When Tele2 was preparing for its leadership team’s January summit, it sought a way to engage attendees in a non-distracting, yet useful way. In came BuzzTale, an app designed for use by internal communicators based on principles of social sharing

Who: BuzzTale and Tele2 Problem:

Most companies understand the importance of strong personal bonds in the workplace, but interactions within a company can often seem stiff and impersonal. BuzzTale: Enterprise Story Network strives to tackle this problem.

Tele2, a European telcom provider with over 8,400 employees, was looking for a way to make its internal meetings and larger events more engaging and interactive. It approached Buzztale at a time when it was beginning to receive requests about potential internal comms roles, but it hadn’t yet moved into that area. Tele2 was BuzzTale’s first corporate user and first used the app at a CEO and extended leadership team summit in January.

Tele2 began using that the app to enable a greater flow of communication between summit attendees without distracting or deterring from the matters at hand.

Strategy: BuzzTale was used both in anticipation of, during and after the Tele2 leadership summit. Before the event the guests were able to post about what they were looking forward to or expecting and Tele2 was able to use this feedback from an early stage.

As the app creates engaging social stories online, it offers an innovative alternative to traditional forms of internal communications, such as emails and intranets, and has a user-led format that is effective for employee engagement and team-building.

The story format works by taking online behaviours that employees are already familiar with from the consumer world and applying them to the working environment. The BuzzTale app allows users to post photos, videos, text or comments to an online platform. These items are shared with the group on a board that looks somewhat like a social media site timeline. 

During the Tele2 leadership event, the Buzztale app was set-up on a second screen. Users posted photos and comments about the day’s proceedings. A question and answer session that incorporated BuzzTale encouraged people to post questions online; a format that gives a voice to people, such as non-native English speakers, or simply more introverted people, who may be reluctant to pose a question in front of everyone. Through this format the BuzzTale and Tele2 were able to encourage inclusivity. 

Results: Tele2 was worried that an app like this might detract or distract from the face-to-face elements of the leadership summit, but the opposite proved to be true. Not only did the two elements sit easily beside one another, Buzztale complemented the personal aspects of the event by encouraging participation and thus adding to the overall experience.

Andris K. Berzins, CEO at BuzzTale, describes how BuzzTale, “Opens up the communication to a wider group. In most internal company communications it’s very top-down and most of the organisation is pretty much in receive mode all the time, but here there’s an opportunity to participate and I think it is very appreciated and that employees like to be part of that.”

The social element of BuzzTale has also proven to be particularly engaging with employees, as was the case with the Tele2 leadership summit. Bonds among employees and within teams are an important part of company culture and are essential for employee engagement and retention. Berzins continues, “My favourite part [of the project] is the fact that all that content was mixed together. In the same story you had business content; in terms of comments, questions, and presentation material, as well as that social element, and I think it’s a reflection of real life that those two things were mixed together.”

BuzzTale relies upon the fact that the very image-heavy visual web-content marketing style currently present in consumer communications will carry over to the internal communications world in replacement of traditional methods of communicating. Social media is clearly a large enabler of this movement as employees get used to communicating in a certain way. 

Tele2 has continued to use BuzzTale. Lars Torstensson, EVP communication and strategy at Tele2, says, “Another area where we’re going to use BuzzTale is in our training [...] we will start using it as a way of engaging when training the Tele2 way, and that is another area where we see an instant benefit of using BuzzTale.” 

BuzzTale now operates entirely as an internal communications tool. The success of the Tele2 project was a key driver for this change of purpose. It can be integrated into existing internal communications platforms.