everyone submits 2, I would do this the same, and everyone submits 2, I would do different. And we just go around, everyone picks one of their 2 things that they would do the same, and then they go around and talk through it. We do the same thing with different, and there's a reflection and summary part of the event as well. So it has evolved to look like this, which honestly does not look dramatically different than the original, but there are some tweaks that are kind of in there. We tweaked the process after each one. The first two that we ran, we actually had plus-deltas at the end of it to try and get feedback from folks about what was working, what wasn't. We ran out of time to do those, so we stopped doing them. And then started relying on talking to people after the fact to figure out what we should be doing differently. But we added people, we added images to it basically. So there's pictures of the projects here and here. You'll see that each individual person's, there's a picture of the person and their name, which is particularly helpful when people don't know each other as well. And if you're gonna say, ask someone a question, then being able to look up at their name is a really nice kind of helpful hint sort of thing. And then when we go through and are talking about, you know, things we would do the same or things we would do different, you'll notice that there are these little Post-its on the side. And as the people are telling the story that the image represents, people are adding Post-its about things that they heard or things that they thought were compelling or worth mentioning or sometimes just giving some kudos and validation for folks as well. So after we go through, everyone goes through one round of I would do the same and one round of I would do different, we are typically out of time. But if anyone has an image that they didn't get to talk to that they really, really want to, they're given an option there. Having two images is actually pretty useful because there's sometimes some duplication. And if the person before you got to talk about the thing that you were going to talk about, and then it's your turn, you have a backup, you have something else that you can talk about. So it's not just like, ah, what that person said, which is not as compelling and doesn't give people the opportunity to contribute in a, in a meaningful way. So then is the reflection period. And this is where I torture the extroverts in the event. And I make them be quiet and write out Post-it notes of the things that they thought were compelling. The introverts love this part, which is great. We do some basic affinity to identify the things that we see that everyone is doing. And then we ask people to vote on them. So then people put thumbs up, thumbs down, or whatever other random smiley face or frowny face or whatever that they want. And then we identify, oh, well, here are the X number of things that had the most energy around them, the things that they thought were most important for us to report out to the rest of the firm. And then we ask people for volunteers. Who would be willing to make a Finch post? Finch is our intranet, so a Finch post is basically a missive. It's like an email. What used to be an email at Shepley is now a Finch Post. And those Finch Posts look a lot like this. In fact, these are the Finch Posts, 3 of them at least. You know, you have an opportunity to talk to the rest of the firm and to create something that is potentially useful. It's an artifact of the event, and people get to validate, oh, that's actually a really great tip. We really like that. And then if there's an opportunity, they might reach out to the person and find out more. Most of the time, people are not writing up their own idea. They're writing up something they heard that someone else did. There's also an ulterior motive. If you, if you understand the issue enough in order to write a coherent post about it, you've probably learned it, which is great, because then it's like, that's a lesson that has penetrated deep into that person's brain. It didn't exist there before. And now it's just sitting there waiting for the right time to provide a stroke of insight when it's appropriate for a project. So that is more or less the actual thing. But Jen and I, from the start, were