Connecting with frontline using Viva Engage
Australia Post
APAC | Viva Engage Festival 2024
Australia Post is using Viva Engage communities to connect with their large and diverse frontline team to ensure they’re receiving key updates and information from the business. Colum and Ashleigh will talk about their Viva Engage journey and using communities as a focal point for communications.
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Okay, so here we go, time to get into things. At this stage, I would like to warmly welcome our first speakers of the day. We're joined by our friends from Australia Post.
We have Ashleigh Brock and Colum Coomey, and they'll be sharing insights into how they use Viva Engage communities to connect with their very large and very diverse frontline team. And we know this is a challenge for many of the people in the audience today. We know that many of you are keen to hear about how they may be approaching this.
So, please give a very warm welcome to Ash and Colum. Over to you. Hi, everyone.
Thanks for all the clapping emojis. I feel very, I'm very honoured and flattered by them. I'm Colum.
I'm the Senior Communications Manager for Digital Communications at Australia Post. And I'm joined by Ash in our team. Do you want to introduce yourself, Ash? Hi, everyone.
I'm Ashleigh, and I'm a Comms Manager here at Australia Post. And I'm very excited to chat to you all around sort of how we've been working to engage with our frontline teams here at Australia Post. OK, cool.
So, we'll jump straight into it. Today, we'll be talking about Viva Engage at Australia Post. We will chat about how we've been engaging our frontline, our very large frontline team, as Emily mentioned.
And we'll also be talking about some of our communities that perform quite well in the Viva Engage benchmarking report. I just want to start by just giving a quick overview of Australia Post. Many of you are probably based in Australia and are quite familiar with Australia Post and have probably ordered stuff over the last five days in the busiest time of year.
So, we're obviously one of the oldest and most iconic institutions in Australia. And our goal really is to connect people across Australia and around the world by delivering everything and anything. We have 64,000 plus in our workforce, and that fluctuates.
Obviously, at the moment, that will probably be higher than 64,000 because we're in our peak period. We have five generations in our workforce, 143 different team member nationalities, and we have a very culturally and linguistically diverse team as well. So, that's kind of who we are and where we're at.
At the moment, we're incredibly busy after Cyber Weekend with Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, and our team is massively under the pump. So, there's probably not as much time for them to get on to Viva Engage and engage on Viva Engage at the moment. So, I wanted to start off just by talking about Viva Engage at a very high level.
So, the makeup of our team is really important, and it's probably one of the key reasons why we use Viva Engage. It's predominantly a frontline team. Seventy-five plus percent of the team are in frontline roles in retail, so that's in our post offices, or in processing, sorting your parcels and making sure that they get to you on time, or else they're in deliveries.
So, that's our posties and our frontline delivery team. Historically, it's been quite challenging, and a lot of you on the call probably have had similar challenges. Having direct online communications with these team members.
So, we've always used notice boards and team briefings. I think for more than 200 years, we've been doing that. And the challenge for us really is making sure that team members are getting messages directly and that they can self-serve as well.
So, a couple of years ago, we did a communications audit at Australia Post, and we asked team members what they thought of our communications and the level of information they were getting. And the feedback wasn't amazing. So, as a result of that, we looked at options for how we can reach our frontline team.
And the solution that we came to, because we're a Microsoft shop, is that we would use Microsoft Teams so our frontline team members could download it on their phone and then they could access updates and communications from the business through Viva Engage. We already had licenses for Microsoft Teams for the whole organization. So, that was a really kind of straightforward solution for us.
And then Viva Engage, obviously, the functionality has improved in the last few years. So, we have the ability to do announcements, and it also kind of coincided with desire within the business. And I think globally, this is something that's happening from a communications point of view.
To move away from email and to have more two-way conversations with teams and connect with teams directly. So, our internal communications has really shifted into Viva Engage. So, we launched in May 2023.
So, we're up and running now about 18 months. And from the get-go, we've had a very Viva-first approach with our communications. So, we've moved the vast majority of our enterprise emails that we would have sent out from our leadership team into Viva Engage as Viva Engage updates.
We rebuilt our existing Yammer community architecture so that it reflected the structure of our business and our organization as well. And that was a really important part of getting that engagement and setting us up for success. So, we are now very focused on pushing all of our enterprise-wide communications and our announcements from our different executives in our business through Viva Engage.
