Preparing for launch: How to set up forViva Engage success
London Stock Exchange Group
EMEA | Viva Engage Festival 2024
In this talk, Andy Pamphilon will share the story of how they created the right conditions for Viva Engage success at London Stock Exchange Group. He’ll share some fantastic advice plus an impressive framework for rolling out Viva Engage and establishing it as a key channel within the Group, creating and maintaining enthusiasm and understanding every step of the way.
-
So that brings me to the first speaker of the day, Andy from the London Stock Exchange group, who has a fantastic story about setting up for success and sustaining success. So without any more from me, Andy, over to you, if you'd like to share screen and share your story. Thank you.
Thanks, Pete. Let me just share my slides and you'll, you'll notice our corporate colours are blue. So lots of blue throughout this presentation.
I'll get going. A lot to talk to in 25 minutes. And thanks very much for having me here.
Apologies in advance as well for sounding all bunged up, I've gone and got myself a cold and blaming my germy kids. Anyway, hopefully it won't interfere too much. So I'm Andy.
I work at LSEG in LSEG's internal comms team and specialise in channels and content. I've worked across different areas of comms, internal and external, but for the last few years have focused my time particularly in the content and channel space. And today I've been asked to share some of our experience of preparing for launch and some tips as well to continue to drive adoption.
So who are we? I hear you ask. Well, LSEG is short for the London Stock Exchange Group. We're a financial infrastructure and data provider.
Essentially, we run the systems and platforms that allow people to trade and collect a ton of information about markets, investments and companies so others can make smart financial decisions. The London Stock Exchange is probably one of the businesses you probably most recognise. That's just a very small part of our business with lots of other businesses that make up around 90% of our business, including FTSE Russell, Data Analytics, Risk Intelligence and quite a few more.
We have around 25,000 FTEs across the globe and many more thousands if you include contractors or consultants. We have big populations in APAC around 15,000, EMEA 8,000 and in Americas around 3,000. Most of our employees are desktop and office based and we've grown rapidly over the last few years through acquisition, which as you can imagine, means there's been a high amount of change and continues to be lots of change.
So a pretty big company spread out across lots of geographies and this is one of the reasons that Viva Engage appealed to us, to connect people across geographies, to enable that two-way dialogue, to make our leaders a lot more visible and also to drive a more self-serve approach to comms. So I thought it really useful just to give you that background and context around our company. I think it'll be helpful when I'm taking you through the next slides.
So what we've covered today, I was thinking about how best to approach the session and I decided to chunk it up into three areas. The readiness and planning phase, so essentially some of the big things we focused on to get ourselves ready for launch. The launch phase, so how we launched and some of the key things that we did and then adoption So some of the big things we've done to drive adoption.
Now it's by no means rocket science and in 25 minutes, you know, I'm not going to be able to cover everything, but I'm hoping I'll be able to give you a decent overview of some of the things that we've learned along the way. So readiness and planning. So what did we do? Well for me, and I suspect a lot of you guys on this call listening will agree, it's probably one of the most important phases of any big project like this.
Let me share some of the important things, in my opinion, you need to spend time on. I should say they're not in order. In fact, some might be running in parallel, but some of the big things to consider are invest some time in a pilot.
Number two, configuring, setting up and understanding the technology, I think is really important. Three, governance. Some might think boring, but in my view, absolutely necessary to get right and a lot of thought needs to go into it.
Number four, community management. What is your community hierarchy? How you'll run communities, how they're set up and five, support and education. So giving people the tools and resources they need to be able to use the platform.
Let me talk you through them one by one at a high level. So we run a pilot with around 500 people on it. We made all the comms function, made sure that all the comms function was on it so that they could get used to the platform before launch.
And we use the pilot to see how people used it and get feedback and insights to refine our comms approach. And we got lots of positive feedback. People liked the more digestible content.
It was more authentic way to communicate. It was nicer way to be able to engage and reach leaders. And we took all those learns and those insights and use them to kind of ready ourself for launch.
