FAQs: LEAD.bot for Microsoft Teams

To install LEADBot, go to LEAD.app and click the “Add to Teams” button. Sign in to your Teams account. If you’re already signed into multiple Teams workplaces, you will need to choose a workplace.

(Please note, only 1 person in your company needs to install the app. If the app is already installed in a team in your workplace, you can add it to a new team or teams.) 

Add LEAD to any Teams to activate the matching starting from the following Monday at 10 am PT. (To modify your timezone/time preference, type dashboard as a DM to the bot at the chat window, (please do not type dashboard in any teams, only to LEAD.bot)  and the bot will send you a link to access the dashboard. *If you can’t access the dashboard after typing dashboard to the bot, please check whether you are also in the matching team as a member, and your command is a DM to the bot; the response from LEAD.bot will tell you what went wrong. If there is no response or you are not sure what it means, please email support@lead.app with a screenshot of the issue, thank you! )

Add LEAD.Bot to a Team

Add LEAD.bot to any Team e.g.#coffee-matching as the dedicated Teams to use for LEAD employee matching.

LEAD supports mutli-channel matching. You can invite LEAD.bot to any Teams, such as #ChicagoYoga or #Engineer-PM-meetups, and the bot will match people within those Teams.

To set up matching in multiple teams, please repeat the procedure: find the bot in the app,  add the bot to a team, then find the bot in the apps again, then add the bot to a new team. Once you add LEAD.bot to a second team, please add a new schedule to the team as each team can have its own matching schedule.

If you add the bot to multiple teams, without setting the cross-team matching on the dashboard, the bot will only match within the same team.

If you want to set the bot to cross-team matching, please review the setup steps in Q11.

Configurable settings and access 

Most functions are configurable from LEAD’s admin dashboard. If you need new functions, please email support@lead.app to set up a call.

Announce LEAD to your employees!

Your team will participate in LEAD matching by joining the Team that LEAD.bot was added to, so now you just need to invite others to participate and let them know that they need to join the matching team in order to get matched. You can announce LEAD to your team via email and/or within Microsoft Teams (most people tend to post it in the #general or #social). You can just copy and paste the blurb sent from LEAD.bot right into Teams (e.g. into #general or #social). If you need an email announcement template or need to send articles to your co-workers about why meeting others is good for them, please type help to LEAD.bot and it will send you a list of resources. If you have other needs/feedback/requirements, feel free to email support@lead.app, thank you! )

Enable calendar integration in seconds, steps below: 

Step 1. Sign into the Dashboard by typing “Dashboard” in a direct message with LEAD.bot.

 Step 2. Visit the “Org Settings” tab in the sidebar.

Step 3. Under the “Organization Matching Settings” section you will find a title named “Enable Calendar Integration”.

Step 4. Click the “Enable Calendar Integration” button in order to grant LEAD.bot permissions to create calendar meetings.

Step 5. Step 4 will open a new tab which will take you to the Microsoft website, where this process will be completed. Click “Accept” in order to grant the appropriate permissions.

Step 6. Within one minute the “Enable Calendar Integration” card should change to display “Your organization has Calendar integration enabled”.

Step 7. Calendar integration has now been successfully set up! As a result, when users receive meeting invites, they will now have the option to select from times of mutual availability and directly book meetings through an additional card, making scheduling more efficient than ever.

Once your admin enables calendar integration, all employees who participate in LEAD matching will be automatically enrolled for the integration. This means they won’t need to enable it themselves, avoiding confusion and inconvenience. Enjoy the added convenience of this new feature!

If you see an error as above, first, please check whether LEAD.bot is installed in the team.

Then, please check whether you are in the matching team (a team with LEAD.bot installed is called a matching team.)

If the bot and you are both in the matching team, usually there will be no error message. 

Yes. You can change the calendar default meeting name on the Admin Dashboard. Once you select a team, this change will apply to the entire team. This feature is available for any Basic Plan users.

Type dashboard to the bot at the chat, then the bot will give you a link to access the admin dashboard. Then select “use default” to display the original icebreaker. You can edit the original icebreaker, give your employee discussion topics/guidance and/or survey links.