So, team members can have those two-way conversations. They can comment positive, negative, neutral. And we've had a huge amount of success doing that, which is great.
What we've seen overall is that we've had a huge uplift in engagement and an uplift in active users. But we still have those barriers to adoption for our frontline team members. Because the use of Microsoft Teams isn't mandatory, we need to get that buy-in from our frontline.
And then we have a variety of different challenges, which Ash is going to get into with the frontline and the different barriers to adoption that a lot of you will be quite familiar with. But I'll let Ash talk to that. So, we're still really in an early stage of maturity, despite the fact that we've been going for 18 months.
We've had a massive uplift in engagement. We've had a big uplift in active users. But we're still navigating and evolving and honing things.
And I was talking to someone on our team earlier about this, that although we've had a lot of success with this, it's not perfect. And I think a lot of our peers in the corporate affairs and communications space are in a similar position where we're trying to get the right balance between different channels with Viva Engage, email, intranet, and everything else. So, we'll talk a little bit about that.
But just as a starting point, I just want to talk about how we've shifted our internal communications at Australia Post into Viva Engage, just at a very high level. So, for our internal communications, we started off by really creating a strong community architecture that reflected the business. And where we've landed, and this has evolved a little bit, is that we have two main communities that are enterprise-wide.
One is called Australia Post Updates. This is essentially a channel for our internal communications where we share updates from our enterprise accounts. So, we created service accounts in collaboration with our tech team.
One is called Australia Post, and the other one is called Pip. So, Pip is our World Wildlife Foundation mascot for Australia Post, who you can see there on the left-hand side. Very, very popular.
We use Pip a lot for fun competition posts and engaging posts and different internal campaigns. Our Australia Post account is really where we share our BAU comms updates, so anything that's coming from the enterprise that we're sharing from internal comms purposes. So, as you can see there, we've had a lot of success doing that.
So, we have Australia Post Updates communities. In that community, we share posts and announcements from our CEO, from our leadership team, from Australia Post, and from Pip to Koala. This is a comment-only space for team members, so only those accounts can share posts in there, but then team members can jump in and comment on those posts.
So, with these two communities, we've had 2.2 million post views in the last 12 months, which is great, and it's a big jump from where we were previously. We also have a one-team community. So, this was our existing all-company community.
We moderate this, but essentially anyone can post in there, and it's a space for team members to share posts that they want to share with the whole business. And again, that two-way conversation piece has been really effective with the governance of those communities. So, we've had over 15,000 replies in the last 12 months in these communities as well.
When we got down a level from our enterprise communities, we created communities for each area of the business. So, our network operations team is our largest community, and that's the largest part of our business. It includes our delivery team, our processing team, and that's a lot of people.
This is a highly active community, and it was in the top 50 globally when the SWOOP benchmarking report came out. It has had 3,900 posts in the last 12 months, which will tell you the level of activity and engagement coming from those teams as well. And then in our retail community, again, this is a very large community.
It includes all of our post offices. We've had 46,000 reactions in the last 12 months. So, overall, specifically for those two accounts that we created, when we started off, we've had over 30,000 reactions, 6,000 replies from team members just to content that we've shared.
So, it's been really effective having that strong and clear governance around how we're communicating internally. And so, that's just a snapshot of how we're set up. And I'm going to hand over to Ash now to talk about the engagement that we've been doing with our frontline and just a bit of background on that as well.
Over to you, Ash. Thank you. Right.
So, I'm going to chat through, I guess, how we've been engaging our frontline team here at Post. The first thing really is about understanding the business and how important it is to gain a really deep understanding of your audiences and particularly your frontline audiences. What motivates them? What are their challenges? And what are their unique needs? And I think as a business with, as we've said, a very large frontline team, we have a really diverse team.
We have, as Colum said earlier, five different generations, different cultural backgrounds, and everyone has a differing range of needs. And I think it's really important that we take the time to tap into what those needs are. And then this means really taking the time to learn about your frontline audiences.
So, whether it's through interviews, surveys, or just spending time with them sort of on the ground, this is going to really help shape your approach in a way that resonates best with them. The second part of this is engaging leadership. So, it's really important to get buy-in and endorsement from your leadership team at all levels.
