Launching Your Own IdeaHub

The Transportation Department on Tuesday launched IdeaHub, an online community where its 55,000 employees across the country can share and collaborate on new ideas. And thus far, employees have been embracing the new online platform with open arms.

Marlise Streitmatter, Transportation's deputy chief of staff, told Wired Workplace on Wednesday that within the first 24 hours of launching IdeaHub, more than 1,500 employees logged in, with one-third coming back more than once. Employees also had submitted 342 ideas, and those ideas had received nearly 2,250 ratings and 426 comments, she added.

The online network was created after the 2008 Federal Human Capital Survey results flagged a need for Transportation to engage employees more, said Brodi Fontenot, the agency's acting deputy assistant secretary for administration. Fontenot said the greatest challenges in standing up the network were reaching out to and educating the agency's 55,000 employees and figuring out how the decisions on the ideas would be reviewed and implemented.

"We needed to figure out a solution for how each of our modes could be involved and how we could create synergies across the department among those modes," Streitmatter said. "Our system is perhaps the first in government that allows employees to do that in such an intermodal and cross-modal way."

For other agencies looking to stand up similar online communities, Streitmatter said that simply involving and communicating with employees is the most powerful first step. "You need to tap the expertise and the creativity of the people you have at hand in order to successfully stand something up," she said. "And I think you also have to be prepared once you stand it up for how you're going to manage it on the back end."