Also, when you first installed the software, we send you announcement templates. If you cannot find the welcome email, you can also access the templates anytime through the bot: simply type help to LEAD.bot, and the bot will show you a list it can help with, including the template link.

On the template page, you will be able to find a list of conversation icebreaker topics as well. Sometimes it might be hard to find the icebreaker topic link, please try “command + F” on your keyboard (depends on your settings) to find the keyword Icebreaker.

1. You can invite the bot to different “teams” (please add the bot to teams, not channels), To set this up, you will need to add the bot to different teams. Please repeat the procedure: find the bot in the app,  add the bot to a team, then find the bot in the apps again, then add the bot to a new team.
2. Go to the dashboard by typing dashboard to the bot, and access the dashboard to select the teams you want to cross-match/shuffle.
3. Go to Matching Settings of any matching team(teams with LEAD.bot installed are called matching team), choose Cross Team Matching, and follow the on-screen instruction.

If you have 4 teams, but you only want to select 3 teams to shuffle, please delete the bot from the 4th team if you don’t want any matching to happen. However, if you want the 4th team to match within the 4th team, you can leave the bot there.

Every time you made a new team, there is a default schedule. Please make sure to disable default schedules if you only intended to add the new teams to a cross matching rule, otherwise the default schedule will match people within the same team as well.

4. After you gave a name to the cross-matching group, go to “matching schedules”. pick a schedule and assign it to the matching group, then save the setting.

1. Yes. Once you install the software, we will send you announcement templates. For Teams users, you can also access the templates anytime through the bot: simply type help to LEAD.bot, and the bot will show you a list it can help with, including the template link.In the template page, you will be able to find a list of conversation icebreaker topics as well. Sometimes it might be hard to find the icebreaker topic link, please try “command + F” on your keyboard (depends on your settings) to find the keyword Icebreaker.

There are two ways to set up mentorship programs with LEAD.bot.

1. You can create a “mentor team” in Microsoft Teams, invite all the mentors to that team, then create another “mentee team” also in Microsoft Teams, then invite all the mentees to that team. Add LEAD.bot to both teams, then type “dashboard” in the chat with LEAD.bot. This will allow you to access the dashboard and set both teams to cross-match. (Please make sure both teams have the same amount of people so everybody can get a match. )

2. You can use the manual matching function, select a mentor first, then select a mentee. Edit the intro message, send the match. Once you are done with the first match, you can repeat this flow to make other matches.

Every company has faced a tremendous change in the past two years. 72% of organizations report that fostering a healthy culture drives successful initiatives and allows employees to perform more effectively during periods of organizational change.

These massive changes over the past two years have dramatically impacted company cultures, creating a very high-risk environment for employee turnover. In this article, we will talk about how you can champion company culture even in a hybrid or completely remote environment.

The Goal: Don’t leave culture change to chance — create and manage it.

“Change is hard because people overestimate the value of what they have and underestimate the value of what they may gain by giving that up.”

– James A. Belasco and Ralph C. Stayer

Everyone is afraid of change. But change is inevitable. Managers should set up clear goals and support employees through organizational change. Either from changing traditional workplace into hybrid work, or getting employees adapting to new technology tools like LEAD, that helps strengthen company culture

The steps that are critical to properly drive organizational change:

1. Quantitatively measure your current cultural values.

The first step to culture change is knowing where your current culture stands; that is, what employees believe your organization’s current values are. This will allow you to get a good idea of how much change is needed and enable accountability and the ability to track your culture change more precisely over time.

2. Intentionally align culture, strategy, and structure.

Be sure that the culture change fits with the firm’s or group’s business strategy and that both fit with the organization’s structure (its formal systems and policies). Reconsider formal reporting relationships, job descriptions, selection and recruiting practices, performance appraisal, reward or compensation structures, and training and development. Supporting change and innovation both structurally and culturally have been found to be critical to the success of culture change initiatives. Make changes where appropriate to support the new culture.