And again, when talking with frontline, it's important that we engage the frontline leaders too. And, you know, the reason for this is without the support of frontline leadership, really any initiative is quite at risk of falling flat. So, we've really put in the groundwork to identify what those challenges are and what our frontline audiences are looking for prior to launching Viva Engage to Teams.
And, you know, and I think what's really important to hear is that leadership at all levels endorse and champion the initiative. So, it's not just looking at those executive leadership levels, but who are those people leaders within the business that are going to help show how important it is and encourage their teams to follow suit. So, for us, and I'll talk through a little bit more on how we've engaged them later, but working with our team leaders and facility managers as well to drive adoption.
Identifying key influences. So, once you have that endorsement from leadership, who are those key influences in the team? So, these influences, they don't necessarily have to have formal authority. As I've said, they don't have to be at the executive level, but we're looking for people across the business who are well-respected and they have influence and they can motivate their peers and engaging with them really early on can help sort of create buy-in at that grassroots level.
And the last thing we've spoken about briefly is being really aware of the barriers to adoption. Looking at things like resistance from team members or technological limitations. It might be that your demographics mean that you have a large proportion of your team members who aren't technologically savvy.
At Australia Post, we have a large portion of our frontline team members in our facilities, our warehouses, who are over 60. So, knowing these barriers and being able to anticipate some of the challenges that these team members might come across is going to help you prepare solutions in advance and just really help with a smooth implementation. So, on the next slide, I'm going to talk to some of the practical advice based on our experience from launch.
And the first one is really just go big. Don't hold back for your launch. I think you really want to elevate this kind of the perceived value and show that leadership is committed.
So, when you launch, make a splash, have a big event to draw attention, create some excitement and make sure that your senior leaders, and particularly including your CEO, are all involved. And that really helps to kind of underscore the importance of the initiative and this platform within the business. Competitions are key.
We do a lot of competitions here at Post. Everyone loves a friendly competition. And we've found that by incorporating some fun challenges to get team members excited and engaged, obviously offering prizes and incentives for participation helps too.
But competitions can really work to be the hook which can sort of drive people to get online and, you know, interact with Viva. Use your existing channels. So, look, don't underestimate the power of your traditional communication channels to drive adoption.
I think Colum touched on this a little bit earlier. So, for example, in order to drive adoption, you can't just launch something like Viva Engage and expect that everyone's just going to download and jump onto it straight away. And people are very used to using the tools that they've been using previously.
So, we really work to leverage those tools in order to guide people towards Viva Engage. So, whether it's using the intranet, whether it's using emails, whether it's putting, you know, QR codes on the traditional notice boards. That's a way that we've sort of helped to drive adoption for Viva Engage.
Additionally, we've hosted in-person talks at our facilities. And this has been really important in terms of creating some face-to-face touch points for our frontline teams. These sessions and we've sort of gone, Colum and I have gone all around the country chatting to our team members in facilities.
And it's allowed us to sort of spread the word about Viva Engage. But it's also given frontline team members the opportunity to ask us questions directly, to share any concerns they might have. And then we can take that feedback back and tweak what we need to.
And lastly, you know, training as well. So, scheduling training sessions for leaders across the business. Provide it early, provide it often and tailor those sessions to the audience to make sure that you can keep it relevant.
So, in terms of driving ongoing adoption, stakeholder engagement is really key here. So, maintaining relationships with key influences and encouraging them to engage their teams. Keep building relationships with them, keep engaging with them regularly.
That's going to be really crucial for sustaining momentum. And that really has been the case for us. Frontline site visits, as I've said, hitting the ground to connect with team members and understand the local landscape.
This has really been essential for us in terms of conducting site visits regularly to gain a better understanding of how our team members have been utilising Viva Engage and also getting an understanding of what those barriers to adoption are. It also, you know, visiting on site has given us an opportunity to really sort of build some stronger relationships with those teams and make sure that they feel supported along this journey too. Celebrating milestones.
This is a really fun one. People love to have success recognised. So, we do sort of our top posts of the year, we do top posts of the month, top users of the week.
All of those ones, they help to boost morale and also just give people a bit of a guide as to what is working well and sort of inspiring others to share too. And more competitions, as I've said, keep the fun going. Have regular competitions and campaigns.
