2023 Bronze B2E

Agency: Ogilvy UK

Client: EY

Entry Name: EY’s NextWave Elevator Challenge

Executive Summary

EY’s global ambition and strategy for creating long-term value had high awareness and commitment. But many of its 365,000 global employees didn’t understand what they needed to do differently to connect their day jobs to the strategy.

Strategy

Having an ambition is one thing, but getting employees to embrace, understand, and act on it is another. To engage them, the strategy was rooted in a fundamental human driver: the desire to play. That meant co-creating a digital platform based on gamified team play and fun.

Creativity

The NextWave Elevator Challenge fused gamification with a 90-minute team experience, all built in an immersive 360-degree viewable game environment, to literally elevate employees’ understanding of EY’s Next Wave strategy.

The ‘elevator’—called Levella, with her own personality and sense of humour—could move sideways and forwards to transport global teams to different environments to play interactive games, watch films and solve animated puzzles aligned with the strategy.

At the end of the experience users took part in a facilitated team discussion to reflect on their learnings and consider their part in the company achieving its ambition. Accessibility and competition were key, with behavioural science and gaming psychology—including ‘points earning’ strategies, multipliers, feedback loops and a team leaderboard—appealing to the friendly, competitive nature of EY's employees.

Results

within the hybrid workplace and be translated into 12 languages, across 22 global regions.

Feedback scores were exceptional with scores of more than 4/5 across all three key metrics: fun/engagement; teamwork; and future priorities.

Thousands of participants posted on EY’s Yammer platform and their own LinkedIn accounts, praising the initiative.

Contributors

Hogarth, GDS, Subvrsive