3. Ensure staff and stakeholder participation.

Change can’t succeed without the meaningful involvement of many people throughout the organization. Participation can range from individually offering ideas, solutions, and reactions to concepts, to taking part in team meetings to design and build the new culture and organizational structure. Use a balanced approach, keeping in mind that input from a wide range of people can generate excitement and motivation to change, but make sure that you have a separate change structure in place (e.g., change sponsor, change committee) that can make timely and clear decisions to prevent an ambiguous vision or delay key actions.

Let’s take implementing LEAD.bot as an example.

Yes, implementing software such as LEAD.bot could be a culture-changing activity because software is only here to support, to make your job easier but not to do the whole culture-changing work.

1. Own the change

Emphasize the importance of the change, and assign someone to be the lead.

For example, if you would like to increase casual conversations among different teams and you use LEAD.bot. First, you will need to assign a project manager to be in charge of the software. The person needs to decide what the purpose for those matches is, is it for virtual coffee, or buddy program, or for diversity discussions or all of them. Then, identify how many people in total would like to participate in the matching program.

2. Motivate Stakeholders

Once you have identified the number of different programs, then it’s time to loop in the leaders of those teams, recruit “culture champions” to run the pilot of the programs, give feedback and share feedback in writing. If the feedback is positive and can be inspiring to your overall project adoption, make it into your company newsletter and give awards/recognitions to the contributors.

3. Track progress and adapt

Keep the momentum. Every quarter or so, you can have surveys about what people think and the topics people would like to discuss. Remember, you don’t want people just to meet up for anything, because people like to have suggestions first if they are unfamiliar with mingling; it is much more engaging if you ask them to meet up with certain purposes first, no matter it is to get to know each other’s job routine to increase collaboration, or help certain ERGs to discuss topics they care. It is also important to change the purposes from time to time to keep things interesting. This means you will need to update the chatting topics or create different meet-up groups to keep things interesting. You can try some icebreaker ideas we provided here , or create periodic initiatives such as March DE&I discussion, May Executive lotteries (shuffle matching executive team/channel with non- executive team/channel), Summer buddy program for interns, etc.

4. Celebrate the wins

It is important to share positive news about the program you are running. People might experience differently throughout the program, this has something to do with luck. However, a good experience can be reinforced through story sharing. Interview your employees who have good experience with your initiative, and write it in the general channel, or share it via newsletters. Once people have hopes, the chance of winning will be much higher than just doing something like a routine.

5. Don’t Lose momentum

Even after you planned and implemented it effectively, sometimes things might take time. Many companies that go through culture changes will need a lot of advocates and culture champions to create the trends. If people hesitate to share their thoughts or meet their colleagues, then you might need to consider implementing policies that improve employees’ psychological safety.

—> recognize frustrations while keep educating people on the value and progress.

6. Believing

Organizational change takes effort and patience. The right resource investments in organizational change will lead to incredible long-term benefits.

If you are an individual and you block LEAD.bot, you will not able to receive matching notifications, and others will still be matched with you and receive the matching notification. If this happened to you, please unblock the bot by checking your apps.

If you see the button shows”unblock”, means you’ve previously blocked the bot, please click and unblock; if you see it shows “block”, means you have not blocked the bot, in this case, please do not click it, and email support@lead.app with your screenshot. Thank you!

If you are the IT admin of your company and you block LEAD.bot, we will lose API permission to match your whole company.

If you are a user and you block LEAD.bot, you will NOT able to receive matching notifications, and others will still be matched with you and receive the matching notification. You will NOT be able to directly message LEAD.bot either.

If this happened to you, please unblock the bot by find LEAD.bot in the app sessions, and unblock as below.

If you see the button shows”unblock”, means you’ve previously blocked the bot, please click “unblock”; if you see it shows “block”, means you have not blocked the bot, in this case, please do not click it, and email support@lead.app with your screenshot. Thank you!

If you get an error message in this case, that’s because you did not type any message in the message box above the “send message to ..”button.