This really sort of helps to maintain excitement and kind of prevents interest from waning. We have a really steady stream of engaging initiatives to keep everyone tuned in and excited for what's coming next across the platform. Now, tackling barriers to adoption.
I know some people are going to be really keen as to how we might have addressed some of these. This is just, and look, there's all different things that have come up that team members have expressed to us around sort of why they might not have jumped onto the platform yet. But these are probably some of our top ones that have come up across our conversations.
The first one is, I'm not interested. The reality is that there's probably only a minority of people that don't want to connect to get information using their own device. We know this from surveys and feedback in our facilities.
What we really do to address this and doing those site visits and chatting to team members in person has been really valuable. It's just the ability to make sure that and share with them that the platform's value is really clear and highlight how it can make their work easier, more efficient and more rewarding. We also ensure that team leaders, champions, influential people are all there actively encouraging people to sign in.
And lastly, we always remind people it's optional, but it is the quickest and the best way to get updates and information from the business. The second one is, I don't want to use my own device and team members, our frontline team members are using their own devices to access Fever and Gage. We know that some team members are hesitant to use it for anything work related.
But the reality is, is that most team members are using it in some way, using their personal device in some way for work, whether they're calling their manager or they're checking a payslip or they're doing something on there. We think it's been really important to offer flexibility. We address any privacy concerns really directly, excuse me.
We'll always ask if they've seen it, we'll show it to them on their phone, talk them through the privacy settings and again, remind them that it's optional. And also just again, reminding them it's the best way to get updates from the business. It's they can check it at a time that suits them and that they can tailor their notifications so that they can sort of keep that work and personal life separate.
And the third one is I'm not tech savvy. So reality is most people, most Australians have a smartphone. I think we've got over 90% of Aussies have a smartphone.
Most know how to use it. Most use it on a daily basis. For those who are less comfortable, we remind them where they're to offer support and that there's always team members in their facility who will be able to help them with any questions.
There's always going to be someone in a facility who's more naturally inclined to be able to utilise a platform like Viva Engage really seamlessly. For any others, it could mean we've provided sort of easy to follow tutorials, any one on one coaching and as mentioned, sort of peer support as well. I think ensuring everyone feels confident using the platform is key.
So we really make sure our training resources are available and accessible for all skill levels. Asha, Colin, we have a heap of questions coming in. So if we can just have, I know you've got a few more slides, maybe just one more minute and then we can jump into the questions.
Yep. So just really quickly, you may have had a look at the SWOOP benchmarking reports and in that we had five communities that were in the top 100 globally. All of these communities have been created since we relaunched Viva Engage.
So the first one is actually our team's community. So a lot of the people in there are comms professionals. So I think there's probably a bit of an unfair advantage there, but it is quite active and organically active.
The second one is our Star Trek team, which is great because that's a frontline team predominantly. Our network operations team is also in there. And again, I mentioned them earlier, they're a frontline team.
So that's really, really positive for us. And you can see here that the level of activity across these communities and the level of engagement has been fantastic since we started. So it's really validating for us that setting up those communities from the get-go was really helpful and it was really clear to the people who are using the platform where they needed to go and that local team recognition really, really helped as well.
And the last thing I wanted to talk about was just what we've learned and what's next. So this Viva Engage obviously ties into the wider ecosystem with Microsoft. And something that we've wanted to do for the last 12 months and that we're very close to doing is turning on Viva connections for the whole business.
And this is something we piloted last year. One of the adoption challenges that we've had from the get-go has been having a hook. So as great as it is for all of our frontline team members to get communications directly from the business, it's not exactly like the most important thing to them.
And like everyone on the call, the thing that everyone goes to directly and a lot of you will know is payslips, rostering, things like that. So that people services accessing that information really easily and quickly. So we're going to switch on the Viva Connections dashboard.
We've piloted this and shared it with our frontline team doing site visits. And we've had a really, really positive reaction to it. So we do think that this will benefit our adoption numbers and then we'll have a knock on with engagement and activity in Viva Engage because it's all in one space and everything's happening in Microsoft Teams, which is our ultimate aim.
The other thing that we'll be doing is building a bigger champion network that's more comprehensive and then that will encompass connections and Viva Engage and just communications generally. And then continuing to tackle those barriers to adoption. So really looking at that resistance management in more detail and working closely with leaders and team members locally to navigate that.
