Best Buy's Best Practices

This past summer I happened to have a lot of free time on my hands and so I ended up really a lot of books. However, the books I read were really nerdy. Most of them were about how the nation’s most successful companies have made it to the top. One theme that kept reoccurring was the importance of empowering and listening to your employees. This brings me to Chapter 11 in "Groundswell" and the impact of Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation. 

Best Buy started what is known as Blue Shirt Nation as a way to give its employees a voice in the company. It is an online community where Best Buy employees can post about everything from ways to fix the company to daily store activity. "Groundswell" mentioned the impact of Blue Shirt Nation was three fold: it created a place for management to listen to workers, helped solve simple but important problems in the workplace and created a support group where employees could help each other. 

As I was reading about the impacts of the Blue Shirt Nation, I was reminded of everything I read this summer in regards to the importance of listening to employees and giving them the respect they deserve.

One book I read, called "Vital Friends" by Tom Rath, outlined the why people should be encouraged to foster friendships in the workplace. Rath noted that some companies have very strict policies when it comes to employee to employee and employee to management friendships and interactions. However, Rath also noted that the most successful companies are the ones that allow employees to befriend one another and support each other in both personal and business matters.

In his book, Rath mentioned that having friendships in the workplace promotes work productivity and work satisfaction by a very significant margin. The Blue Shirt Nation promotes workplace friendships because employees get a chance to help each other and interact with one another through this online community. 

A few other books I read this summer highlighted the importance of giving employees a voice and allowing them to feel like an innovative part of the company. For example, when Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS Shoes was starting his company he worked side-by-side with the interns who he hired to help him get the company up and running. He valued their opinions and gave them huge responsibilities that many CEOS wouldn’t trust anyone but themselves to do. 

In another book I read the CEO of Sonic, America’s Drive-In could be found answering phones at what looked like the receptionist’s deck that actually served as his open air office in his efforts to remain transparent and open with employees. The Blue Shirt Nation strives for the same effect in the form of an online community. Best Buy is giving its employees a chance to connect with management as if those in higher power were sitting at humble desk in the front of every store. 

Whether it’s online or in an office setting, connecting associates in the form of an internal community is extremely important. At the end of the day we are all people and we all want to feel like what we say and do matters, and Best Buy was able to tap into this concept in the form of its Blue Shirt Nation. Bravo, Best Buy.