Use Viva Engage to Amplify Business Priorities While Engaging Employees
Health Care Service Corporation
AMER| Viva Engage Festival 2024
Robin will share her organization’s recent Viva Engage journey, and how her department is now taking a more focused approach to the application. You’ll learn about their plans to “re-introduce” Viva Engage with a new community aligned with business priorities. It’s designed to help employees gain plain-language insights from people who are integral to bringing key business initiatives to fruition.
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Now we are very fortunate to have Robin McCasland from HCSC as one of our last presenter for the day until we have our next session with Microsoft and so Robin, I'm just going to hand it over to you and. Okay, all right. So what I'm going to be talking about today is our own, my company's own journey with Viva Engage and where we are now and where we're about to head, which I'm pretty excited about.
Sometimes it's the little things, but for us, it's a big thing. And just for those of you who aren't familiar, HCSC is Healthcare Service Corporation. We're one of the largest healthcare insurers in the United States.
And for those of you who are familiar with that, and I realize healthcare is delivered differently in different parts of the world, but the name that people recognize is Blue Cross Blue Shield. We are an independent licensee for Blue Cross Blue Shield in Texas, Illinois, and three other states, United States, but we have a number of subsidiaries as well. There you go.
All right, so let me talk about our history. We'll start there. Okay, so our history, like many of you, is our company launched Microsoft 365 or Office 365 several years ago.
I had not yet joined the company. So I was not here when this began, and I'm not saying there was anything wrong with how it was rolled out, but if I had been here, we would have done it differently. So Yammer, obviously before Viva Engage, was made available to all employees, I think, in about 2016, which is a year before I came here.
What I pieced together was that there was no strategic plan to launch Yammer with users. And for people who don't think that's necessary, you know, if you want employees, let me back up. Most employees do the right thing.
They're good peeps. They want to do the right thing. We have some people who look at Viva Engage as their personal Facebook at work, which is not cool.
And we would have been better served by having a strategic plan to roll it out, kind of say, these are the rules of the road. These are our policies that govern this. This is what it means in terms of how you behave on Viva Engage.
You're welcome to use this platform, yada yada. As far as I can tell, that didn't really happen. So when I took over the team, we had this very robust set of communities, but we were also coming into this at an interesting time.
It was right before the pandemic. So I took over this team in late 2019. And the pandemic and a few other events caused some really interesting things to happen where I had not experienced these things in Viva Engage.
I was like, oh, people behaving badly. Interesting. Okay.
We are huge because we have about 1000 communities, which is tremendous, right? There's a mix of public and private communities. Some have never been used or abandoned. They use them for a one-off project and then abandon them.
Or people have used them for things like, oh, we're going to plan a surprise party for somebody. So they set up a private community for that, but then never deleted it. And of course, if you know how Microsoft works, that created a community or a Teams community.
It created a SharePoint site, none of which needed to happen. So IT is working on that and cleaning up the things that really shouldn't be out there anymore. But we still have a ton of communities.
Go on to the next slide here. All right. So actually, let me go back to this for a second before I talk about that.
So in most cases, people use Viva Engage in our company the way they probably use it in your organization. They collaborate. They use it for camaraderie, which we are all in favor of.
We have a humongous photography group. We have a group called Meow and Woof because people love their pets. And so they're always posting stuff.
And it's a nice way for employees to take a break, right? At lunchtime, end of the day, whatever, just go see what their friends across the company are up to. It's a really lovely thing. There's the geeks of HCSC.
There are Star Wars and Star Trek fans. There's a lot of stuff like that. But obviously, a lot of organizations in the company, a lot of departments use it for collaboration on big projects, which is the way we would hope it would be used.
Our all company community at the time was open to everybody, as it typically is for most companies. But we went through some changes. Like I said, the pandemic hastened part of these changes because we had just a handful of people who didn't want to behave properly in Viva Engage.
So let's talk about that. All right. So the first inkling we got of this was at some point in 2019, we had a new CEO.