And then the other part of this is, as I mentioned earlier, we've had a lot of success with internal communications and Viva Engage and pivoting to Viva Engage. But we're also having conversations about have we tipped the balance too much? Have we tipped the scales too much? Do we need to look at how we're having a multi-channel approach? How we're connecting Viva to SharePoint and how we're connecting other channels as well and how everything ties together. So we'll be looking at all of that and kind of taking stock and getting feedback from team members as well about their experience using Viva and what their preferences are as well.
So that's it from us. Questions. I can see that there's loads of questions that I can't multitask.
Sorry, I'm trying to present and answer questions. I've got in and answered some where I can. Perfect.
No, thank you so much, Colin and Ash. You've provided so much fantastic insight. And I can see that there's questions in the Q&A that you've definitely been covering off.
I can see there's a lot of interest in understanding how your frontline team members are using devices to access Viva Engage. I think that slide that you had that summed up each of those pain points, I think that was very screenshottable. So I really loved that one.
But let me maybe pull out a few of the questions that maybe we could dive into a little bit more. Did you have any trouble getting members of your leadership team on to Viva Engage? Were there any detractors and how did you work through this? We were very fortunate. So we have had CEO sponsorship from the start.
So our CEO has come from another organization where they had, I think they had workplace that was quite active and they used it as a listening and monitoring tool just to kind of get a sense of what the conversations across the business are. So if your CEO is on board, it makes it a hell of a lot easier to get other leaders on board. We have varying levels of engagement.
So some leaders have communications partners that support their communications as well. That helps. Some of them are just like naturally switched on and they'll go ahead and like they'll have a lot of activity in there.
One of the things that we have been doing with our extended leadership team is just sharing a monthly leaderboard with them using SWOOP. We'll go in and we'll benchmark them each month and then share it into their community. I'm sure that half of them don't like that and I'm sure half of them love that.
Some people are really engaged. So like they may not engage with that post, but if you get in the lift with them, they'll be like, oh, I saw the I'm in the top 10. I'm so happy about it, you know, and those it's also those relationships and those conversations as well.
So we would have built quite good relationships with leaders across the business. And there there's a desire there from them to from the majority really to learn how to use it more. And what we'll often get from them is like, I don't I wish I had more time to share things.
And my feedback to them is always just keep it simple. For example, our CEO often goes out and visits post offices. And I think he has a rule, a personal rule where if he's at a post office, he'll take a selfie and he'll put it on Viva Engage.
And then we use that as an example for other leaders not to overthink what they're sharing. So that's kind of it at a high level. That's perfect.
I think as well, we've got to maybe like two more minutes for a few remaining questions. I can see that some people are quite interested in hearing about some of the examples of the competitions that you found to be the most engaging or the most successful. So maybe if you could just give us a bit of an insight to what you found to work quite well.
So what using Pip or Koala is really, really effective. The two to probably stick out are Katie and our team did a really good competition. During the Olympics, because we had Olympic stamps for gold medalists and it was a gamified competition that was kind of drive like whoever's the most active on Viva Engage will get a gold medal or a silver medal or a bronze medal.
And we did it by team as well. That was really good. But the other one that sticks out as well is just kind of tapping into the culture.
So obviously at Australia Post, we have a huge team, a lot of long serving team members. So one of the things that we did was we just asked everyone to tell us about their first day at Australia Post. So when we celebrated one year of Viva Engage, we had a week of competitions.
But one of the posts was, can you tell us about your first day at Australia Post? And I think it was one of the most engaging posts we had for the whole year because it's quite emotive. And people who were there for two weeks or for 45 years were sharing stories. So people talking about delivering telegrams and people talking about how to figure out how to book their desk.
Yeah, it was great. Amazing. Well, Colum and Ash, thank you again for sharing.
There's still a whole heap of questions that are remaining there in the Q&A. So if you could perhaps hang around and maybe provide a few written answers, then we can make sure that everyone gets the answers to those burning questions. So can everyone just maybe join me again in thanking Colum and Ash for sharing your story.
Thank you.
Meet the speaker:
Colum Coomey
Senior Communications Manager
Australia Post
Ashleigh Brock
Communications Manager
Australia Post
