To achieve our goals, we developed the LLL Awards, a grassroots, peer-to-peer internal recognition program. Innovative components of the idea included:

• Driving associates to recognize one another, generating thousands of stories from within the company

• Basing the Awards categories on the new Values & Behaviors to educate and appeal to associates in all countries, at all levels

• Encouraging competition by choosing “people’s choice” finalists based on numbers of supports and comments

We wove these ideas into the development of an internal platform that emulated the functionality social media. The LLL Awards intranet site would allow Novartis associates to share, like, comment and connect with both content and colleagues.

Then, we brought the concept to life through a highly emotional campaign, with marketing materials that evoked the power of saying “thank you”. To achieve broad reach, we would cooperate with country communicators to introduce these concepts in all major global markets.

Execution of LLL Awards took place in several phases:

Announcement (15/03/15): Joe Jimenez announced LLL Awards during a CEO broadcast, generating excitement for the program and illustrating its importance to leadership.

Awareness (16/03/15-30/04/15): We created toolkits to provide global communicators with resources such as timelines, messaging, promotional materials and digital content and rolled out an instructional, inspirational video.

Nominations (01/05/15-12/06/15): The Awards microsite launched, inviting associates to nominate and support colleagues. We distributed ongoing communications to keep associates excited and motivate them to revisit the platform. We organized weekly steering meetings with global communicators in which key campaign metrics where discussed.

Judging (19/07/15-01/09/15): Finalists were announced and their stories appeared on the platform while an executive judging panel reviewed and selected winners.

Winners Ceremony and Winners campaign (02/09/15-30/11/15): Winners were announced on Joe Jimenez’s blog and received a trip to Novartis headquarters and iPods to capture video of the experience. We collected this content in a compelling wrap-up video, shared with all associates.

The campaign was highly successful:

• Within 6 weeks, Novartis associates filed 7,063 nominations

• We counted 544,826 interactions (including 89,285 unique visitors to the intranet platform)

• 81 countries and all hierarchy levels participated

LLL Awards became a crucial tool in deploying the new Values & Behaviors and enhancing engagement with the Novartis mission. In a participant survey, nearly half felt they better understood the Values & Behaviors following Awards and 55 percent were more committed to the mission.

Participants feedback included:

• Extremely motivational to say “thank you” for the extraordinary job colleagues are doing every day

• Awards spurred a discussion identifying role models and drawing inspiration from their achievements

• Awards showed that roles models can be found on each level in the organization

Ultimately, the Awards reinforced the belief that Novartis values associates and their contributions to improving lives. Due to this success, Novartis plans to rerun the Awards in 2017.