trying to figure out how do we make sure that we aren't the bottleneck in this process? And the answer to that was really documentation. So we put together pretty extensive documentation on this thing with the intent that we would be able to pass on the mantle of Back to the Future facilitators to future people, allowing us to do more of them, allowing them to happen regardless of what happens with our schedules, that sort of thing. So you can see here, this is pretty much it. On the left side over here, you'll see all the different steps in the process, almost. And then in the center here is just kind of your 30 days out, do this stuff, all that stuff. And then each one of the blue things in the middle is a link to an individual object which is further documented. So that looks a little bit like this. So this is basically the template that we have for reaching out to PMs to get agreement on who should participate. To the surprise of exactly nobody who knows me, the first step in this process is to figure out which, which projects, and then we identify who has spent the most time on those projects. And then that's our list of people, and we give the project manager the name of the person and the number of hours they spent on the project. And we ask them to use their judgment on who might be good to talk about this project, who might have learned some things along the way that would be worth sharing. So we get them to give us that, which also provides tacit approval for them to participate in the event, assuming that it's for that project, and it isn't always. And another example is this, which after we ask people, hey, could you share on Finch what you learned, what you took away from this Back to the Future event, We give them a prompt. We also give them a couple of examples of, hey, here's maybe some ways to start the actual email— the Finch post, rather. I've often found that people struggle a little bit with, I don't know how to get this thing started. It's this idea and trying to get it formed into such a way that it starts to flow. So we gave them a whole bunch of different examples. It is interesting to note that almost none of the actual posts start with anything of that. So either it is not at all valuable, or people decide, great, those are all the things I don't want to start with, and move on from there. But either way, it seems like people get it done. So it's all good. So the other thing is, you know, we're a bunch of designers and architects. Pictures are worth a thousand words. These were useful at the beginning, more so than after the fact, because people have gotten a chance to understand what these things actually do. So we don't have to explain it so much anymore. But initially, this is a diagram that starts to talk about what the pre-work looks like. So we send an email to people and say, hey, send us 2 images, 2 things you would do the same and 2 things you do differently. And then we will put them onto this board. And then when you show up to the event, you'll go through and you'll talk about each one of these things, and we'll just go around the room. And then eventually we'll be asking people to share their findings with the firm out on Finch. And then we realized, well, you know, if we're going to try and sucker some poor person to moderating this thing, probably we should give them a little bit of clarification as well. So we put some time into clarifying what the role of the moderator as well— what you do, how much time it's likely to take, that sort of stuff. So again, if you know me, this won't be a surprise to you, but we try we tried very hard to do things and keep some analytics and some stats going. So we ran 4 events, including the original one, that included 7 projects, because one of the times we kind of did an asymmetrical version where there was one project in CA, starting CA, and one project in SD, and they were similar size and complexity. And the newer project that was just starting really wanted to hear lessons learned from the the project that had just gone through this Herculean effort. So we did that, but there really wasn't very much for the project in design development or design— no, what's the one before design development? All right, well, that one, it's not in my head right now, but it'll be somewhere else.