Someone had been promoted into that role, and there were new leadership roles, his team, basically. So some people were promoted, and they wanted to shore up the dress policy. Now, our policy is kind of in a phrase, it's dress for your day.
So if I'm meeting with a senior leader or somebody important's coming in, like a customer, which I don't typically meet with our customers, but if I did, I'm expected to dress appropriately. That doesn't necessarily mean a suit and tie every day for people or anything like that, but that's kind of what you're expected to do. On Fridays, we're very casual, again, unless you have a meeting with somebody.
And that's in part because health care is more conservative. In the United States, it's just a more conservative industry. We have a lot of employees who are in customer service roles because they talk to, we call them members, but they talk to the people who have our health coverage, helping them navigate things that they need and how much things are going to be covered by and looking at their health claims and all that kind of stuff.
Some of those folks don't typically see other people, they don't see customers, they don't see, they're literally in a call center somewhere in one of our offices in the United States. But because of that, things were getting real casual with some of those folks. And I don't want to say, if you know the United States at all, if you've ever seen funny things about how people dress when they go to Walmart, they're practically wearing pajamas.
We had a little bit of that, which was really interesting. I don't know what to say other than that, it was interesting. And so we put out this simple, like, hey, we're not asking everybody to wear a suit and tie.
We're not asking you to go get a new wardrobe. A lot of people can't afford that. That's not what this is about.
It's just like, be professional. Even on the day you wear jeans, it's like, look, put together, right? You'd think that was simple enough, but it created the biggest firestorm I have ever seen. And it went on for weeks.
People started posting on the All Company community, and it went on and on and on. It was crazy. And at the time, I was new in my role, my boss was new in her role, and we let it go for the most part, unless somebody said something really bad or used bad words or threatened somebody.
There really wasn't that. They were just complaining about it. And we let them go because we're like, well, it's an open community that, you know, as long as they're not spending all day on this topic, we're going to let it go.
And eventually it died down, but it really was a wake-up call, like, oh, my goodness, this is crazy. These people, it was wild. That's all I can say.
So that sort of died down, and then COVID came along. And Viva Engage was once again a good thing because everybody was working remotely, and it was a good way for a lot of people to stay connected and still have that camaraderie, even though they were never in an office together, which was great. But unfortunately, we're a company in the U.S., and things have been very political and not in a good way.
We've been very divided as a country since about 2016. Not that we weren't before, but it got worse in 2016. And so when COVID, when we were coming out of COVID, when vaccines were available in early 2021, our company was exceptionally generous, and they weren't going to force anybody to get a vaccine if that was not right for them.
But they offered ridiculously generous stipends if you got your first vaccine, and you got another ridiculously generous stipend if you got your booster when you were supposed to. And that created a firestorm, and that's when it became political. And so it wasn't a lot of employees, but it was a few employees being very ugly about it.
Well, we should get a stipend. We don't have to get a vaccine, and we should still get the extra money. And it's like, no, the company can do what it wants.
And we're in healthcare, so in this case, our company is like pro-vaccine. But you don't have to if you don't want to. You can come back to work.
But they didn't like that. That became very ugly. And then later that year, well, actually earlier in that year, we had started returning people like me.
So anybody who was in a leadership role came back on a very limited schedule, and it was very lonely around here for a while because there weren't very many of us here. But we came back on a hybrid schedule, which we have to this day. Sometimes we work at home a couple days and we're in the office the other days.
But it was just leadership. And then as we got into the fall that year, we started bringing everybody back. And that created another issue.
It became very political. And when I say political, there was one person who posted a manifesto, basically, which we had to delete immediately. And it was very, very political.
It was crazy. And finally, we got to the point where our senior leaders were so turned off to it, they wanted to shut down Viva Engage. It's still called Yammer then.
And I said, we can't do that because of the way it's linked to everything else. It's linked to Microsoft products like Teams and SharePoint. And we said, we can't just turn it off because people have legitimate projects out there.
But what we ended up doing was turning off the all-company community to comments, which personally I hate, but we needed to do it. And that was the only way we could stop this crazy stuff going on. And there were a lot of employees who weren't posting anything ugly, but they were just there for the cinema, right? Like, get your popcorn.
