How do you communicate a corporate strategy to tens of thousands of employees spread across the globe? Like most companies, this banking and financial services giant sends updates via email. Yet only a small number of their employees actively click on the links in these global emails. So, Alastair and his team turned to Kahoot! to drive awareness and understanding of the company’s new strategy and highlight how every employee can contribute.

“It was our global head of internal communications who suggested using Kahoot! when we were thinking about new platforms. We liked how Kahoot! encourages communication and discussion. We were also impressed by the team-building and brainstorm features and how everyone has a voice at the table,” said Alastair.

Communicating corporate strategy enterprise-wide with a Kahoot! wave

Kahoot! wave (available with Kahoot! 360 Spirit) turns one-way communication initiatives into an enterprise-wide conversation. Waves enable larger organizations to deliver engaging content that employees remember. Here’s a quick overview of how a Kahoot! wave works:

During the build-up phase, Alastair and his team created a kahoot for the wave, translated it into five languages, and distributed them to managers across the world. The CEOs of individual countries then sent out emails to managers, encouraging their teams to participate. As an incentive, the winning team would meet one of the world’s most decorated Olympians.

Tracking understanding of key corporate strategies

Managers could host the kahoot at any time during the wave’s defined two-week crest phase. In total, over 2,700 live kahoot sessions were hosted, with 32,000 employees participating. Employees who weren’t able to attend a live kahoot session were emailed a self-paced kahoot to complete asynchronously.

As part of the follow-up phase, Alastair’s team accessed aggregated insights and analytics across thousands of sessions. “We asked the same question at the start and at the end of the kahoot, which was ‘how well do you know our strategy?’,” said Alastair. This enabled Alastair and his team to quickly identify a 32% increase in employees with a fair/good understanding of the company’s strategy. “The main benefit was seeing that number increase by such a large figure. It links directly to our main objective, which was to increase understanding of the strategy, and the secondary objective, which was to highlight how everyone can contribute,” said Alastair.

What’s more, managers were encouraged to review their team’s brainstorm output during the follow-up phase. The brainstorm questions sparked insightful conversations and the output will help individual teams identify how they can contribute to implementing the key pillars of the strategy. In total, over 26,000 ideas were submitted, creating an invaluable vault of feedback and opinions for the company to utilize.

Building team spirit and strengthening company culture with a Kahoot! wave

As well as helping employees understand the company’s strategy, the Kahoot! wave also acted as a great team-building tool. “Kahoot! has helped boost team spirit, connect people over geographies and inject some fun to our communications,” said Alastair.

“The local leaderboards were great. I think that local engagement is what really helped the Kahoot! wave work so well. We shared the leaderboards midway through the wave to say which businesses functions and markets are doing best and to instill an element of healthy competition,” said Alastair.

Creating engaging experiences that everyone loves

From investment bankers in Asia to retail staff in Europe, the company created a kahoot that appealed to a wide variety of employees. And, even though such a diverse audience played the kahoots, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

“The feedback was so refreshing. Kahoots are much more engaging than an email or video. They make you be present in a competition. It brings out your competitive side! If you’re watching a video, especially if you’re on Zoom, you can write emails at the same time. However, with Kahoot!, people were involved and attentive the whole time. Our global head of strategy, global head of HR, and global head of communications were all really pleased with Kahoot!,” said Alastair.

Key features used

• Single sign-on provided a seamless, time-saving onboarding for every manager that hosted a live kahoot session.
• Multiple-choice quiz and type answer questions sparked friendly competition between team members and helped make knowledge stick.
• Double point questions kept excitement levels high throughout the session as the leaderboard changed dramatically with so many points on offer.
• Slides with videos and images were inserted between questions to give participants more context to the company strategy and to help guide teams through the experience.
• Brainstorms, word clouds, and polls were used to spark conversations, give every participant a voice, and make the strategy relevant for every employee.
• Enterprise workspace library enabled Alastair and his team to easily collaborate on kahoots. They could review and edit content and lock the final version of the kahoot.
• Enterprise workspace reports gave Alastair and his team full visibility into all session reports.
• Enterprise workspace usage report provided the company with an in-depth summary of their company’s activity on the kahoot platform.