Conceptual design.

Ah, conceptual design. Thank you very much. So that was kind of a one-way deal, and it was It was pretty interesting. We also did some variations around, you know, mixing the different project types together. One healthcare, one education, and, you know, we did two healthcare at one point as well. And we would ask the questions like, what would you do differently? And when we did one healthcare and one education, people said, oh, it would be great to have, you know, two education projects at the same time instead of one of each, because some of the things that were shared, maybe aren't relevant to the kind of work that I do. And when we did two education— or two healthcare projects, people said, "Ah, it really would have been great if we'd had one education project as well, because we don't get to see what they work on so much." So the takeaway that we kind of took from it was regardless, it seems like it has value, and people like talking about their stuff. So we generated 25 Finch posts from 21 individual people. And, you know, all in, with all the 62 attendees, it was 140 hours involved. The really big one-sided one, we ended up spending more time than the other ones did. Typically, they run around 2 hours, give or take. And then the facilitator spends about 4 hours total, including 2 hours in the event, facilitating, getting stuff put together, and then sending out reminders. And probably to the surprise of no one, the most aggravating part of the entire process is finding time on people's calendars. When we were first thinking, oh, we'll do 4 in a year, that seemed totally doable until we realized how difficult it was going to be to find a time that would work for all these people, and they were all free to get together. So I think we only ended up doing 3 in 2019. But it was— so we hit— we didn't hit our goal. But we still came reasonably close and value was delivered. So we're still feeling pretty good about it. So, you know, we also measure the Finch posts themselves as some sort of an indicator of the value that was delivered. And you can see this is a typical chart out of Synthesis, but the blue line is the one I think is the most interesting, and that represents the number of people who got an opportunity to see one of these Back to the Future posts. And you can see over here, it's actually pretty high, and it stays reasonably high, and it keeps going up. And that's people kind of re-finding these things. If they're going to the, uh, Back to the Future hashtag, they can kind of see all the different stuff, and they scroll down and looking for things that they think are interesting or helpful sort of thing. So it's sort of a stand-in for, or as best we can find as a stand-in for, is the information interesting to the rest of the firm? So as I said before, variations are fine. You know, people just seem to get value out of the event regardless. The facilitators, thank God, do not need any special knowledge about projects or even architecture. Jen does not have an architecture background. I went to school for architecture and then probably forgot anything I learned there, which as anyone who's graduated from architecture school knows isn't very much to begin with. So we were still able to perfectly effectively facilitate the events without any actual knowledge of other things they were talking about. People really like talking about their projects. We have a rule of thumb right now, 2 hours for every 15 participants, and then add 30 minutes for each 5 additional participants you put in there. We ran into a couple of problems, we were just running out of time in the end, and it felt pretty— it wasn't great because we were finding having to shut down conversations that we weren't entirely finished, it felt like. It could have gone either way. Either they were just going to keep bloviating for another 4.5 hours, or they were just about to make a really great point and we had to cut them off for time purposes. So being a little bit more generous on the time is certainly something that we've tried to figure out how to do. PMs seem to be really interested in having us do this. We really didn't have any PM deny the request to get one of their people to come in, except for because they had deadlines on those times, or the person was on PTO or was otherwise unavailable. And because probably someone is interested, we we charge the time spent on this thing to the project that the person is currently working on. And that may or may not be the project that is being discussed. So the reason for that is that the lessons that they learn in these events, in theory, are then directly applicable to the project that they're working on, and the value will be derived by that project. So we invest in our people, it's really important for us, and this is just one mechanism for doing that. The last kind of thing is to add photos. People like photos, they like seeing pictures of their fellow bullfinches, they like seeing pictures of our projects, that sort of thing. So we added a lot of those things, and that seemed to help a lot. So then there's a point 5, because I don't follow Chris's instructions all that well. It's kind of It's not exactly 3 experiments. It's kind of 3.5 experiments. But we wanted to see, you know, can we do lessons learned with Revit using the same format? So that brings us to the geeks. So Jess Purcell is our Design Technology Manager, and myself as the wizened old soul who already knew the process. And we decided to try and figure out, could we do Back to the Future on a piece of software instead of on a project? And that looked a little bit like this. And we basically said, great, you know, we identified the people who worked in Revit the most. And we said, we're looking for people to take part in a series of events about Revit. You may have heard of a Back to the Future on projects. This is about Revit. We'd like you to send us two pictures that represent things you would want to do again on a Revit project and two things you would not want to do again on a Revit project. And we went through the same kind of process. We went around the room, everyone had an opportunity to talk. We were— we had Revit people kind of talking to each other about things that they had in real life, and there was a lot of sharing of, "Oh, did