They might be at work, and then they'd go check the community to see what outrageous things somebody had said. And it was really wild. We had to get HR involved and all the things that come when you get HR involved.
So it was not fun. So we closed off the community, which people didn't like, but we gave them lots of notice. And to this day, we're still using it as a way to amplify other things we're communicating through our employee publication that comes out twice a week.
And through other things that we share in different channels that we have, we help amplify it there. We also use it if there's a legitimate emergency, because we know that if, let's say, some email domains go down or something like that, they may not see it if they can't get on email, but we can put something on Viva Engage or the all-company community that says, hey, this is what's going on. Or maybe we've got inclement weather when we have harsh winters, which is pretty rare where I am in Texas, but it happens.
Well, we need people to stay home and work from home. And if we can't reach everybody, we can use that as an additional channel because we know people are looking at it. But, yeah, that was a really tough thing.
And knowing what Viva Engage could be used for got us thinking about what we really could do with this, because, again, a majority of employees do the right things with it, right? So let's talk about that. So what influenced our next steps were making sure that employees understand that Viva Engage is a right. It's not a privilege.
Or, I'm sorry, that they consider it a right, not a privilege. There are employees who, when that's shut down or when any community is not open to additional comments, they're like, you have to let this whatever, you have to let us speak. And we're like, we don't.
Because sometimes we have conversations with individuals saying, well, what did you do before there was Viva Engage? You talked at the water cooler or you talked to your HR person or you talked to your boss, you talked to whoever. But we have an interesting sense of entitlement with some folks. And so, yeah, that's kind of where we were.
We had to start resetting that and saying it's a privilege to have access to this. And we want you to have those communities for camaraderie and fun, but we want you to behave like the professionals that you are. We also learned, as we were kind of soul searching after we did return to office and all the craziness that happened, I was networking with a lot of companies in my area that I have relationships with to find out that a lot of people were having similar challenges.
They had a handful of people who were behaving strangely or making it political or making something other than what it actually was. So that is still a problem, but at least it made us feel better that we weren't alone. What it did was it caused other employees who might want to participate in Viva Engage, it caused them to shy away because of the minority of people who were behaving unprofessionally.
They didn't want any part of it, didn't want to be on it. They don't like being, you know, they tried to unsubscribe from all company, just didn't like it. But we have encouraged people to use Viva Engage because it's better than an old school static newsletter, which we try to avoid people doing at any cost anymore other than the one employee publication that we send out electronically.
We've said, but you can do this in a heartbeat. You don't have to compile some crazy 1980s newsletter. When you have news, go post it in your community.
Make sure the right people are subscribed and then they can ask questions and engage. And that's the right way to use it. And so we've been encouraging that.
And people are starting to finally catch on like, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I remember what this was for in the first place, which is which is good.
That's what we want. So now I'll tell you a little bit about where we're headed. So.
In January, we're going to reintroduce how Viva Engage can be used properly. And we're using an example of a new community that I'm going to show you in just a second. That's focused on business priorities and some leader features.
The remaining communities aren't changing, so people can still do what they want. That means the all company community is still locked down. They can't comment.
But this is an opt in community. We'll make it official. We'll put the little checkmark by it and we're going to communicate about it a couple of times in advance.
And then when it's live, we'll let people know about it and then they can opt in if they want it. And because it's an official community, it will come up, you know, when you're on your Viva Engage homepage, basically, it'll come up as one of the things they might be interested in because there's only one other community that has that checkmark. And that's the all company community.
So we'll do that. And we have already put it together. We've put together really clear rules about what is not involved.
And, you know, basically, we're saying and again, I'll show you more in a second. But basically, we're saying this community is for this purpose. And we encourage you to ask questions and comments.
But if there is ever a new post, somebody just decides to post something because they don't like one of their benefits or something or they don't like what a leader said. It's like if there's anything that is off topic or offensive, we're just going to delete it. We're done.
