How the Atos internal digital transformation has evolved since 4 years

To summarize our internal digital transformation work we did the last 4 years at Atos, I wish to highlight the following 3 hashtags (well known on Social Media :)

#ZeroEmail 

By creating a strong sense of urgency such as “Zero Email™ ambition, desired by our CEO Thierry Breton in 2011, we alerted and stimulated in-depth enterprise cultural changes.

Atos recognized the first that emails overload was a key hurdle for collaborative transformation. And the replacement of internal emails with collaborative technologies has resulted in a profound cultural shift at Atos. 

The working culture has evolved from one based on hierarchies and command-and-control to a more open environment in which all employees and leaders can engage with each other more quickly and easily thanks to many online communities.

Atos Zero Email^TM initiative was very ambitious and we are still impressed with the way everyone within the company has responded to the challenge to radically change our way of working and the progress we have made together – in three years we have reduced internal emails by 70%  in average.  Reducing internal email is a great outcome from better use of collaborative tools and new behaviors.

#SocialCollaboration

Reducing internal email was a “big plus” for employees who were suffering from email overload, from now Social Collaboration is our ongoing objective unleashing significant winnings by :

·         creating added value and more revenue

·         increasing project team productivity

·         accelerating our sales time to market

·         improving our customer satisfaction

·         generating collective innovation and ideation

We are taking advantage of a new connected team culture and our goal is to generalize this culture for all Atos current and future businesses.

Over the past 4 years, we have laid a solid foundation to now reap the benefits of our efforts and increasingly we are using the right tools for the right job; from our social business network blueKiwi to Sharepoint for document management, Lync for communication, online meetings and chat and e-mail for external contacts and formal communications.

In addition to the shared ambition to reduce our emails pollution, we have implemented many changes and internal communications initiative’s to address some confusions, middle management resistance or fears.

Our change strategy was mainly to :

1. Educate the organization about why we need to change and how culture is changed in order to gather support for cultural change across the organization (5000 managers completed dedicated training for leadership in a collaborative environment)
2. Develop a comprehensive communications and training plan that includes all the cultural levers that create change across the organization (we promoted company values in dedicated campaign and also fun training personas videos available here : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ2TzHPQDM9P65uRap2_PPqEqX-QYpxSm
3.  Enhance employee engagement, by applying effective change management principles by involving employees in the change process; (we record email addict testimonies stories to recognize their challenges and path to liberation)
4. Mobilize senior leaders to be accountable for the Collaborative culture they create in their areas with dedicated bonus targets (first target with their own social network usages and second target with their community health achievements)

The key success factor is especially to start with strong Change influencer’s network with support of few seniors’ leaders to create business exemplarity.

#WellBeingAtWork

As a consequence, we strengthened our Wellbeing at Work initiatives, because we saw positive correlations between collaboration benefits, employee engagement and digital cultural transformation.

For us  a truly Wellbeing at Work  go through cultural adaptation to digital attitudes like the rise of authenticity, transparency,  crowd-collaboration, flexibility , less bureaucracy, and an effective leadership by exemplary .

In this continuity, we are simplifying our leadership model to become more agile, customers communities oriented, fully networked mainly because high number of our knowledge workers are moving from a traditional pyramidal model to a collaborative networked community model with less complexity and more crowd collaboration

Today many analysts and experts recognized that Atos internal digital transformation has well evolved from ZeroEmail™ over Social Collaboration to WellBeingAtWork!

(see quotes selection below )

Our next challenge will be to succeed this move from a traditional hierarchy based organization to a collaborative, community led organization.

Honestly transforming towards a collaborative & networked enterprise is a long term marathon. Not really a “journey” without goal, but a kind of “relay race” in which we regularly welcome newcomers.

I will come back later to tell you how we will accelerate our mutation to the networked enterprise. 

Key Analysts and Experts recognition quotes :

From Gartner : 

“No Email initiative provides valuable lessons on driving big change through Social Collaboration. A cultural transformation of this kind and magnitude is very rare.  To prepare its workers and managers for this major transition Atos invested significantly in a communications, recognition and training programs.”

From Harvard Business Review : 

“Atos’s experience is evidence that an effective collaboration platform isn’t just a tool for communication, it’s a key to achieving smooth, integrated growth and competitive advantage in the knowledge economy.”

From Bloomberg Business :

“The Social network changed the method of working . It’s become more horizontal, less hierarchical. 

“Like other corporate social networks, BlueKiwi lets employees create online groups where they can exchange information or work together on projects. Co-workers can review one another’s documents and videos through the network and post comments on them there rather than generating a blizzard of reply-all messages.”

From Forrester :

“The Atos Zero Email program won the Forrester Groundswell Award for Excellence award in the Employee Collaboration category”

From PAC :

 « Atos ready for the real Digital transformation business »