you know you could do this instead?" or "That actually got fixed in this thing," or whatever, all the different things that they were kind of talking through. It was really eye-opening for us as well, Jess and myself, because we heard things that people were doing in the field that we had no idea, because it's, it's impossible to keep tabs of how people are using software if you're not looking at them all the time, and no one has time for that, or interest, frankly. So same thing, you know, there are artifacts of the process created on Finch, so there's opportunities for people who are not involved in the thing to kind of see things. They can comment on them, they can like them, validate them. All that sort of stuff. It also was great for the, the Revit Users Group folks, which is our internal user group, to identify things that people think are really great and look into areas and make sure that they can kind of bring the content and distribute it more evenly across all the people who are using the software. So quick stats. We had 3 of these events. These all happened in 2020. Yeah, 2020. Yeah, we did these during pandemic years. This is one of the things that we were looking for, that we, as a firm, you know, we did what everyone did. We had town hall meetings. We had, we invited, we didn't invite anyone to do a virtual pet walkthrough, and Gen Z is going to be rolling her eyes right now, but that was something that I wanted to do. I wanted to virtually pet a llama, because who wouldn't want to do that? But we did a lot of other things. We had trivia night, we had, we had a Jeopardy! night. We did a bunch of different stuff to kind of connect people. The trouble is, is that what I really was seeing is that we were getting a lot of people to show up, but we were missing a target demographic. There is some subset of people who really aren't interested in socializing for the sake of socializing. They have other conflicts or lives or whatever, or no interest, whatever the case may be. And I wanted to give them an opportunity to connect with folks on a topic that they actually cared about, that they could justify taking time out of their day when they had so much other stuff going on during work from home. So that was kind of the, the, well, let's try doing the Revit thing, because that was something that we could control and something that we were really concerned about, the fact that you couldn't just turn around over your left shoulder and talk to someone and say, hey, I've got this Revit problem going on, what should I do about it, sort of thing. So we had 14 Finch posts from 12 people off of 3 events with 31 attendees. 62 hours spent total, facilitators spent 12 hours. The facilitation really doesn't seem to go down too much. It's about 4 hours per event. So it's, it's a little bit of a lift, but it's not the worst thing in the world. And again, you know, we're keeping track over time. These all happened, the last one happened last month. The documentation was great. As it turns out, because I wasn't able to make the last one, and Jess was able to rope in one of our other design technology specialists to run the event without me. And I'm not going to say they had a better time without me, but they certainly didn't suffer for my absence, which is great, because that's kind of the whole point of the documentation effort. So our observations, it works on software as well as projects, which is great. Reminders are necessary. People don't always remind— they're in the middle of doing a bunch of other things. And so we ended up having to send a bunch of reminders trying to get people to send us the images that represented their, their 4 things. And the PMs really appreciated being notified first, especially because, again, anyone attending one of these events is billing time to the current project they're on. But A lot of the PMs have kind of been through one of these things on the project side of things. They understand the value, and none of them really objected at all to giving people time, assuming that we scheduled it far enough in advance and made sure they didn't stomp all over a prior commitment. The playbook has been great. So that was an effort that was definitely well worth it. I'm really glad that we did that. And it turns out that people like talking about what works for them in Revit just as much as they like talking about their projects. Go figure. So I think that's great, and then it really comes down to us providing them an opportunity to do so. So the next experiment is experiment number 2, for those keeping track, and it is actually rug debates. And this is about identifying best practice with context. And I am absolutely a storyteller on this one because I had no direct involvement whatsoever. Which is great, because we have a lot of really great people at Shepley who are very smart and do really cool creative things. I'm just the mouth that tells you about them most of the time. So in this case, we have the debaters, and that is Whitney, Luis, and Jess. Whitney and Luis are kind of our current RUG chairs, Revit Users Group chairs. And what they decided, they had a problem, which was, they needed a low-effort, fun, and inclusive way to help identify when a best practice is best. And I know that there is some concern about the idea of a best practice being antithetical to a learning organization. But for me, a best practice is best when it is and maybe not when it isn't. And it's that context that really matters. And that's why I think this was particularly brilliant. So we created another diagram. This was created posthumously by Jess. Thank you very much, Jess. We have a moderator, some debaters, and the RUG folks created a list of ideas of debates that they would want to run. And then the moderator identifies people who might be good for those debates. And they ask them and say, hey, would you run these? And then they kind of have a conversation about, you know, each person's side on the debate. And you— we asked them to take a slightly kind of extreme version of it. It's not a very fun debate if people are agreeing on everything. So we asked them to kind of say, all right, well, go a little bit of— don't go crazy, like, on the fringe of things, but, you know, make sure that there's some distance between you and you're