Like we're not even going to post a comment saying we deleted your comment because we're just deleting it. And we we shared this. I don't know why this I don't know why we didn't think about it before.
It's actually really simple. Like it's your community. As long as you're handling it professionally, you can do what you want.
As long as you're not violating any terms of our policies or our code of conduct. We don't have to give employees, you know, a message every time they post something dumb. We can just say, hey, that didn't fly.
We delete it and we move on. And we met recently one of our team members, Stacey, who's received one of the engages or swoops awards before. So thank you for that.
She's really good at engaging all of our community admins. That's part of her job. And we had a meeting with them recently.
And Coco in general were part of that. And part of our discussion was with them. You can do the same thing.
We told them about this new community we're doing and we said we're resetting expectations. Most of them have not had any problems. But we said, if you do, it's your community.
Take it back. Like people don't have to do that. You can delete it.
You don't have to tell them why. It's nice if you do, but you could get into a back and forth with people and it's not worth it. You reset the expectation that your community is for X. And if people want to be there for X, please do.
Please engage in the conversation. If you don't. OK, that's fine.
But we're not going to go off topic on our community. You can go start another community to talk about whatever. But yeah.
So let me show you. Excuse all my arrows, but it's just easier for me to show you what it looks like. So the community is going to be called the spoke.
And I'll show you in a second what our Internet looks like. The Internet's called the hub. So the spoke is kind of a play off that hub and spoke and also spoke as in people speaking up and talking about various topics.
So it matches our new branding. We're adding the blue checkmark, as I said. So it's an official community and will be prominently on your home page once we turn it on in January.
We will use the other tools that the question and the praise and the poll, especially the question in the poll. Once we get more people subscribed to the community, we'll do more intentionally to get them to come back and vote in polls and have conversations about how our business is doing and why they should care about it. And doing it in terms that makes it more engaging for people.
And then I'm going to show you in bigger words in a minute with the where it says info, what our rules of engagement are, and then the policies that we have linked to that, because our policies are what we fall back on when people are behaving poorly. It's like this corporate policy. You're expected to follow it.
So and I'll show you that more in just a second, but the way we're going to manage this to to make sure that we get people engaged with it routinely is we'll have a publication calendar. Just like we do with our employee publication. So we'll have very short, engaging interviews, like three questions with key people, as I said before, who are leading initiatives.
We will do occasional polls and things like that. We're going to post at least weekly, if not twice weekly to keep them engaged. We might have to might be a little slow at first, but we're already putting together that calendar now.
We're going to tie it to our 2025 business plan launch, which will be near the end of January. It always helps when you tie something like this to something bigger because it makes it bigger, too. It's kind of like this was all planned, which it was.
But, you know, we have a reason to interview somebody and have a nice little kickoff saying, hey, you saw the plan was launched. And I want to tell you about X. Right. And start getting people engaged and like what we're going to be focusing on for the year.
And then we're going to do plenty of pre-launch communication to tee it up. So that is coming later this month and again in January when we get closer to launch. So second time.
OK, so this is what that language says, where the info is. It tells you what it's about. It's for people to engage in conversations about key business topics and our priorities.
It says that it's governed by policies. By participating, you acknowledge that you will abide by our policies, which there will be a link there. Our code of conduct, the code of ethics and conduct and our core values and appropriate or off topic post replies will be removed.
That notice, which, again, might feel harsh to some people if you're looking at this and you're not part of our company. But it's how we're going to reset the expectations for how this is used. So let me just show you quickly when I refer to those things.
Every company's got similar things. But our code of ethics and conduct covers compliance or conduct at work, ethical decision making. We have a very robust social media policy which covers internal meeting, Viva, engage and some other places where people can comment on our business stories.
So it covers internal and external social media. It refers back to the code of conduct and communications policy. And then our main comms policy covers guidelines for all the internal channels that we manage.
And that's what my team does. We manage all the employee comms channels that we create content for some of those channels, including the Internet, things like that. And then it refers back to the social media policy and other relevant policies.
