The Marketing community, with +300 people in +45 countries, of a global manufacturing company, struggled to share knowledge and best practices across. They needed to redesign the setup of its community, but they lacked hard data on the issue.

They asked Innovisor to run an Organizational Network Diagnostic on their global community. This diagnostic needed to help them to build the optimal setup by first looking into the current state of collaboration and the roadblocks there were for them to work as ONE.

Specifically, they needed to know:

1. how the employees collaborated across regions and countries
2. who the real experts were to be included in the knowledge hubs
3. what changes were necessary from the employees’ point of view

The Organizational Network Diagnostic (watch the video explaining Organizational Network Diagnostic) confirmed the need for rethinking the community. Specifically, three findings made it clear that the setup that supported the sharing of knowledge and best practices needed attention:

• Employees expressed dissatisfaction with the structures around collaboration and knowledge sharing.’

Both managers and employees were dissatisfied with the knowledge structures compared to the Innovisor Benchmark. They were 7% below benchmark. On top of that,35% of the suggestions shared by the community were about how to improve collaboration.

• The collaboration network was not coherent – with AMERICAS disconnected from the rest

One region – AMERICAS – was completely disconnected from the rest of the community. One of the reason for this was that the various companies did not collaborate across. Within regions, companies only collaborated very little or not at all with coworkers in other companies. This was clearly shown in EMEA.

The Organizational Network Diagnostic was followed up with short- and long-term actions –  all focused to promote the sharing of knowledge and best practices.

In the short term, the Marketing community needed to break down geographical boundaries. This was done by bringing the identified connectors together on select projects. Connectors are those who tie together the individuals in a subgroup or silo. So, if they are connected across, they effectively foster knowledge sharing.

Two groups of connectors were used:

1. Connectors in countries within the regions. This strengthened the connectivity between the countries in the regions.
2. Connectors between the regions. This strengthened the connectivity between the regions.

In the long term, the community worked on the setup of global knowledge hubs. These knowledge hubs were required to sustain collaboration and knowledge sharing. The knowledge hubs were driven by the identified experts. These experts were nominated by for the knowledge in the specific Marketing areas – both by their fellow employees and management.