representing a point. It's not necessarily your deeply held convictions. They host a prep session where they kind of go through both things and they explore both sides for about 30 minutes, just the debaters and the moderator. And the moderator identifies questions that they're gonna ask and does all the prep work for making sure that the event will go through solid. And then we actually hold the event in our Teams channel. And the Teams channel actually has a live poll, which I personally think is genius, because what happens is as the debaters are going back and forth, kind of talking through things, the peanut gallery, or the audience, or the people who are also on the team, are going through and they're actually giving them live feedback on whether or not the content of the debate is compelling or not, which I think is hilarious. And, you know, there's also chat comments going through and things like that. And the moderator also kind of starts off giving some cover to the debaters and says, they've been asked to take this position, it may or may not represent their deep-held beliefs on these on this thing, and then they kind of go with it. And then what happens is an artifact of the event is created because Jess has been paying at least some attention to all the things that I do over the years, and she knows ahead of time what I'm going to ask her to do and just does it because it's easier than doing it after the fact. She identifies the people who are most engaged in the chat room in the Teams channel, and she asked them, hey, would you make a write-up of the thing? Um, and then people make the write-up, which is great. Okay, so, um, we have done 3 of these to date. Uh, I thought it might be helpful for context. This is the ugliest slide ever, so I apologize ahead of time. Please don't tell anyone on my marketing department. Um, we did one on worksets, more versus less. We did one on Keynotes, uh, file versus in the actual, uh, note takes. And we did one in design options, more design, use design options or use other options. And again, it's not like there's a definitive right or wrong. The issue is trying to get people to articulate when one might be the right answer and one might not be. Revit is a very complicated project, or software rather, and there's a lot of different ways of doing things in it. And helping people understand this is maybe the right decision, but only under these circumstances. And if you get this circumstance, maybe it's not the right decision. And then this is actually what the, the Teams meeting looks like after the fact. There's the poll there. You can actually see who responded to what poll, and there's a recording in the meeting, which is great because then people can go back to it after the fact. This is what the Finch posts look like. They're not that exciting if you know what a post looks like, but the content is actually pretty great. And these are the people that kind of were tapped to, to make that report out and create that artifact of the process. So for these, they're shorter. They're only about 30 to 45 minutes. So a lot less difficulty getting them scheduled. We basically schedule them for time and then people show up to them. Rather than have to schedule around people's other planned events. We've done 3 of them so far this past year. We had 72 total participants who were live. Some of the same people came to each one of those 3 events. Teams up until recently didn't have very good attendance, which was a pain in the neck. So we don't have as good numbers as I would like, but I infrequently get as good numbers as I would like, so I'm getting used to the disappointment of that. And we've had 20 people view the recordings after the fact, which we think is encouraging. For these, you know, the 72 people spent 48 hours total listening to them, and the debater and the moderators didn't need to spend nearly as long. So for the 3 events, it was about 12 hours. I'm sorry, that's actually supposed to be 9 hours. And then you can actually see here we have some of the data about the sharing and whether or not the people in the firm are actually seeing the content, that sort of thing. Pardon me. Okay. So some observations. You know, it's really important to give people that cover and make sure they aren't overly attached to their views. It's also important to keep it light. There are some like— I have flashbacks of like quiz show and, you know, high school debate team and things like that. It's like, this is really not that at all. It is intended to be kept light. The questions are structured in such a way that there's always a little bit of fun to be had in the midst of hopefully trying to learn something. It makes things a lot easier for people to acquire information if they're not struggling with preconceived expectations or notions at the same time as they're trying to learn something new. And again, the goal is to identify the context that makes a best practice best or relevant. So it's not necessarily just about the thing, but about the thing about the thing. That was a sentence, so you're welcome. The Peena Gallery is also great, and live voting is a fantastic way of keeping people engaged. The votes are going back and forth as people are changing their votes. It was suggested— there was a great hashtag on one of the posts that you can see, if Barak had brought his little girl, he would have won. So there's a lot of camaraderie that's kind of brought to it, and people are really seeing it as an opportunity to engage in the event itself, not just be a passive listening experience. The best question we got was, what is a horror story you can share about using the other option? People like talking about things that cause them pain and are difficult and aggravating. So if you can come up with a question that lets people think about that, but also share something useful, I've always often found that it can be pretty, pretty effective. We also think that the debates can be useful for more things with RUG. So we're planning on trying the format out to talk about things that are equally complex and ambiguous, ambiguous around architecture, generally technical terms, whatever other things. It's pretty easy to run and set up. It's been pretty effective. So we'll probably try it on some other things as well. So now for