Again, thanks go to Gary Brooks for tracking this down. This is a great story on how their Blue Shirt Nation (BSN) site got up and running with 20,000 employees. I know this is like telling you the ending of a movie but I’m going to do it anyway. The best part is that they weren’t afraid of failure and learned from their mistakes. Our culture these days seems a little afraid of failure and yet that’s probably the best way to improve ourselves.
Then why do we think its a fluke?
Its a fluke because we didn’t know enough at the beginning to say what it would be. Its a fluke that we built a prototype and someone actually full-heartedly supported it. Its a fluke that people showed up on the site. Its a fluke that people liked our t-shirts and signed up- and then told others. Its a fluke that management started to listen to the employees and make decisions based on their input.
The biggest reason its a fluke is that we could have never planned for what it became. There are two main reasons that it became something real. The first is admitting what we knew when we started. And that one thing we knew is that we didn’t know enough. We didn’t know what people wanted or how or if they’d even use it. Admitting that forced us to ask questions, to listen, to react quickly.
The second is failure. We’re good at it. We fail weekly and we kind of like it. We try tons of new things, some stick and some don’t. Most don’t. But we do it in a low criticality environment. We do it so it doesn’t cost us a lot of money or make an investment on our part that we’re too proud to give up. And when we fail, people forgive us and we learn. We do our best to be human on BSN- to be Gary and Steve on the site- not the BlueShirt Nation admin team. We built real relationships with the users, protect them when they need it, respond as quickly as we can, and ask for forgiveness when we screw up.
By doing that, this fluke has turned into a thriving community of our best employees. We have 20,000 of them on the site. 65% are active meaning they come back at least once a month. In a company with a 60% turnover rate, the members of BSN turnover at a rate of 8.5%. We are getting the most engaged employees on the site and talking about how to make the company better.