We integrate with Outlook calendar directly, which provides the ability to see user availability when scheduling a meeting. See the three attached screenshots for the workflow.
If you click “Propose Meetup”, please make sure your organization or you integrated/ have enabled outlook calendar beforehand; otherwise, you might get an error message.

To temporary disable your matching without leaving the group type @LEAD.Bot disable matching for me
To redisplay instructions send help to @LEAD.Bot.

Please do not block LEAD.bot using the block function in Microsoft Teams, otherwise, you will still be matched with your colleagues and only them will receive the notification.

If your LEAD.bot is matching the whole company, you probably have added the bot to a TEAM that includes all the people in your company. Please delete the bot from that team.

Create a new TEAM (not channel )and only invite the users you would like them to be matched. If you set the team to be a public team and announce the news in the GENERAL channel, people might join voluntarily as well. The bot will only match the people within the matching team. (if you add the bot to a team, the team will become a matching team.)

Every company has faced a tremendous change in the past two years. 72% of organizations report that fostering a healthy culture drives successful initiatives and allows employees to perform more effectively during periods of organizational change.

These massive changes over the past two years have dramatically impacted company cultures, creating a very high-risk environment for employee turnover. In this article, we will talk about how you can champion company culture even in a hybrid or completely remote environment.

The Goal: Don’t leave culture change to chance — create and manage it.

“Change is hard because people overestimate the value of what they have and underestimate the value of what they may gain by giving that up.”

– James A. Belasco and Ralph C. Stayer

Everyone is afraid of change. But change is inevitable. Managers should set up clear goals and support employees through organizational change. Either from changing traditional workplace into hybrid work, or getting employees adapting to new technology tools like LEAD, that helps strengthen company culture

The steps that are critical to properly drive organizational change:

1. Quantitatively measure your current cultural values.

The first step to culture change is knowing where your current culture stands; that is, what employees believe your organization’s current values are. This will allow you to get a good idea of how much change is needed and enable accountability and the ability to track your culture change more precisely over time.

2. Intentionally align culture, strategy, and structure.

Be sure that the culture change fits with the firm’s or group’s business strategy and that both fit with the organization’s structure (its formal systems and policies). Reconsider formal reporting relationships, job descriptions, selection and recruiting practices, performance appraisal, reward or compensation structures, and training and development. Supporting change and innovation both structurally and culturally have been found to be critical to the success of culture change initiatives. Make changes where appropriate to support the new culture.

3. Ensure staff and stakeholder participation.

Change can’t succeed without the meaningful involvement of many people throughout the organization. Participation can range from individually offering ideas, solutions, and reactions to concepts, to taking part in team meetings to design and build the new culture and organizational structure. Use a balanced approach, keeping in mind that input from a wide range of people can generate excitement and motivation to change, but make sure that you have a separate change structure in place (e.g., change sponsor, change committee) that can make timely and clear decisions to prevent an ambiguous vision or delay key actions.

Let’s take implementing LEAD.bot as an example.

Yes, implementing software such as LEAD.bot could be a culture-changing activity because software is only here to support, to make your job easier but not to do the whole culture-changing work.

1. Own the change

Emphasize the importance of the change, and assign someone to be the lead.

For example, if you would like to increase casual conversations among different teams and you use LEAD.bot. First, you will need to assign a project manager to be in charge of the software. The person needs to decide what the purpose for those matches is, is it for virtual coffee, or buddy program, or for diversity discussions or all of them. Then, identify how many people in total would like to participate in the matching program.

2. Motivate Stakeholders

Once you have identified the number of different programs, then it’s time to loop in the leaders of those teams, recruit “culture champions” to run the pilot of the programs, give feedback and share feedback in writing. If the feedback is positive and can be inspiring to your overall project adoption, make it into your company newsletter and give awards/recognitions to the contributors.