something completely different. And you're going to have to squint and turn your head sideways a little bit. To see the knowledge management in this. But this is about keeping people connected through recognition. And if there's any HR folks out there, this one's hopefully for you. This is maybe what you came for, whether you knew it or not. So this is the team of digital transformers. I am involved in this one because there was a fair amount of custom IT work that was required. Emily is our human resources manager. Jess, again, who should be recognizable from the last examples. But our problem was, is that collecting and displaying Shepley Shoutouts is exceedingly difficult when everyone is working from home. And what is a Shepley Shoutout? Well, this is a Shepley Shoutout. This is something that we started doing in 2017, and it's a way of providing recognition for people. So in November of each year, we would have like a month of shoutouts. And you would see these little boxes down here that you could, in the living room of each office, you could come in here, you're on your coffee break, you're eating lunch or whatever, and you could be like, "Oh, OK, I'm gonna maybe write some shoutouts and express some appreciation for some of the people that I work with for some of the cool stuff that they did that impacted me or, or my project." And this was fantastic. But it wasn't perfect. What it did great is it inserted the desired behavior into the flow of people's breaks. This is genius. So it's in the living room, so you're already there because you're not focused on work, you're taking a break from work, you're either replenishing yourself or you're just hanging out, just having a conversation with someone or whatever, and it's like, oh, well, since you're already on a break, why don't you come here and actually do a shout-out for someone? It also looks really impressive. It's cool, and you would often find people just kind of sitting in front of the wall just looking at the entirety of all of the shoutouts that were actually given, which is fantastic. Wasn't perfect, though, and I don't know that Emily would agree with me on all of these things. Some have said that I am opinionated, and they're probably not wrong. I know that Emily did, in fact, she was disappointed that it only happened once a year. She was interested in having a process that would be, that could continue throughout the entirety of the year. It was only visible in the office that they're in. So we would collect shoutouts per office. So the smaller offices maybe didn't look as impressive because they only had 150 or so shoutouts instead of, you know, 450 shoutouts. Like the Boston office had. The other thing is we would collect the shoutouts and we would sort them, which was a very manual process that fortunately I didn't have to do because I would lose my mind. And then we would hand the shoutouts back to the people who got the shoutouts or to the manager of the department who got the shoutouts. So the shoutouts were not destroyed, but they were given away to people and they weren't easily kind of observed after the fact. It was also kind of hard to find your shoutouts until you got your list back. You know, it may have included people from another office and you didn't have an opportunity to see those because those are pinned up in an office you weren't in. And until you kind of got them, and there was a mailing process involved in getting people's shoutouts to the right office and things like that, it was, it was kind of a faff to find the shoutouts that you actually were shouted out to. So what we did is we created a digital version of this because Emily came to me and that's what I do for a living. So this is actually a mockup and this is the Mad Libs style. And Jess Purcell made this actually in Power Apps, I think. And then we also had a bespoke mockup and the bespoke mockup is download this template, draw on it with your pen, do whatever you're going to do and upload it back in and then you can actually make it. And it's kind of important to give people options, so we try to do that. Some people are, more proud of their drawing skills than others. One of the reasons why I got into computers to begin with is because I can't draw to save my life. So I was mostly sticking with the Mad Libs style. It still looks pretty damn cool, if I say so myself. It's really great. And we got a lot of people doing shoutouts. This is the digital version. So this is all web-based. And, you know, we were able to actually put the shoutouts in a rotating, manner on the homepage of the internet. So every time you go to the internet, there was a new shoutout on the right side. And if you wanted to see a different one, you could click a button and it would find a different one. And then there was also the option of you could go to your own profile page on Finch and you could see all the shoutouts that you were listed in, which was also great. So they're more kind of persistent as add more, as more are added, they are added to the top of the list. And you can kind of blow down. So this is the stats of people kind of looking at stuff. So you can see when we rolled it out in December, it got a lot of traffic. There were over 1,000 people kind of hanging out, checking out the page. And as time passed, it kind of went down. But even in March, we had 200 people viewing the page. So people are still doing the digital equivalent of sitting in front of the wall and just kind of checking it out, which I think is really cool. But because we had to do something, we actually took the mock-up that Jess did and we had to— we couldn't get it to scale in Power Apps, so we had to do a custom developed application. But because we did that, I also made sure that we actually had hooks in the backend that we could tie into analytics. So this is the actual dashboard that we use to identify shoutouts and shoutout behavior. And I think Emily would be comfortable with me saying that it has not gone exactly how we would hope. It has been fantastic, but they put, you know, a minimum goal of 40%. Their KPI was the number of Shepleys who are making shoutouts, and the high goal is 60%. And we hit 38% in December of last year, which was a little short of the Low goal, 40%. But, you know, again, still pretty cool. And then in the