Insights Teams: Prepare for the Future of Flex Work

One of the biggest themes that emerged from IIEX Forward was that the changes to the workplace we’re seeing now will continue to shape the ways we work post-pandemic. By April, 57 percent of U.S. workers said their employers were offering them flex time or remote work options, up from 39 percent in mid-March. And because many organizations have discovered that their employees can still work effectively outside of the office, the idea of adopting a long-term flexible work model has gained traction. In recent weeks, leaders from companies including Shopify, Twitter, and Facebook have announced that they will give employees the option to continue working remotely as long as they want. 

As decentralized teams and flexible work arrangements become the new norm, it’s essential for insights and market research professionals to adapt to virtual collaboration and intelligence sharing. This consideration has been top of mind for my organization and is the topic of an upcoming webinar we’re hosting with insights and customer experience leaders from Capital One and Estee Lauder.

When insights professionals aren’t in the same room as team members or internal stakeholders, it becomes increasingly important to be intentional about communication—and to ensure everyone can access and take action on insights to make better business decisions.

Make Market Research Visible and Accessible

While there are many benefits of flex work, ranging from reduced overhead costs to greater employee autonomy, it also presents the risk that information could become siloed within decentralized teams or departments. This is a challenge that market research and insights teams need to address head-on, especially when their research is relevant to multiple departments or lines of business.

Consider this scenario: an insights team conducts a research project for a marketing director and presents their findings to that director and their team over video conference. The insights team announces notable findings in a more broadly distributed email, but this message quickly becomes buried in their recipients’ inboxes. Due to the lack of visibility, the research results don’t stay top of mind with the stakeholders to whom they were delivered, and even worse, stakeholders in other departments don’t realize the research is available and miss valuable opportunities to apply the findings to their decisions.   

To maximize their impact, insights teams must share research results in a centralized location where stakeholders across their organization can easily find and access them, regardless of where everyone is working. Failing to do so results in missed opportunities to leverage insights, increases the risk that different teams will duplicate existing research, and lowers the ability for brands to stay competitive in dynamically-changing markets. .

Strategies for Distributing Research to Decentralized Teams

 

1. Establish a Centralized, Searchable Insights Hub

When internal stakeholders have to dig through email inboxes or manually request information from an insights team member, they’re less likely to use existing insights that can add value and guide better business decision making. Insights teams can eliminate friction by using a searchable knowledge engagement platform like Bloomfire as the central insights hub for their entire organization. Stakeholders can access this platform at any time, from any location, allowing them to leverage insights when they need them.

2. Encourage Stakeholders to Access Research On Demand

Once an insights team has centralized their research in a customized, searchable hub, they must be persistent about regularly communicating and driving stakeholders to the platform. Holding training sessions, merchandising content and relevant content, and getting executive champions to regularly engage with the organization’s insights hub are all steps that can encourage stakeholder buy-in. Ultimately, stakeholders need to appreciate that an insights hub offers a single source of truth for market research and to develop a routine of self-serving for their personalized needs. 

3. Schedule Virtual Presentations with Multiple Stakeholder Groups

When internal stakeholders can’t all gather in the same room for a research presentation, insights teams can still schedule virtual presentations over a video conferencing platform like Zoom, Skype, or GoToMeeting. Insights teams should also consider scheduling different virtual meetings with different stakeholder groups so that they can tailor the stories they tell to the interests and needs of each group. This will help increase the reach and impact of the research beyond the original line manager who commissioned it. 

Leading Companies Democratizing Insights Across Decentralized Teams

Over the past several months, my team members and I have had many conversations with customers who have adapted to collaborating virtually and distributing real-time insights across their decentralized teams. A commonality we’ve seen across these organizations is that they’re all democratizing insights by making them available on-demand to internal stakeholders and taking steps to keep their stakeholders engaged with their centralized insights hub.

Capital One

With corporate locations across the U.S. and in London and Toronto, Capital One’s insights teams were already in the habit of distributing insights across multiple locations, departments, and lines of business before the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Tanner Frevert, CCX Insights & Customer Voice Manager at Capital One, “The way the company is structured, information is pretty free-flowing already. I think part of the reason we didn’t have to make a huge change is that we have platforms like Bloomfire that have helped democratize our insights.” 

Comcast Business

Comcast Business was already using Bloomfire as a searchable digital library for market research prior to COVID-19, but when their employees went fully remote due to the pandemic, they began using Bloomfire more widely as an essential tool for sharing regular updates, articles, and forecasts with hundreds of stakeholders across the company. They’ve also started sending their internal stakeholders a monthly research roundup newsletter and a separate COVID-19 newsletter with links to timely insights in Bloomfire.

Lubrizol

As an essential business during the COVID-19 pandemic, Lubrizol knew it was imperative to provide on-demand access to knowledge and insights for their distributed team members. They used Bloomfire, which they refer to as their insights engine, to create COVID-19 series for each business unit so that business leaders, marketers, and innovation teams could be updated weekly with the rapidly evolving information they needed to know. In addition to sharing COVID-19 information, Lubrizol also empowered decision-makers to engage with and communicate with one another about these updates.

“We provide context, calls to action, and make it all digestible to help teams act quickly and make strategic business decisions,” says Dan Stradtman, VP of Consumer and Marketing Insights at Lubrizol. “This tailored, market-centric approach allows nuanced and actionable information to get to key decision-makers: C-suite, business line leaders, general managers, marketers, and innovation teams. This new approach is highly valued because insights without action are just information.”

How Is Your Insights Team Adapting to the Future of Work?

The shift to flex time and remote work amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, which some news outlets have dubbed “the world’s largest work-from-home experiment,” has led many business leaders to reassess their assumptions about where and when work can be done. As flex work becomes increasingly common, it’s essential for market research and insights teams to think about how they can not just survive but thrive in this new normal.

We’re continuing the conversation about how to make flex work successful in a virtual fireside conversation with innovative leaders from Capital One and Estee Lauder. We hope you’ll join us for more real-world lessons and strategies to share insights successfully across decentralized teams.  Register here.