So they all point back to the same things. It's very, very clear that these are the things that govern how you use this this application. So now just for fun, I'll show you.
This is what our Internet part of the Internet. You can't see the bottom half of it, but obviously the Internet is called the hub because it's a hub. It's where we have people go there like more than a million times a month because that's where they go to get to everything in our company.
So the spoke is a name, an extension of that. Employees can comment on some of our like you see a few stories here, like our biweekly message from our CEO and some other things. They can comment, but it's really not two way.
More often than not, when they comment on our stories, they are asking a question. Hey, I'd like to learn more about this. Who was the subject matter expert? And then we connect them with that person or that department.
So it's not the same as Viva Engage, where you can have kind of a virtual conversation with people. But, yeah, so that's how the spoke got its name, because it's related to the hub. And then, of course, we'll be using SWOOP analytics to measure our baseline growth.
See who the influencers are as this as this grows. We have a really robust listening program. And obviously our measurement through SWOOP is part of that.
But we measure everything that we do internally and externally. And we my team puts together monthly and quarterly dashboards so that we can help give senior leaders a view into what's working, what's not. And and to help all of us when we're consulting with senior leaders, make better decisions about how we proceed with communication in the future.
So we'll be doing that with the spoke of the course of the year and then looking for sentiment changes, too, because what we are doing very deliberately is using this as a start to are we changing the tone more, period. Like generally things are very positive in this company. We're very profitable.
We have really good people here. We have a lot of great history. But when it comes to these kinds of conversations, it had taken, as I said, some negative tone and some people didn't want to play.
So we expect that if we do this well over time, we're going to begin to see sentiment changes, not only in this new community, but in other communities where where people are having ongoing conversations. So finally, I'll say this. If you have been through something similar, or if this piques your interest, just make sure that you have support from your senior leadership's ethics, legal, HR, all the things before you launch.
Because because you're doing something bigger and talking about bigger things within your company, make sure you are clear with the participants about your policies and the guidelines that apply. Be very consistent with that when people behave badly, take action, test the community with a representative sample of your employees, which we have done as well. Then you'll learn things that you never would have thought of, because that's why you do user testing.
It's just you learn new things, which is really helpful. You want to build your editorial calendar. So you're not like going, oh, God, what are we going to put in there this week so that you feel confident you have stuff in the pipeline to post.
And then communicate it about it robustly and keep doing that so that you gain traction. And then, of course, you just whip analytics and other things you may do to measure the success of that. And that is it.
And I'm always excited to connect with new people. So that's me on LinkedIn. If you'd like to connect, we don't already know each other.
I would love that. So thank you. Amazing.
Thank you, Robin. Thank you so much. The presentations today have been incredible.
So, again, thank you to all our speakers that have shared their stories, shared how they are using Viva Engage internally. The chat today is absolutely on fire, Robin. So we have got some questions and I know we've got about five minutes before we move to the Ask Microsoft Anything session.
So, again, I'm just going to go through some of the questions and if you don't mind answering them. So I think we have, so Kai actually asked, how do you practically moderate communities? So what are the consequences for people who aren't following your policies? I think that's probably a big one. That's a good question.
Of course, he asked that question. We get HR involved. So there's a part of HR called Workforce Solutions.
And if people aren't behaving properly, there is somebody who contacts them and they get a direct conversation. Sometimes, depending on the nature of what happened, first of all, let me say this, the post will get removed. And now, since we haven't launched the spoke, we're going to do this a little bit differently.
But traditionally, what we've done is had a standard post that said John Doe, you know, at John Doe or whatever your post has been removed because it does not align with our code of conduct policy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? And we link to all those. And we use that every time.
And then sometimes that causes more, right? When people go, why? What was that? Whatever. And it's like, here we go. But we also forward that to HR and say, here you go.
We took a snapshot of the conversation. And typically, excuse me, sorry, HR will have a conversation with the supervisor first saying you probably didn't see this, but we want to make you aware. And sometimes they have a conversation with the employee.
