CASE STUDY

Etihad

Airways

Etihad Airways is the second-largest airline and the flag carrier of the UAE. The airline operates more than 1,000 flights per week to over 120 passenger and cargo destinations globally.

The airline company holds the distinction of becoming the fastest growing airline company in commercial aviation. With more than 20,000+ employees, Etihad Airways knows the importance of quality customer service, in-flight entertainment systems, and exclusive lounges.

Etihad Airways needed a faster and more effective way to leverage knowledge from all employees cross-organization to unleash powerful ideation and drive continuous innovation.

Senior leadership realized that their manual system and processes created an environment that limited their competitive advantage, and didn’t allow enough valuable input from the entire organization.

Etihad Airways was managing their company-wide employee innovation in an unscalable and inefficient manner to try to turn ideas into decisions, resulting in poor results and outcomes.

Etihad Airways’ superhuman two-member innovation team manually consolidated a series of tools – from suggestion boxes and forms, to Yammer chat rooms and boards, and surveys — to design the company-wide innovation process for turning employee insights and ideas into  investable decisions.

Their in-house innovation process was falling short of what management envisioned. This in-house process did not allow ideas from other team members or employees across the organization to add their insights or scrutinize the proposals.

The best ideas, as determined by the innovation team using a closed evaluation process and metrics, were presented at a Monthly Innovation Council’s “Dragon’s Den” to determine their fate. In the lead up, the innovation team would coach the proposal owners on how to turn their proposal into a compelling 5-minute business pitch.

The process, while highly valuable to those who had their proposals move through the process, used an enormous amount of already-scarce senior management time in an inefficient way. Many felt left out of the loop resulting in low motivation, engagement, and productivity. The program also yielded limited results organization-wide: It required 2 FTEs to manage; produced only 324 ideas, 10 of which made it to a decision-round and 3 of which were selected, resulting in a negligible 1.5% company-wide engagement rate.

Senior leadership realized that this manual, high-touch system and processes seriously impeding the organization’s ability to innovate at a faster rate and leverage powerful insight from their entire employee base.

We worked with Swae to pilot iFikra, an internal ideation platform for Etihad employees, and the results have been encouraging. What started out as an idea platform has now evolved to be a driver of employee engagement, allowing us employees from different roles, grades and locations to collaborate, share ideas and have their voices heard. It’s taught us that there are bright ideas waiting to be uncovered amongst our employees, and importantly, that they will share and engage, if provided with the right platform to do so.

The Swae team has been accommodating to our requirements, tailoring the solution to needs unique to an organisation our size, and have been an absolute pleasure to work with. We look forward to evolving the platform with them, introducing more features and improving the employee experience as they interact with iFikra

Kai ling Ting

Senior Manager Strategy & Innovation, Digital and Innovation

Improvement

I like how it was open to all ideas.

– Etihad Employee & Swae User

We cannot expect to be in business tomorrow with todays tools. We need tomorrow’s tools and Swae’s platform help us evolve and adapt

– Etihad Employee & Swae User

As an employee, it felt empowering to voice my opinions

– Etihad Employee & Swae User