3. Track progress and adapt

Keep the momentum. Every quarter or so, you can have surveys about what people think and the topics people would like to discuss. Remember, you don’t want people just to meet up for anything, because people like to have suggestions first if they are unfamiliar with mingling; it is much more engaging if you ask them to meet up with certain purposes first, no matter it is to get to know each other’s job routine to increase collaboration, or help certain ERGs to discuss topics they care. It is also important to change the purposes from time to time to keep things interesting. This means you will need to update the chatting topics or create different meet-up groups to keep things interesting. You can try some icebreaker ideas we provided here , or create periodic initiatives such as March DE&I discussion, May Executive lotteries (shuffle matching executive team/channel with non- executive team/channel), Summer buddy program for interns, etc.

4. Celebrate the wins

It is important to share positive news about the program you are running. People might experience differently throughout the program, this has something to do with luck. However, a good experience can be reinforced through story sharing. Interview your employees who have good experience with your initiative, and write it in the general channel, or share it via newsletters. Once people have hopes, the chance of winning will be much higher than just doing something like a routine.

5. Don’t Lose momentum

Even after you planned and implemented it effectively, sometimes things might take time. Many companies that go through culture changes will need a lot of advocates and culture champions to create the trends. If people hesitate to share their thoughts or meet their colleagues, then you might need to consider implementing policies that improve employees’ psychological safety.

—> recognize frustrations while keep educating people on the value and progress.

6. Believing

Organizational change takes effort and patience. The right resource investments in organizational change will lead to incredible long-term benefits.

Trust & Security at LEAD

At LEAD we are always working to keep your data safe. Hundreds of organizations entrust us with the their data because LEAD was built with a privacy-first philosophy:

☑️ Data Encrypted in Transit

☑️ Data Encrypted at Rest

☑️ Field-level encryption for sensitive data in Database

☑️ Fully encrypted backups taken every 24 hours

☑️ Quarterly review of threat models

☑️ GDPR Compliant

☑️ Privacy Shield Certified

Within LEAD, we operate around a principle of least privilege in which we only collect data that is strictly necessary for us to offer our service. Because our service operates within Slack and Microsoft Teams, we use their APIs to which provide granularly scoped permission models to ensure we only have access to data that we require to offer our service.

Sub Processors 

Our vendor list 

Legal

Terms of Service

Privacy Policy.

DPA (Data Processing Agreement)

Standard Contractual Clauses

Commitment to EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

LEAD is compliant with the GDPR in how we handle customer data. See our updated Privacy Policy for an explanation of what data we collect and how we use it.

EU/US Privacy Shield Certified

LEAD is EU/US Privacy shield certified, which governs the data privacy practices that we adhere to.

SOC 2 Compliance

While LEAD is not yet SOC 2 complaint, we are working towards our SOC 2 audit.

Availability

LEAD is cloud hosted on AWS and spread across multiple availability zones so our services remain online, even during outages. LEAD experienced 100% Uptime in 2021 (as well as 2022, to date).

Vulnerability

Please see our Vulnerability Disclosure Program for instructions on how to bring vulnerabilities to our attention, and our security team will contact you shortly.

Thank you for your interest! We are more than happy to hear that.

Annual Enterprise contracts need to have a minimum of 500 LEAD.bot users. If you’d like to discuss an Enterprise package, share some info about your team by emailing hi@lead.app or leave your name, work email, and requests over the chat on the right button corner, and we’ll get back to you ASAP.

All of our prices are in USD.

We follow strict security protocols and strive to go above and beyond the standards in the industry. Please review our terms of service, privacy policy, and Trust @LEAD. We are in the process of getting the Microsoft 365 compliance certification and SOC2.

LEAD.bot uses AWS as our cloud hosting provider, which offers best-in-class security. We also use Microsoft Teams to sign users into our Dashboard for further security.

Our servers use HTTPS with TLS 1.3, and all of our data is encrypted. LEAD.bot is trusted by some of the largest companies in the world – ranging from Fortune 500s and cloud security businesses to government organizations.

We can also send you our Privacy and Security FAQ package upon request, please contact us at security@lead.app and we will get back to you within 24 hours!

All of our customers so far are satisfied with the information and services we provide, we hope your organization would like it too!

Yes, we do! If you’re a nonprofit, educational institution, we may have a special plan that fits your needs. Please contact support@lead.app for more info.