It could, according to policy, could result in being put on a performance improvement plan, being terminated, things like that, depending on what they do. Yep. So we're serious.
And I think it goes to your last point on your slide as well of who to work with and get involved. So, you know, before I rolled out any channels, HR, the employee, legal team, just to make people aware, because I think Ty, I don't know if you saw Ty in the comments, we talked about the popcorn GIF. And so lots of us on this call have seen that popcorn GIF appear and we have to deal with some posts.
So we've all been there. And I think it is a minority, but we have been there. And I think it's just about having those processes in place for dealing there.
Tons of questions still. So on a similar theme, does HR have to approve your messaging regarding any of their policies? No, we do not. As long as we're, you know, we're basically saying this is the policy and we're not saying anything other than that, we're fine.
We can post those things. Right. And then we've got one from Lee.
Do you typically post under sort of global corporate communication? So I'm assuming, do you post under a persona or do you post as yourself? How does the result compare? I think it's a really good question. Yeah, that's a great question. And I'm glad you brought that up because actually we're going to do this with the spoke too.
Most communities post, people post as themselves and admin will post or somebody will post. With our all company community, we do have the corporate communications ID instead. So most of the time we post as corp comms and not use our names because, and I'm sure some of you have experienced this, if you use your name and people go, oh, I've got a name now and they will email you relentlessly about things.
You're like, let me just stop my day job and just answer questions forever. So we want to be supportive, but yet we do have a corp comms alias that we use for some of that. And we'll do that with the spoke as well.
OK, so just a final question, a few minutes. Are you OK to share typically what you include in your leadership dashboard, your team presence monthly and quarterly? You do have an incredible team, Robin, so I know that they invest a lot of time with Viva Engage. And obviously we have those, you have those six monthly, quarterly, those reviews and honestly that HCST are the most invested team with Viva Engage.
And so, yeah, if you can talk about those dashboards quickly. So you want to just like what we share from Viva Engage or what we share in our dashboards overall? Yeah, so it's just how do you connect the intranet content? So this is great. Thanks for sharing.
Could you share what you typically include in the leadership dashboards for your team presence monthly and quarterly? Yeah. OK, so monthly we share. So it's internal and external.
So we get input from because my team's focused on internal, but we also handle the measurements. So we get input from our external comms colleagues. We get input from our brain creative team, anything that shows where we are engaging our audiences.
So it's one thing to say, hey, our employee publications really popular because it is employees like like 70 some percent of employees will open that every time and read part of it. But we try to get to other things like which things, which stories are they engaging in and why? Because we can start to see themes. What is resonating with them and why? For external comms, kind of the same thing.
If there are certain news releases or certain announcements that we made that are resonating with people or maybe goes dormant for a while and then all of a sudden a news release that was posted eight months ago suddenly has traction again. That gives us a clue about what may be happening in the health care industry in our business that we can then give feedback to senior leaders about. We think this is why this is happening.
We share with Viva Engage. We share like some of the main measures about how many people are interactive, who the influencers are, what the top posts were and why some of those kind of things to show who's influencing conversations in those communities. Quarterly, there's more than that, but you kind of get the gist of it.
It's more like things that will help us make better decisions as communication professionals. And then quarterly we do things we take every senior leaders town hall results. Their town hall questions are all identical on purpose.
So we're comparing apples to apples. And so we look at all the results and then we compare those, not to say, oh, somebody is a terrible communicator in their town hall. That leader is not good.
It's not why we do it. We look at to say, okay, there's a problem here. Like, they're not as engaged.
Their employees are not as engaged or not resonating the same way. And then we can also look at things like their attrition. We can look at HR numbers and say, do they have a lot of attrition in that in that business? Something is missing there.
And then if we see over time that their attrition is going down, the communication levels are going up and it's like, okay, you're communicating more effectively now. We've made some tweaks to help you resonate better with your employees. So we look at things like that, that kind of show across the board how our senior leadership is making either connecting or not connecting with employees in their divisions.
Meet the speaker:
Robin McCasland
Senior Director Corporate Communications
HCSC
