Instead of a suggestion box, Verizon will engage its employees in an all-company hack day.
Anyone who has worked in a corporate culture for any period of times knows the drill.
Every so often, sometimes with predictable regularity, the management calls that type of meeting. It’s a meeting that brings all-hands or select-few together to work on an issue. Part brainstorming, part therapy sessions, these meetings usually come up with plenty of ideas and things to fix. It’s then up to management to decide what to pursue, if anything, and what to quietly brush under the rug.
Usually what follows in the worst organizations is getting employees’ hopes up that they have been heard, followed by a big fizzle with no communication, a corporate shake up that would have happened anyway, or a combination of both. That “transform” workshop you were invited to inspires your anxiety-ridden co-workers to warn: “Don’t transform us out of our jobs.”
Instead of putting out the proverbial suggestion box, Verizon announced it is holding an all-company hack day where everyone in the company will meet up in small teams and produce ideas. A panel of judges will decide which ideas to execute. “We’ll figure out how many of those ideas we can execute in a really quick process,” said Matt Ellis, Verizon’s CFO, in a video (see below).
June 26 is the big day, and they’re telling the world about it.
Verizon is using the language of the hackathon —a gathering of developers holed up in a room trying to solve the world’s, or just the company’s, problems — using code and technology, where ometimes all-nighters and pizza are involved.
“This is an opportunity for us to have a creative, giant brainstorming session across the whole company,” said Ellis.