Eligible Educational institutions:

• Non-profit educational institutions
• Accredited primary, secondary, and tertiary institutions

Eligible non-profit institutions must hold a valid charitable status with either the IRS (in the United States), a local tax service/charity commission, or a local TechSoup Global partner.

If you are a free community (with no membership fees), such as groups for students, volunteers, minority’s rights, or startup communities, such as groups for students, volunteers, or minority’s rights,s or startup communities, please reach out by contacting support@lead.app.

Let’s say if you have 300 active users but you only paid for 200 of them, then LEAD.bot will randomly choose 200 people to match each round, and will eventually cycle through everyone in the team.

If you would like everybody to receive a match for every round, please choose a plan that includes all active users.

You can cancel your monthly subscription at any time, and you will have access to your plan features until the end of the current billing period. If you need help, please contact us at support@lead.app

If you upgrade in the middle of the billing period (a month), then the next round match will include more active users up to the number of active users you’ve paid for.

If you downgrade in the middle of the billing period (a month), then a credit will be added to next month until it runs out or cancels.

No. We understand your financial department well and that’s why we do not charge more than you committed to pay.

The Free plan matches 24 people per round in unlimited matching teams. You can add the bot to as many teams as you want, however, all the matching teams will be on the same schedule. (Our Standard Plan offers different schedules, meaning each team can have its own schedule)

That’s to say LEAD.bot intros are limited to 12 pairs(if you use the default group of 2 settings) per matching round. If you have more than 24 people in the team, LEAD.bot will randomly choose 24 to pair up each round, and will eventually cycle through everyone in that team.

You are also able to use free Watercooler topics, we have more than 80 free topics for the Free Plan.

If you’re on a Standard Plan, active LEAD.bot users are the number of people on your billing account receiving Intros. A person only counts as 1 active user, no matter how many LEAD.bot teams they belong to.

If someone leaves the matching teams, LEAD.bot will not include the person in billing next month. They can opt back in anytime.

If you’d like to test our Standard Plan features, we offer a 14-day free trial. There is no credit card needed for the free trial.

(Most organizations set their matching cadence either per week or bi-weekly for each program, so in 14 days, you can try LEAD.bot’s full functionalities 1-2 times.)  After the 14 days, you can use our Free plan for as long as you’d like.

Absolutely! Many of our customers use LEAD for their remote workforce. Upon signup, we send employee engagement resources to our users to help them leverage LEAD.bot in a way that best fits their organization.

1. Statistics show that 40% of employees feel isolated in the workplace. Enabling workplace friendships across teams helps to increase employee’s sense of belonging, increasing productivity by 3-7 times.
2. Breakdown business silos. Connecting employees for different purposes can lead to higher employee retention rate and better internal communication.
3. Contact support@lead.app if you are interested in more insights.

(The illustration is a famous meme about different organizational cultures, it has nothing to do with guns or anything political. )

Before the pandemic, products that introduced colleagues to each other were still in the early adopter stage and many companies did not pay attention to employee connections because it did not show a short-term impact to their organizations. However, after the pandemic, social isolation became an urgent issue for companies. In almost every company, the resultant lack of co-worker interactions showed up as lack of collaboration, productivity, or happiness.

However, a product like LEAD.bot is not just a fun tool for companies to plug in for such urgent usage. There is a lot of scientific research behind the fundamentals. We would like to share the research behind our idea of building LEAD.bot and tell you why an organization-wide LEAD.bot can actually help you to improve your company’s bottom line through facilitating connections across organizational boundaries.

If you attend HR conferences or study people analytics, you probably know that many global fortune 500 companies have people analytics departments. These companies know that they can identify true influencers and energizers through an organizational network analysis (ONA). ONAs track and map day-to-day workflows, collaboration, and expertise sharing enterprise wide, and helps to understand how an organization really works.

Before we get into why we built LEAD.bot, we would like to get into a deeper explanation of what ONA is, so you understand the idea of LEAD.bot was like a no-brainer.

Understand employee connections through ONA.