last 90 days, everyone's been super distracted with trying to figure out little things like how to get people back into the office and how to start staffing for work that we think is coming back but maybe isn't going back as fast as we thought, and dealing with less resources in operations in general to do things like remind people to shout out, that sort of thing. But we have in place the levers that we know that we think we want to start throwing, and we will know through this data whether or not those levers are actually having the desired effect. So we have the number of shoutouts that people have sent— where did my cursor go? Okay, there we go— the number of shoutouts that people have sent in the last 90 days, so we can tell that people are using the system a lot, so we can give them positive reinforcement. We know the people, active employees who have not gotten any shoutouts. So we could reach out to their managers and say, "Hey, you know, Anna Becker hasn't gotten a shoutout in the last 90 days. If she's done anything great, you know, you might consider doing that." Unfortunately, all these activities take time, which no one has right now, because I think like most of you guys, we are currently trying to staff up again. Because work seems to be going back. And then we can identify people who've received shoutouts in the last 90 days— I'm sorry, this was sent, this is received— and then active employees who haven't received a shoutout in the last 6 months. So we know what we need to do, we just need to find the time to actually do it. And I am cautiously optimistic that it'll get to a good place. So what we learned, the observations from this is rolling things out right now is hard. The creation of the tool was difficult. It was competing with a lot of other IT priorities and problems that we were trying to deal with at the same time. And it was generally just, you know, it was kind of painful, generally speaking. Painful but totally worth it and super cool. So we also find this kind of It's, when we were doing it once a year, it was like, OK, it is the season for shoutouts. And we were able to generate a lot of energy around that. Now that we're doing it, trying to do it consistently throughout the year, it's kind of hard to maintain that level of awareness. And it's a little difficult to encourage people to express appreciation. So without, it's like, it feels like being voluntold. So we're trying, We're trying to think about, well, how do we do this in such a way that it makes it natural? The other— I think the other thing that's working against us here is that where we used to have in the living room, where you're going in order to have a break and everything is fine and dandy, and you were already kind of predisposed towards doing something like doing a shout-out. Now it's on the computer. So you're trying to— if you're on a break, you're leaving the computer. You want to get as far away from it as possible because that thing is your entire life right now. I think that is a bit of a problem, and we haven't figured out if there's a way around that. In order to kind of do a shout-out on the computer, you have to go back to the computer. So if it's not the first thing that you're going to do before you get back to work again, you know, how do we make room for people to do that in the flow of their life without making it an extra obligation that they have to go do? One bright spot was we actually— Carol, who's our CEO, she actually hosted a shout-out writing session on Teams. So we have a Teams channel that has everyone in the company, and she just started a meeting and says, "Hey, I'm going to be doing some shout-out writing if anyone wants to join me," sort of thing, which I think was super cool. She didn't get a lot of people to jump in because it was unannounced and unplanned. It was just like anyone opportunistically wants to hang out, and it was the digital equivalent of people seeing Carol sitting at the table signing, writing shoutouts in the living room and wandering by and saying, "Oh, I'm gonna go do that at the same time because I get to chat with Carol at the same time as I'm recognizing my coworkers." So that was pretty cool. So it feels like there's something interesting there that we want to kind of tweak on a little bit and take further advantage of going forward. So again, that one, that is an example of it was great. It is not living up to our expectations, but we have not had a chance to really focus on What can we do to fix it? I am cautiously optimistic that when we do that, we can get it kind of rolling and get it tied into the behavior of the firm and self-sustaining a little bit. So that is kind of it. So kind of 3 stories. The Back to the Future is really about connecting groups of people together and getting them to share stories. Kind of the campfire sort of idea. And then things that they learn, they internalize by writing it out in a communiqué that will go out to the rest of the firm, allowing for further communication and connectivity to happen with other people who read it, resonate with it, and then appreciate it and/or reach out to people for more information or details. The work sets— the RUG debates are kind of similar. It's a bunch of people talking about something that has value to them in their business, in their work, and the things that they have to do on a daily basis, and having fun doing it and not being too overly serious. And being able to kind of bag on some of your friends as well at the same time is kind of an added bonus. And then the shoutouts, and the shoutouts is about kind of connecting people through recognition, sitting down and making a considered effort to recognize your fellow employees and then making that recognition as visible as possible to the rest of the firm, kind of going forward. It'll be interesting to see if at some point with shoutouts we have a problem with too many shoutouts for people and we have to actually limit to a random number or to the first 50 or whatever. So that'll be a fantastic problem to have, and I can't wait to have to, uh, talk with Emily about that, try and figure it out. So that is the 3 and a half, uh, experiments that I wanted to share with everyone. Hopefully that was useful for— at least one of those is useful for everyone. It's great, Jim.

