In late 2014 we initiated ‘Project Miru’ to mark an unprecedented shift towards a more collaborative, agile and dynamic way of working at Canon EMEA.

At the core of Miru lay the idea of helping employees see what they had never seen before.

Nodding to Canon’s Japanese heritage, Miru (Japanese for ‘to see’) would take on the form of a social digital platform that would unfold like a piece of origami, disclosing all the knowledge, skills and creativity Canon employees weren’t able to share before.

With a visually rich and powerful integrated campaign, we would help employees believe that all the power, creativity and bravery the company needs for a successful future was already among them.

The technology we would provide only helps them to surface it. Miru became something much greater than a technical platform – it became the embodiment of a new culture and mind-set within Canon.

A four-phased approach across 18 months was adopted, encompassing: Planning, Design, Build, and Transition & Communication.

Key to the culture-shift aspirations of Miru, and to fulfilling crowd-sourced staff needs, was the bespoke design, build and deployment of Miru’s digital and social tools; featuring Microsoft Office’s entire 365 application suite, including Yammer, Skype and OneDrive.

Teaser communications initiated activity and ‘asked’ employees to be part of a new culture. This was married with a grass-roots word-of-mouth campaign deployed by 260 ‘Miru Mentors’ and a dedicated leadership adoption work-stream.

Shortly before the Miru platform launch, employee touch points were expanded across multi-platform magazine articles and infographics continuing to seed a ‘future way of working’ concept.

During launch, inspirational print material (posters, flyers, etc.) combined with multi-platform guides and games (Yammer groups, competitions) further told the Miru story and encouraged engagement. In each market distinct local success teams carried out bespoke local launches.

Create: The Miru Platform launched across Cannon EMEA in June 2015 uniting employees. The first two months saw:

1) 10,000 employees (67%) active on Yammer (industry standard is 16%)

2) 358,000 page views generated

3) 8,000 active Skype users – 6.6 million IMs and 102,000 audio conferences

4) 1178 groups created

Deploy: The Canon workforce has truly embraced new platforms and brought about business benefits:

1) 24 catalogued examples of new business success due to Miru two months from launch

2) 86% actively use 134TB of cloud storage removing old processes to save €268,000 a year

3) Full ROI in 2016

Guide: Employees think and act differently; recognising the impact of Miru:

1) 10,464 messages posted on Yammer in the first 28 days

2) 4,100 daily users

3) 96% positive feedback from Canon’s top 40 leaders

4) 92% positive feedback from ‘Miru Mentors’

5) 87% positive feedback from HR Directors