What is a Woo?
Daniel Noble is the former CEO and a Co-founder of WooBoard. His specialisation is in the development of early stage business or mature business in saturated markets within Australia, Asia or the USA. His primary expertise has been the development and application of innovative technology to create new competitive advantage, product innovation or market disruption.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Toby Jenkins: Hi. My name’s Toby Jenkins, I’m CEO of Bluewire Media. I’m here with Daniel Noble from WooBoard. Thanks very much for joining in today Daniel.
Daniel Noble: Pleasure.
Toby Jenkins: One of the things – we’ve used WooBoard in Bluewire Media for reinforcing our own cultural values and stuff but, what I’d really like to hear from you is a brief description on what is WooBoard.
Daniel Noble: Sure.
Toby Jenkins: For a kickoff.
Daniel Noble: Sure. WooBoard is a tool that allows us to motivate and engage staff across a wide variety of areas so, looking at staff recognition, connectedness, influence, support. Basically, everything that makes them who they are within your organisation. So, the idea was that – beyond your job role – there’s a contribution you make daily which makes the business you work in what it is, and WooBoard allows us to capture that every day: they’re conscious every day. So it really has a real meaning for the staff.
But from a management perspective, what it does – it allows you to see how culture is tracking your organisation and how to affect it in a positive way.
Toby Jenkins: Yeah. And so, what is a Woo? Going back to basics.
A Woo is a moment of recognition.
Daniel Noble: A Woo is a moment of recognition. Or a moment when a staff member has lived value in their role and that’s peer recognition. So it’s not recognition – it’s recognition from other people in their organisation when they have seen that staff member do something that is ‘Woo worthy’.
Toby Jenkins: Okay. Awesome, and so WooBoard is an online platform…
Daniel Noble: That’s right. It’s an enterprise, access model, so it’s accessed via the Web, there’s no installation of any kind of software per se, the idea is we’ve made it very simple and sending recognition takes 20 seconds. You pick a person’s name, you say what it’s for, and you pick a value that it best represents. And by making it quick and easy people can make it part of their behaviour.
Because at the end of the day, a company culture is made up by the actions of its staff and by changing behaviours to make recognition part of your behaviour, it becomes second nature. So one of the biggest things we’ve had from companies is when they realise that WooBoard has changed not only the online behaviour of staff, but their offline behaviour. They realise just how closely linked the two of them are. That’s been something that’s been really cool.
Toby Jenkins: Yeah cool. One of the examples from Bluewire’s point of view is definitely around geographical separation as well, and a way to keep in touch. Have you found that?
Daniel Noble: Absolutely. Many companies who’ve got multiple locations have used WooBoard – using the WooBoard they say that it’s brought them closer together because people just weren’t aware of what was going on across the organisation and WooBoard gave them an opportunity to see what was happening and then an opportunity to say, ‘That was interesting. Good job’. And also to manage the microcosm of a distributed office and the social, the cultural aspect, is kind of palpable because it’s hard to promote a sense of a certain culture when you’ve got disparate locations and WooBoard allows you to bring that together and coalesce it in one place.
Toby Jenkins: Yeah, awesome. Okay, well thanks vey much Daniel. How can people find out a bit more about WooBoard?
Daniel Noble: Very simple. It’s online it’s www.WooBoard.com you just take the three week challenge and we can kickstart you on your way for staff engagement.
Toby Jenkins: Excellent. Thanks Daniel.