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Breaking Down The Barriers At Davies

Davies is an award winning public affairs, issues management, and crisis communications firm. They support clients in four specialized industry areas: Hospitals & Physicians, Pharmaceuticals & Biotech, Energy & Natural Resources, and Real Estate.

“People called it the single most useful tool that Davies has introduced to us as a staff, period.”

Brandon Edwards, President and COO

Davies is organized into specialized practice groups that cut across multiple offices and time zones in order to service clients nationally. Over the last four years Davies tripled in size, and consequently began to experience a few communication issues. With a flood of new staff and an expanding organizational footprint, Davies’ capacity to coordinate internal communications, facilitate knowledge transfer, and keep new staff connected to the Davies culture was pushed to the limit. A new solution was clearly needed. That is when Phil Stone, Executive Vice President of Operations, turned to Socialtext to help Davies solve their problem.

Summary
Problem	Disjointed internal communication among office locations and among staff in the different practice groups resulted in duplication of effort, inconsistent processes for client service, and a workforce that did not feel connected to one another.
Solution	Deployed Socialtext workspaces to collect and share company-wide best practices and subject matter expertise. The workspaces included a series of blogs for sharing company news and generating new ideas for making Davies “better.” Socialtext People and Socialtext Signals were introduced to provide social networking among staff and company-wide sound bite communication throughout the work day. A customized Socialtext Dashboard was created to tie everything together as a company intranet.
Benefits	Best practices are documented and shared, and duplicative efforts are greatly reduced throughout the firm. Davies employees can now find subject matter expertise across the firm, and can deliver exceptional client service. Time searching for information was reduced. New hires are “on track and running to win” faster, and the training and development of existing staff is accelerated to meet the demands of a rapidly changing environment. A greater sense of collaboration across the firm is leading to improved morale, more efficient and effective employees, and ultimately greater value for clients.

“Once I knew that we needed blogs and wikis to spread our subject matter expertise, keep our growing staff connected with company news, and create a means to capture new ideas to make us ‘better,’ I went shopping. We talked to Socialtext and it was immediately clear they could provide everything we needed.”

Phil Stone
Executive Vice-President of Operations

Collecting, Refining, and Sharing Best Practices

The Davies senior leadership team established a program called “A Better Davies.” The team’s idea of “better” was not about the pursuit of perfection. Rather, “better” was an initiative to infuse a commitment to continuous improvement of the firm’s service to clients into its cultural DNA.

Phase one of this initiative was to create a communication platform to facilitate the “better” conversation, and to capture best practices and processes in a central location. The objective was to enable cross-pollination of innovation, by providing a platform for having open discussions and sharing information. By using Socialtext workspaces instead of e-mail, information became centralized. Information that used to reside solely in an individual’s head is now available to everyone. This broadened the reach of knowledge for Davies, and reduced the distraction and inefficiency of answering the same question multiple times, via individual e-mails. Pages in the shared workspaces are tagged, categorizing and grouping similar information. This makes it easy for people to find content quickly. Finally, by centralizing information, Davies delivers a more consistent message, and has improved on-time deliverables to clients. Now, employees spend more time adding value to clients rather than searching for information or duplicating effort.

“With the right person responding to a question and others adding information they know, what we previously shared in a staff meeting is now available in real-time. With the high cost of billable time, our staff meetings now focus on more important ‘high-touch’ topics such as our strategic direction, our vision for the future, and our cultural values.”

Phil Stone
Executive Vice-President of Operations

Speeding Up Training and Knowledge Transfer

Davies’ growth brought new opportunities and a flood of new staff to the firm. Along with this came a challenge to speed up the on-boarding process. To solve this, Davies turned to the profiles and social networking features of Socialtext People. By leveraging detailed profile information, including subject matter expertise, areas of interest, and projects assignments, employees gained the ability to easily discover and build relationships with the peers best suited to help them. Within these social networks, people can see what others are working on, who they are working with, and learn about updates to important information. Like most services firms, Davies works on a billable structure, so getting people trained and into the field quickly is extremely important.

Making Everyone Feel Connected

Making Davies “better” had a third component: cultivating and propagating the best of Davies culture as the firm continues to grow. The firm's expansion added numerous new faces and locations, which made it challenging to maintain a sense of cultural “one-ness” across the firm. With the team spread out across remote offices and traveling extensively, it was difficult for employees to share updates of either a professional or personal nature. Whether it was a question about a client project or an announcement about a birth or engagement, Davies wanted to make it easy for everyone to stay connected and informed about what was happening company-wide. They added Socialtext Signals, a microblogging application, to do just that. Now it is easy to share concise bits of information with everyone in the company in real-time, including sending a Signal when a workspace page is updated with new information.

Bringing It All Together

To help bring all of these new tools together, Davies customized a Socialtext Dashboard, delivering a social intranet for everyone to access. They laid it out so it shows content from various workspaces including blog posts with the latest news and important information, and so it gives web access to Socialtext Signals.

Davies also used their Dashboard to highlight two very popular internal programs:

“Star-Fantastic” is an informal award given by peers to congratulate others on a job well done. The award started as an actual plastic star which people could place on their desks. Finding it difficult to circulate this award across multiple offices, Davies captured the spirit of the award with a special blog dedicated to highlighting a co-worker for a job well done.
“Leadership Insights” is the blog used by the firm’s CEO and COO. Each communicates their thoughts, questions, and any interesting articles with everyone in the firm. Employees can interact with senior management openly, responding with comments and criticisms. Davies rolled out the concept of “A Better Davies” to the entire company through this blog. Through comments and feedback captured in online discussion, the concept was shared and refined with contributions from every person in the firm.

“With Socialtext Signals, people share pieces of knowledge or key actions they’ve taken throughout the day, giving us a ticker of what we are accomplishing for our clients.”

Lisa Bertero Palmer
Senior Vice President

Making It Happen

The team at Davies understands that technical challenges, as well as issues with cultural adoption need to be overcome to ensure success. Based on past experience, Davies focused their effort on a strategic, staged roll out, starting with their senior staff. Senior staff were introduced to the tools, trained to use them, and given the challenge of adding content to the system daily for 21 days. Davies then identified and trained subject matter experts in key knowledge areas to boost the content prior to introducing Socialtext company-wide. As more employees were invited to participate, the content began to be more dynamic. People began to comment, contribute, and share their knowledge and insights. Davies was becoming “better.” By the time Socialtext was rolled out to everyone, the workspace was rich with a wide variety of dynamic content and subject matter expertise for everyone to benefit from and engage with.

Today, with the help of Socialtext, the people at Davies are better connected to one another and to the firm’s bigger picture. Employees are more informed about what everyone is working on and they know exactly where to find the people and the information they need to help them do their jobs better. Although Davies has greatly improved its internal communication with the integration of Socialtext into the firm’s daily operation, the biggest winners are their clients. For Davies, helping their clients win is what it’s all about.