How a culture of collaboration sparks new ideas: Q&A with PwC

Editor's note: As we ramp up for Atmosphere15, we’re sharing a few sneak peeks from some of the disruptors joining us as speakers. Today, we speak with Deborah Bothun, US Entertainment, Media and Communications Leader for PwC. Register here for the June 2nd (in North and South America and Europe) and 3rd (in Asia Pacific) event, where Deborah and leaders from Pierre Herme Paris and Waitrose share insights on inspiring productive teams.

Innovation’s a buzzword today that means a lot of different things to different companies. What's one essential element of innovation for your team?

In my role at PwC, I have the pleasure of launching numerous primary research studies each year. Consumers, who view organizations with both the employee and consumer lens, tell us that innovation and collaboration are the two most influential attributes affecting employee and consumer experiences. Consumers also tell us that the differentiator is the actual vision of what your company can accomplish as a result of innovation and collaboration. And interestingly enough, CEOs around the world are telling us the exact same thing. This year, 68% of the CEOs we surveyed said that collaboration is one of the top three ways to create value in an organization.

Last October, PwC announced adoption of Google for Work for 45,000 employees in the U.S. and Australia. What was the process for adopting Google Apps across the company?

Our people solve complex problems as advisors to our clients, so we leveraged problem solving to launch Google Apps. As part of our launch plan, we developed a series of innovation workshops. where we tasked teams with solving real business challenges using the tools in the Apps suite. They were asked to create new ways to save time and add efficiency to current processes. And we discovered that better tools for collaboration did indeed help teams to be more creative and inspired. In fact, each workshop produced an average of 100-175 new ideas from the challenges. What we’re seeing in these workshops is that by leveraging Google Apps, we can accelerate the transition to a collaboration environment.

How has using Google Apps affected the culture at PwC?

We all talk about collaboration, but it’s not easy to do. Everyone needs to get involved and leverage Google Apps to make the cultural shift towards collaboration. By giving our teams the right tools to collaborate, we’re helping them to create and compete in news ways. With Google Apps tools, our teams are more engaged, productive and mobile. And we’re adding more value for our clients, at a faster pace, as a result.

What’s one unexpected way you’ve seen your teams work better together?

I’m on at least 20 regularly scheduled team status calls every week, as are many of our 45,000 team members. When we started using Docs to collaborate on agenda items on a continuous basis, we found that we could resolve many of the open questions in advance of meetings. As a result, our calls are more productive – they’re focused on key discussion points, and we often wrap up early. In fact, sometimes, we actually cancel calls altogether. How would you like to get 2-5 hours back every week because you’re spending less time in meetings?

Join Deborah and leaders from Pierre Herme Paris and Waitrose in more discussion on collaboration and productive teams at Atmosphere, on June 2nd (in North and South America and Europe) and June 3rd (in Asia Pacific). Register here.