Reaching NewHeights withEmployee Ideas
The story of Avios, intrapreneurshipand magnificent, magical lightbulbs.

The Challenge
The Avios Innovation Team were tasked with finding ways to improve the company
in three key areas: Customer experience, speed and agility; and use of big data.

The team knew that the key to sourcing great ideas was to listen to the people whoknow their business best - their employees. But how would they engage them?

"We wanted to find a unique way to bring our people
together. We needed to create a buzz and make it easyfor them to share ideas with each other."
Hanna Greenfield
Emerging Technology Manager at Avios

The Solution
The Avios team knew that running a campaign which allowed employees to see the idea generation process
at work would help to drive interest amongst their workforce. However, it was just as important to find aplatform which made collecting and managing these insights fast and simple.

Microsoft Yammer was already being used actively in various pockets of the company. The team saw this as
an opportunity to reduce the barriers to idea submission and ensure more great ideas were created. They
created a group called 'Avios Ideas' allowing people to socialise ideas and get feedback from colleagues.

Each time a new idea was posted, it was automatically fed into the Sideways 6 idea management platform
where the team could manage the ideas and communicate back to employees.

The Sideways 6 platform gave Avios a smart and structured way to manage their ideas at scale. The team
were able to simply move ideas between the three idea types, shortlisting the best ones based on likes andcomments and sending them to an expert panel for review.

Light the Bulb
The Yammer group acted as the heart of the employee
ideas campaign that Avios called 'Light the Bulb'.

Designed with a creative take on encouraging employee
ideas, the team placed large light bulbs around theworkplace which were then linked directly to the Yammergroup and Sideways 6 idea management platform.

As soon as an idea was submitted on the group, they
were picked up by Sideways 6 and the lightbulbs began
flashing in a different colour according to the type of idea.

This sparked an immediate reaction around the officeencouraging others to submit their ideas and put thelightbulbs into action.

How's it Going?
Despite being the first campaign of its kind at Avios, the challenge took off very
quickly and the team received a great response from people at all levels in the89
Ideas Generated

business. Over a five-week period, almost 500 employees joined the Avios
Ideas group and a total of 89 ideas were submitted.

Out of these ideas, 12 have since been sponsored and the remainder now
make up a large bank of ideas which can be taken forward if ever required.
Avios is also encouraging sponsors to get the idea owners involved in the500
Employees Engaged

development and testing process going forward.

The team also found additional benefits of the challenge. Instead of acting insilos, it helped people in different areas and levels of the business tocollaborate. The campaign also enabled Avios to run a company-wide Light theBulb selfie competition which brought people together like never before.

12Ideas Sponsored"Here at Avios, we partner withcompanies who are constantly
innovating, pushing the envelope
and focused on the details.
That’s why we chose Sideways 6."
Hanna Greenfield
Emerging Technology Manager at Avios