Weekly Business Insights from Top Ten Business Magazines
Extractive summaries and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Since September 2017 | Week 340 | March 15-21, 2024
Strategy & Business Model Section | 2
How AT&T Employees Turned Process Gripes Into $230 Million Saved
By Jeremy Legg | MIT Sloan Management Review | March 18, 2024
Extractive Summary of the Article | Listen
An $8 expense — rejected because of a travel policy technicality — led to the author’s own first “raindrop.” That term is unique to AT&T, but the leadership challenge isn’t: A raindrop is an annoying policy, an outdated process, or a tool that’s no longer useful — anything that hinders rather than helps you and your organization move forward. One or two of these may be tedious but bearable; pool enough of them, however, and a day at work can make people feel as if they’re drowning in bureaucracy. Every raindrop wastes time, energy, and/or money.
During the past three and a half years, fixing or getting rid of such raindrops has led to 3.6 million hours saved and helped the company avoid more than $230 million in costs — not a bad return, you might say, from scrutinizing matters as small as an $8 expense.
How Project Raindrops Was Born. Three forces inspired AT&T to act. First, an annual employee survey revealed a deep frustration with the company’s tools, processes, and systems. Then, COVID-19 challenged AT&T to find ways to work differently and more efficiently. Alongside that was a companywide initiative, which the author helped lead, to consolidate and update our systems and network, and improve employee and customer tools and experiences, by using fewer but more robust applications, vendors, and servers. Together, that meant that a lot more people at AT&T were finally asking, “Why are we doing this?” Often, the answer was “Because this is how it’s always been done” or “I don’t know, actually.”
What started with just an email address and a call for submissions quickly took off. The company began by inviting employees to submit their ideas. Managers and leaders amplified the invitation in emails, messages, and meetings, which helped generate a pool of ideas for the team to work on. The team running Project Raindrops has grown to six full-time employees within the CTO organization, and the program has a dedicated page on the company intranet.
Three simple attributes in particular positioned Project Raindrops for success and will continue to shape the company’s focus: informal by design; driven by employees, for employees and supported from the top
Two lessons in particular stand out from the project thus far. The first is that today’s technology fundamentally changes the scale and speed of a project like this. The second lesson is that small quickly becomes big. The compounding, cumulative power of tiny changes is remarkable.
3 key takeaways from the article
- A raindrop is an annoying policy, an outdated process, or a tool that’s no longer useful — anything that hinders rather than helps you and your organization move forward. During the past three and a half years, fixing or getting rid of such raindrops has led to 3.6 million hours saved and helped AT&T avoid more than $230 million in costs. It as AT&T’s Project Raindrops.
- Three simple attributes in particular positioned Project Raindrops for success and will continue to shape its focus: informal by design; driven by employees, for employees; and supported from the top.
- Two lessons in particular stand out from the project thus far. The first is that today’s technology fundamentally changes the scale and speed of a project like this. The second lesson is that small quickly becomes big. The compounding, cumulative power of tiny changes is remarkable.
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Topics: Bureaucracy, Efficiency, Organizational Behavior