But we also got lots of constructive feedback too, which I think is some of the most important things, such as people found it a bit difficult to access and find the channel. The amount of emails and people started getting increased and they found that quite annoying. And then also what you use the platform for versus other channels.
So all this was brilliant because then I then looked to solve for these ahead of launch. So for instance, due to the feedback on increased emails, we decided to block the daily wrap up emails from Microsoft while still allowing those announcement emails. So it just gave us a little bit more control over what emails users were receiving.
And another benefit also of the pilot is we also used it to nurture and create a champion network. We leveraged that during our launch stages and throughout adoption. They help respond to questions from people on a help and support community.
They were on some of the most active communities and they advocate as well for the platform out in the business. Number two, technology. And when I say technology, obviously there's all the standard architectural governance processes you go through to onboard a platform like Viva Engage, which usually run out of the tech team.
But what I mean is more the things we do on the comm side. So you need to obviously decide and understand what features you're going to go live with. You need to understand the user experience of all those features.
You need to test out and map out the end different scenarios because you'll get asked by the internal comms team and you'll need to know the answer. We need to understand the ins and outs of, for instance, when an announcement is sent out, what the nuances of announcements are and the notifications that they trigger and when the notifications are received or the processes for setting up communities or how to set up and deliver virtual events. There's so much we as channel managers need to understand of the platform to be able to be those channel experts for the internal comms team.
So a lot of time needs to be given to this. Next, governance. Now, this takes a lot of time and it's by no means something that you kind of do and move on from.
You kind of always need to continually stress test and update over time. We wanted to have a robust process, but also one that wasn't overly burdensome. As we wanted, we still wanted it to be a vibrant place people can express their opinion just in a respectful and professional way.
So we engaged with teams right across our business, legal, employee relations, tech and lots more to make sure that everyone was happy with the process we were proposing and we were kind of bringing in the right people at the right time. We wrote a really simple code of conduct, which is understandable in plain English, and we flag that to all employees when they're on boarded to the platform. And at a really high level in terms of our process, we judge infringements by grouping them into categories one, two or three and dependent on the category, we then have a process flow and an example of that process flow is there on the screen.
One being very light touch and three being those more serious breaches. And thankfully, we've never had any of them since launch and to support our process as well. We've got keyword monitoring and report conversation features turned on and we've established Viva Engage Intervention Teams channel to cascade messages and updates to to our admins.
Community management, so I personally think this is kind of key to map out and understand in advance. We gave a lot of thought to our community hierarchy and how communities will be managed, grouping them broadly into these four groups. So all company communities, we've got one restricted community, which is a news focused one, which is the typical old company one.
We primarily post under a news alias there and we have a culture focused one as well. So we have two old company ones and that's called Life at LSEG, which is open to all to post. Then below that, we have organizational comms communities.
So those communities are used to engage key divisions and functions. So they're very large communities and they're run by our internal comms business partners that represent those areas. And underneath that, we have communities of interest.
They're EDI networks, sports channel communities and other special interests. And then we also have communities of practice. So those collaborative communities to share learning and best practice amongst peers, for instance, AI communities or Power BI or project management.
So once you've organized and kind of understood it in your head, you can then think about how then they're going to be administered, for instance, communities of interest or employee led communities, whereas the organizational comms communities are IC led. And you're also able to be clear about what content then goes where. If it's significant strategic news, for instance, then that will go on our News at LSEG all company channel.
But if it's a story about an award winning one of one part of our business, it will go on their community. So it just helps us then understand what goes where. And then support and education.
So I can't stress enough how much this helped in rollout and continues to support our adoption efforts. We created a central support hub on SharePoint, which is easily found from our internet home page. That's all the support resources anyone would need to become an expert in Viva Engage.
It's got all our training webinars that we've ever done, news stories about new features, demo videos, a collection of short video FAQs for all the different questions we get asked. And we continually update that over time. So a build and a bank of resources that we can just flick a link across to people if they have a question.
