The NX Ambassadors Club was created to advance a stalled corporate rebrand and transformation effort by empowering and building trust among employees; developing paths for peer mentorship, education, and advancement; and establishing and sharing corporate values that resonate with a 21st century workforce.
NX Ambassadors Club champions Nexign’s cultural transformation
Who: Nexign
What: A reinvigorated approach to corporate transformation to educate and upskill employees, orient newcomers, and create a positive culture to drive transformation, international expansion, and a positive culture for growing an international employee community.
How: The NX Ambassadors Club was created to advance a stalled corporate rebrand and transformation effort by empowering and building trust among employees; developing paths for peer mentorship, education, and advancement; and establishing and sharing corporate values that resonate with a 21st century workforce.
Results:
When its international cultural transformation and rebranding initiative stalled amidst an international expansion, Nexign countered by launching its NX Ambassadors Club to build trust and increase acceptance of new initiatives across the business, whether they originate with management or peers, and to help employees adapt to working in the global business environment.
Through TM Forum education, peer mentoring, and programs designed to onboard new hires, the NX Ambassadors Club has helped to rally employees around the company’s values, minimize employee turnover, drive the company’s transformation, and set the stage for its 21st century workforce with an approach that favors human understanding and live communication over corporate orders and rigid practices.
After 25 years of growth and operation within Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, Nexign aimed to expand internationally. The company’s leadership recognized it needed to be more adaptable and agile to support customer relationships and product development in a demanding global market.
The majority of Nexign’s employees, also called Nexigners, had trouble implementing the new corporate-defined principles in their daily routine. Building new work processes became difficult, for example, because the new rules did not align with common ways of performing tasks and executing projects. As a result, the company’s personnel turnover rate increased. A follow-up audit found the core problem was that many employees did not understand how to change their ways of working based on the new goals the company had defined. A new strategy was needed; one that set proper expectations and provided sufficient guidance for both new and existing employees, making it easier to implement these new values across the company and ultimately get the transformation back on track.
Four key principles were defined as a fundamental extension of Nexign’s refreshed transformation goals, influenced by the company’s desire to implement international business best practices. These principles are:
Nexign established the NX Ambassadors Club, a strategic project aimed at developing corporate culture and driven by the most motivated employees willing to share Nexign’s values and drive customer success. Their goal was to put these mottos into practice with real-life examples and by serving as role models for other employees.
Ambassadors are actual employees who demonstrated a clear understanding of the company values. They attended a week-long camp to learn communication techniques, develop club rules, and draft plans for future activities, such as creating a speaking club which trains employees for public speaking engagements.
The NX Ambassadors specifically focus on #DriveChange and #ThinkCustomer values, which aim to implement up-to-date best practices, methodologies, customer-oriented approaches. NX Ambassadors equally represent all Nexign departments, which allows them to devise a range of activities that reflect specific goals and team needs while consistently reinforcing broader company values.
NX Ambassadors appear at internal and external events, lead corporate culture projects, maintain social media accounts, participate in focus groups and influence decisions on changes in the company. The past year’s cohort of NX Ambassadors included 21 new hires as well as 20 experienced ambassadors who were members of the group in the previous year as well.
An important first task assigned to the NX Ambassadors club was to help new employees adapt. During their first week at the company, NX Ambassadors spoke to newcomers individually about the company’s history, its corporate culture and all the available channels of communication from the service desk and internal portal to regular emailing.
No matter their specialty, all ambassadors were assigned to answer any questions the newcomers might have. This meant that the new employee never had to face problems alone, which proved especially valuable during the initial weeks of the global lock-down. NX Ambassadors have also proven to be a powerful internal force for new technologies and innovation. Bringing together many members from technical departments, the NX Ambassadors initiated the complete renovation of the internal corporate portal, which has automated HR-processes internally, including annual employees’ evaluations and bonus calculations.
Nexign’s internal surveys show that top managers highly value the NX Ambassadors’ work, noting that the time required for a new hire to become a fully-fledged team member has decreased since the NX Ambassadors Club kicked off. “As employees have become more empowered, they’ve also become happier and more productive, which has translated into a successful international expansion for Nexign,” says Zaharov.
The active participation of the NX Ambassadors in courses like the Frameworx Fundamentals bundle have helped them develop a profound comprehension of customer needs, transparency principles, and TM Forum standards that underpin business processes of CSPs.
NX Ambassadors attended a range of TM Forum training courses, including:
This unique curriculum gave ambassadors the techniques and know-how to more effectively promote the #ThinkCustomer and #DriveChange values among their peers, which had been one of the ambassadorship program’s primary objectives.
NX Ambassadors Club has proven that a personalized touch are critical, even in a corporate world often driven solely by numbers and rigid organizational practices. By early 2021, which marked the one-year anniversary of the program, measurements show the program trending toward increasing success. For example, according to an employee engagement survey and other internal measures:
Nexign is progressing with successful international expansion as a result of its commitment to cultural change. The NX Ambassador program has not only empowered employees in new ways, but has enabled Nexign’s cultural transformation to attract new talent; improve how the company interacts with employees from an HR process standpoint; made new hires more successful; and encouraged employees to refer friends and colleagues to the company, which they have done increasingly year after year to support Nexign’s growth and expansion.