Employees submitted more ideas than expected
88 suggestions
Expected 10-20
Challenge
Creating a firmwide way to surface ideas beyond meetings
During and after Covid, with people spending less time in the office, it became even more important to create an opportunity for collaboration and shared experience throughout the organization to advance goals of being a forward-thinking, innovative firm. Doing such in a way that gives all employees and partners a say in the prioritization of firm goals.
Asking colleagues about their ideas for innovation in meetings wasn’t going to give the firm the results they were looking for, so it made sense for them to go for a 21st-century solution and build an app for this task.
So often we default to meetings, and I think many of us are on meeting overload. So we wanted to show ways in which an app can be more compelling than a meeting.
So often with meetings, we meet together with practice groups, the same team, the same working group. With an app, you’re really able to bring people together without those walls so that you can invite new voices.
In meetings, we often know it’s the same people who speak up, the same people ask questions, and oftentimes junior team members don’t feel confident enough to ask questions, whereas an app really levels the playing field and allows for voices of all levels.
Solution
Launching SAULutions as a gamified firmwide innovation challenge app
Saul Ewing’s Chief Marketing Officer, Kelly Enache, introduced the concept of an innovation challenge, to be driven by ideas from all attorneys and business professionals, and the “SAULutions” app was launched at one of the firm’s Town Halls.
The idea was to create an app that works like a suggestions box - where colleagues can submit ideas and propose solutions for improvements and innovations, but the process would be gamified. Submissions would be reviewed by nominated ‘judges’ at the firm who would create a shortlist so that everyone could vote for their preferred innovations, and prizes would be awarded to the winning teams.
We really wanted to offer a forum community built outside of a meeting and outside of the office. Our innovation challenge allows people to share together around common goals and common challenges. We particularly wanted to further people-driven innovation - to hear from people on the ground.
We also wanted to show that we were active listeners, and we strategically timed the SAULutions launch with a change in leadership. We wanted a way for our new managing partner to really be able to listen to all 800 attorneys and staff who had ideas for how we move our firm forward.
Results
Generating strong participation, implemented ideas, and broader momentum
The firm's leaders were hoping to attract ten to twenty suggestions from their attorneys and business professionals, so they were blown away to receive 88 suggestions via the app. These suggestions came from 271 individuals – almost an even split between attorneys and staff. A total of six suggestions made the cut to become finalists in the innovation competition, and more than 340 votes were cast via the app.
The “SAULutions” submitted fell into five different categories - knowledge management; technology; inclusive community building; expressing kudos and gratitude; and ESG, or environmental, social and governance policies. There were no off-the-wall suggestions, with people entering into the spirit of the innovation contest and taking their role in it seriously.
A judging panel from across the firm whittled the 88 suggestions down to six finalists, and then each finalist created a short video to “pitch” their idea to everyone in the firm.
The voting template in Fliplet enabled live voting, and allowed judges to review entries and add certain numbers to different submissions so it was easy to automatically tally up the total number of votes for each entry.
Any time you offer an innovation challenge, you’re really offering employees a locus of control - something many people felt they lost during the pandemic.
The pitch videos were a great way to combine technologies to get engagement. And the discussion forums allowed people to support colleagues and to like and comment on each other’s ideas, which is so important in our remote environment.
Live voting worked well and we used push notifications, which produced an immediate uptick. Not only did we allow people to vote on ideas through the app, but we also showed the trend of the vote, which was a really good way to continue engagement.
Process
Kevin Bosshardt, Director of Marketing Operations, and Sam Steinig, Manager of Web and Internet Development, were charged with making the app happen. Kevin came up with concepts for continued user engagement during the challenge. Sam found that most of the elements wanted within the app were doable via Fliplet Studio’s simple drag-and-drop interface.
If you have no coding experience at all you can get 80 to 90% of the app built, and that’s pretty much how things were with me: push notifications, video streaming, discussion forums, even voting - there are templates in Fliplet to enable you to do all of that. Without too much modification I was able to get 95% of the full SAULutions app built.
If you do have some HTML, CSS and JavaScript experience and need to dive in there and make some modifications to it, you can, and if you don’t have the experience Fliplet’s developers will help you. So this has been a very easy and actually, I might say, fun way to build these apps.
The two winning ideas were unveiled at a Town Hall earlier in 2022. The first, implemented very quickly, was to allow staff to leave work early on Friday summer evenings, assuming their work is done.
The second, known as “Saulexa” is a knowledge center where staff can submit any questions they have without needing to figure out which department to contact. A chatbox is actively being developed to provide straightforward responses and directional guidance using AI and aggregated knowledge organized by senior staff. Saulexa will add efficiencies to day-to-day operations and serve as a valuable resource to lateral joiners.
Both of these winning innovations are good for firm morale and job satisfaction - important considerations in the current jobs market, where competition for talent is fierce. The app and the resulting innovations also received coverage in Reuters and other national press, further boosting the firm’s reputation. Additionally, the firm has been actively implementing dozens of Saulutions that weren’t in the winning circle, but were valuable ideas for firm improvements.
The success of the SAULutions app has helped Saul Ewing to refine some of their existing apps, using what they’ve learned on this project, and also helped them come up with some new ideas for apps.
Future Plans
The SAULutions app will continue to be used for future innovation challenges, and the firm has already seen success with the apps they launched before SAULutions, which included:
A marketing resources app,
A workplace check-in app, and
A community app
The innovation competition highlighted that people at Saul Ewing want to receive more of their information outside of email, and they want that information collectively so that they can digest it in their own time. So one of the biggest takeaways from the innovation challenge is that it highlights the need to create more apps.
Having already developed multiple apps, the next big app project for Saul Ewing is a learning app, which they’ll begin work on shortly.