Thank you. Um, so Jim, we've got 6 minutes left. We've got 4 minutes in the Q&A panel. We're going to try and do maybe a speed lightning round of answers. And so, and folks, if you haven't added something, you can add to the Q&A panel or you can upvote the ones you want to make sure that we prioritize. So Andrew Trickett wants to know, as a part of the debate, did you consider a knowledge cafe approach with the debate using breakout rooms as an option?

We did not because we wanted it to be a shared experience. In that particular case. So the interactivity of having people kind of voting one way or the other during the thing and the energy of that changing over time and people going, "Oh, you just lost a point," sort of thing, I think was the backbone of that event. So I don't think it would have worked in that particular event type in breakout rooms.

Yep.

Cool.

Kerry, how do you handle any legal aspects of talking about things you do differently, specifically referring to things that could be discoverable, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah, we don't talk about lessons learned. We talk about things we would do differently if we had a chance to go back in time. And I think that's— that is one of the reasons why they named it that. Angela is very, very bright. She thinks about all that kinds of stuff. She is the chairman of our board for the last couple of years. So she is not oblivious to that stuff. And we had conversations about that and our Our position is, uh, that we invest in our people's knowledge about things, and there are always things that we could do better. Um, but if we have a chance to go back and try something else, then we would probably try and do something else, right? So we are not going to worry about it if it becomes discoverable at some point and litigious. Uh, we are pretty confident that, you know, we're going to be able to represent our case in such a way that it would not cause a problem. Great.

Stephanie Eiler, how do you get those shoutouts on an employee profile page?

We wrote a custom web part that ties into the backend database where those things live and then just displays them. Filtering will be next. It's, it's, uh, I showed you the picture of Jess's mockups of the interface because it's actually pretty, and the thing we ended up building was a little ugly. It is a minimally viable product. I mean, it's our ugly, so we love it, but, you know, it could use some polishing and we'll get to some of that.

Yeah, it was a functional prototype.

Exactly right. Yes, yes.

James Van De Zandt. Hey, good to see you, Jim. James, are you measuring or surveying overall employee satisfaction and comparing that with the usage stats of shoutouts?

We are not. But we have a lot of data that we collect accidentally around our people. And one of the things that we have used in the past is like a Kickstarter for, for a continuous conversation. So it shows like all the projects you're working on, the different phases that you've worked on, just all the different data about how you've worked at the firm, which is usually pretty surprising to people alone because like, ah, I was just head down doing the work. It didn't occur to me that I, you know, have more construction documents than CA experience or whatever, or I've done more work in healthcare than education or those sorts of things. So I can see in the future kind of having the shoutouts in there as well as another piece of information that people can kind of pull from in order to have a more meaningful conversation with people during their continuous conversations. Haven't done it yet, but also one of the things on the roadmap.

I just want to call out for everyone, I saw a question in the chat from Neil. We're going to be sending the slides out along with the video, so you'll have both. James Van De Zand, question 2: Are you still using IdeaFlip? Sounds like not. And if not, what tool do you use now?

So we just bought a corporate license for Miro. Miro IdeaFlip has been great. We've been using it for probably 5 years or so, but you can't draw on it, and that was the, that was the killer for it effectively. So Miro just is a better tool for designers. IdeaFlip is a better tool for people who are looking for pure ideation but not a lot of creative documentation sort of stuff.

Sounds good.

I don't have any idea how to use it yet, but that's what we're going to be seeing.

Right, that's what you hear. Um, uh, Patrina, um, did the shout-out recognition have any reward or compensation aspect to it?

It did not, and it never has, and I don't think we would want it to because it, it feels more pure when it's being done for the right reasons, which is a genuine appreciation for people's energy and effort put into projects.

And your last question from Jeff Wise, will shoutouts stay all digital? Or will they be a blend of analog and digital in the future?

Yeah, I don't know. I guess it depends on whether or not they end up working well once we get a chance to kind of tweak them a little bit. I had, you know, I had had conversations with folks in HR over the years about, hey, maybe we should take this wall of 400+ things and scan them, and then we can actually give them to people digitally. And their eyes glazed over and a small tear came down the side of their head as they thought about how much work that would be. So we'll see. I mean, we thought about putting an app in place so that they could draw whatever they wanted and then it would take a square picture of it and then upload that, but that was hard. And we were in the middle of migrating our entire IT infrastructure to the cloud at the time. So that was— maybe a future thing. So we'll see.

Cool.

But, you know, will there be a place to actually create a digital version of the viewing? Maybe on a big TV that sits somewhere or something. We're not going to get the whole, you know, 20-foot wall experience back again, probably, unless we individually print and cut them. But, you know, that doesn't feel like a very sustainable, uh, decision. So I'm guessing probably not, but we'll see.

You have a station right there in the living room so people can add them while they're in the—

exactly, just hit print.

Okay, Jim, thank you so much for doing this today, for creating this show and leading us through it. Um, and everyone else, thank you for coming, for your energy in the chat and the questions. Um, we're going to be sending, as I mentioned before, this recording and the slides along later. If you're sticking around for the Hangout or you're curious about it and want to join us to keep talking about