Employees are not just connected through work, but also connected through their personal social activities within the company. The various types of connections among the employees form a collaboration network, and based on how an individual is connected, their roles in the collaboration network are different.

Modern human resource researchers call the process of understanding this network, organizational network analysis (ONA).

ONA measures and graphs patterns of collaboration by examining the strength, frequency, and nature of interactions between people in networks.

ONA helps leaders find answers to the following questions: 

• How do the information and communication follow in the organization?
• How are teams and individuals collaborating with each other?
• Can we identify the most influential employees or teams and quantify their comparative impact?
• Who has been the most affected due to the pandemic?
• Are there signs of burnout?
• Are some employees at a higher risk of exit?
• Can we help employees be more productive?

Depending on the type of roles in the ONA, the way to engage and retain that types of employees is different.

Many companies such as Google, Salesforce, and Amazon did heavy studies on ONA and conclude that “ONA provides a new lens to evaluate how people show up in an organization.”

There are a couple of types of roles that are important for companies to know about, such as connectors, brokers, central actors, so-called “influencers” or “connectors”, and outliers, aka isolated employees.

• Connectors: Connectors are individuals who put in relation to many members of the network.
• Brokers: Brokers are connectors who connect different groups/teams/clusters within the network.
• Gatekeepers: Individuals who control the interactions and flow of information going to their part of the networks.
• Chokepoints: Points in the network where the flow of interactions or information is slowed down or stopped.
• Central actors: Highly connected Individuals with a high degree of “centrality”.
• Outlier / peripheral actors: Peripheral team members who have limited connections with most of the network.

As you can see from above, perhaps companies should give more recognition or rewards to the “influencers” and “connectors”, and introduce more people to the “isolated” ones. A product like LEAD.bot can help you identify the needs of the ones who love to connect with more people, encourage social interactions for the isolated ones. Not everyone in your company will enable LEAD.bot matching constantly and that is okay, as people may have many reasons not to use voluntary matching. For example, people in high demand may experience connection overload. LEAD.bot allows ways to mitigate connection overload by sharing connection requests with others around those in high demand.

While there is no easy way to virtualize the complete collaboration network even through data analysis from the communication tools or surveys, it would be great to give the power to your employees so they can choose what action to take themselves. It is important to offer the options such as virtual coffee meetups, executive lotteries, peer mentorship, DE&I discussion initiatives to your employees.

No one will use a traditional corporate social network product, that’s why we integrate LEAD.bot within your communication tools such as Slack or Microsoft teams and hope to start targeted employee matching and guided conversations. The idea for us to develop LEAD.bot is to help companies enhance their collaboration network in 6 ways below:

• Promoting rapid innovation: organizations can spark innovation by removing silos, combining expertise, and accelerating decision-making.
• Introducing new leaders: Through implementing LEAD.bot, you will be able to identify your culture champions as well as people with various talents, such as community building, people operation, storytelling, etc.
• Driving diversity, equity, and inclusion: employees who aren’t well connected in their networks may be underutilized or at risk of departure. Having ERGs or casual guided conversations to include all races, genders, identities, abilities, or other demographics, you will be able to find an emerging opportunity for the troubling patterns.
• Improving employee well-being: Well-being programs often focus on physical and mental health, but rarely attempt to address major stressors at work such as collaborative overload, or isolation. Implementing opportunities for casual peer-to-peer check-ins will not only have a positive impact on their well-being but also mitigate turnover risk.
• Leading a culture renovation: Companies spend a tremendous amount of time and effort attempting to change culture, yet research shows that only 15% actually succeed. Often, it’s because companies don’t take the time to properly identify influencers, energizers, and blockers within their workforce. By leading LEAD.bot implementation, you can identify connectors early in the process. The culture change team can build support through influencers—who may not be obvious functional leaders—and work to win over or, in some cases, work around potential naysayers.
• Managing a merger or acquisition: Unsuccessful acquisitions are often the result of poor cross-cultural strategies. LEAD.bot can help introduce the influential people within both organizations and can be engaged to act as leaders for the transition.