Now more than ever during the pandemic, "WE.CAPTURE" reflects employee voices in management decision-making.

Corporate transformation is demanded in many situations.
"In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we want to rethink how our employees work."
"We want to strengthen the impact and resonance of our corporate vision."
"We want to understand employees' true feelings during PMI (post-merger integration)."
In response to such management concerns, and driven by the belief that "the key to solving corporate management challenges might actually lie with frontline employees," Dentsu Inc. Business Design Square (BDS) launched "WE.CAPTURE." This service, developed with the cooperation and technical support of VISITS Technologies, harnesses the opinions and ideas of individual employees to inform management decision-making.

We asked BDS's Mai Takahashi to explain the service's purpose, features, and use cases.

Shaping the Future of Companies by Harnessing the Individuality of Every Employee

At BDS, our mission is "Creating a future worth loving, together with companies." We engage in co-creation projects with various clients. Every time we meet a new client, we're struck by how each company's employees possess distinct personalities. We believed that better leveraging these unique personalities would undoubtedly help create a more lovable future. This conviction sparked the creation of "WE.CAPTURE."

I've been involved in organizational transformation projects for various companies, responsible for evaluating their effectiveness. However, in many cases, even when employees freely write their opinions in ES surveys (Employee Satisfaction Surveys) answering questions like "What do you think about this company?" or "What aspects do you find appealing?", it's extremely difficult to read everything and analyze it correctly. On the other hand, quantitative survey methods like "Please choose from five options" fail to capture opinions beyond those provided choices.

To address these challenges, we developed "WE.CAPTURE"—a solution that comprehensively gathers opinions and ideas from all employees, then logically evaluates, analyzes, and visualizes them. By providing a platform to solicit input from every employee and quantitatively and structurally visualize the hundreds or thousands of ideas collected, we enable insights that support management decision-making. It can handle even large enterprises with over 10,000 employees.

With "WE.CAPTURE," we first pose a question to all employees, inviting them to freely share their opinions and ideas online. Rather than simply listing these gathered opinions, we then have the employees themselves evaluate each other's ideas. Using natural language processing, diverse ideas are visualized as categorized maps. Each category is quantified as a resonance score derived from the evaluation results. Based on this map, actions to solve problems are decided. This process allows you to move beyond merely collecting employee opinions and focus on initiatives and ideas that truly resonate with everyone.

Furthermore, it visualizes departmental gradations, such as: "This idea wasn't highly rated company-wide, but received strong support from US employees," or "It didn't resonate with factory workers, but was highly valued by sales staff." This allows us to flexibly and logically add the story behind each initiative to the idea map, enabling decisions like, "While the company will implement this measure, individual departments will adopt this specific proposal."

This is precisely when employee voices matter. WE.CAPTURE Use Cases

In this way, "WE.CAPTURE" can be used in any situation where you've thought, "I want to hear employee opinions, but...". Let's introduce specific use cases to show what challenges it can solve.

1. Corporate Culture Transformation & Corporate Vision Formulation

Amid the pandemic, there's a growing movement to strengthen corporate vision and reexamine corporate culture. Despite working for the same company, employees at headquarters can work remotely, while factory workers are fully operational on-site. This widening gap in work styles has made the meaning of working for the company less clear and reduced the organization's centripetal force. Voices are emerging not only from management but also from employees, saying, "Especially in times like these, we want to design the company's future ourselves," and "We want to think about where we should be heading."

In the coming era, work styles will become increasingly diverse. However, if a strong vision is established and employees who share that aspiration gather, they should be able to walk toward the same goal regardless of their work style. With "WE.CAPTURE," you can share authentic employee voices and formulate a corporate vision.

2. Business Transformation & Service Innovation

When expanding businesses or services, employees are likely the ones who know the challenges inside out, down to every corner of the value chain. Spending time identifying problems and solving them one by one is inefficient. "WE.CAPTURE" excels at discovering where and how to improve, identifying challenges, and determining the priority order for tackling them.

3. Optimizing PMI Initiatives

When integrating two companies through M&A, overcoming cultural differences and generating synergies become major challenges. I myself joined a company several years after its integration and found the corporate cultures still fragmented. While systems and operations could be unified, I keenly felt that people, culture, and the company atmosphere remained unchanged even after years. That's why "WE.CAPTURE" visualizes the differences in corporate culture between the two merging companies and provides support to drive PMI forward with speed. This is also the area where we receive the most inquiries from clients.

4. Special Task Force Formation

Have you ever struggled to select members for a project team? Perhaps you've relied on gut feelings or experience, thinking, "This person seems like a good fit." But misjudging team members can weaken a project's momentum. That's where "WE.CAPTURE" proves invaluable.

For instance, when undertaking business transformation, having employees generate ideas beforehand using "WE.CAPTURE" allows you to assign team members whose ideas are closer to the final decision. Of course, you can also intentionally include employees with opposing viewpoints. By analyzing how other employees evaluated ideas submitted by colleagues, you can logically assemble your team.

Solve business challenges faster than ever, especially during the pandemic

"WE.CAPTURE" is a service that truly shines during the COVID-19 pandemic. The novel coronavirus has accelerated societal change. In such circumstances, companies must swiftly gather information and respond to questions like: What should we do next? What problems are hindering our growth? The clues lie in the workplace, among our employees. BDS also offers the specialized package "WE.CAPTURE for COVID-19," tailored to the operational and business challenges caused by the pandemic.

How has the virus changed the way we work? How are relationships with business partners evolving? What should the company's vision be? This package will be a powerful tool for gathering these voices from the front lines and determining the company's next strategic moves. Everything is completed online, and opinions can be consolidated in as little as three weeks, enabling swift implementation of measures for transformation.

Employee-Centric Design Thinking in Corporate Management

In recent years, "design thinking"—approaching matters with people at the center—has become increasingly established. The key is to empathize with people and solve problems. When creating new businesses or corporate cultures, isn't it crucial to tackle issues centered on employees working on the front lines, rather than through top-down approaches? How well can we adopt their perspective and think from their viewpoint? Such employee-centered "design thinking" seems perfectly suited to the future of management.

By listening to the voices of each employee who truly understands the front lines, you can implement bottom-up initiatives. Precisely because we live in an era emphasizing diversity, use "WE.CAPTURE" to gather the free opinions of all employees and leverage them in management decision-making.

WE.CAPTURE Release:
Dentsu Inc. Launches "WE.CAPTURE," a Service for Corporate Management to Utilize All Employees' Voices in Decision-Making