I mean, only yesterday I got asked by teams, by someone out in the business about how to post and I just pinged them a link to a video FAQ for them to watch. We also have developed really well used help and support community on Viva Engage, which people use regularly to ask questions and they usually responded to in a few hours. They're my top tips I suggest to spend time on before launch, there's obviously lots more, but they to me was some of the key ones I wanted to flag.
Now, let's move on to our launch phase. So we decided to phase our launch, we did this because we wanted to understand different use cases of the platform, build our knowledge as we go and build excitement across the team and the rest of the business. We planned two phases to our launch, lasering in on two distinct use cases, so a site location based community and then a large disparate business orientated community.
Our first phase was a site community and it was London, around 5000 people, the idea was to illustrate the value it can bring to support engagement at a local level, connect people across that location who wouldn't ordinarily interact with people and make local leaders more visible and accessible. I worked with IT Lead to build and plan for fun and engaging campaign, as well as all the tried and tested launch style campaign tactics, which were all well-versed with branding, eye-catching imagery, digital signage, cupcake desk drops and floor walks and things like that. Some of the more interesting things we did ahead of time was work to get all our local clubs and societies set up and there was around 25 clubs and societies by memory.
And this meant that when we invited users to onboard, they were able then to explore other communities and see the value that the platform can bring. We also identified key influencers who we targeted to help us drive it at local level, such as our executive support teams, facilities, local leaders and specifically held workshops with them and developed tailored resources to help them out to champion it. And another key thing we did was we migrated the local site newsletter to become a more bite-sized V announcement and we had a really good early week content plan and a virtual event plan as well, which helped pull people back to the platform over the rollout phase.
So in those six weeks, 80 percent of our target audience had been reached and 40 percent accessed the platform at least once a week. We generated over 500 posts and over 400 people, so that's about 8 percent of our population, actively joined another community such as one of those local clubs and societies. So we we were pretty pleased.
Now, this phase lasted about eight weeks and we surveyed those people, got feedback and reviewed lessons learned ahead of the next phase of launch. So what did we learn? We learned that making it fun worked. We had really fun branding and imagery and messaging, a content schedule, some handholding and story mining was really needed, especially in those early weeks.
Functional and useful content really worked well to pull people back. So, for instance, the weekly restaurant menu was one of the most top performing posts and engaged with pieces of content and events we found were pretty hard to run on a self-serve basis. So we definitely needed to invest a little bit more time in developing our capabilities there.
So we then took those learns and looked to explore and drive adoption in different use cases, this time a more business orientated community targeting our ops colleagues spread out right across the globe. We wanted to see the value it could bring to connect people up across locations to support divisional updates and cascade messaging and to make our ops leaders more accessible and to share knowledge and expertise. The launch to this community was much more functional in style, what the platform was, how it would help them, how to use it, etc.
Ahead of launch, we looked to populate the feed with interesting posts and content with unrecognizable faces across their community. Now, that was so that when people landed on the community, they could instantly understand what the platform was for and how they should interact on it. And we adopted a similar approach as well to moving certain comms to that community.
For instance, the ex-co-member who supported our operations ex-co-member, did a weekly note on Viva Engage instead of by email, which he used to do. We then later swapped that actually to a vlog to make it less formal, which gained a lot more higher engagement. The comms lead also gamified with fun competitions and challenges across the rollout phase.
And again, that phase lasted about eight weeks. So in this particular use case, around 75 percent were reached, so a little bit less than the last one, 30 percent accessed weekly, again, a little bit less. And there was around 400 posts.
So what did we learn? Well, we learned that you needed a really strong leader banging the drum and posting. That really helped. Video posts, as we all know, generate a lot more engagement.
Without that surround sound of comms being visible in and around the office, driving awareness was a lot harder. Gamification really worked. And in fact, most of the posts generated in that community were part of the campaign and more support and better educational resources were asked for as well.
So we took all of those learns and then looked to our all company group launch. Now, by this point, we'd rolled out in one large site in our community. And I'd worked also, as you can see, running across the bottom to get most of our DNI networks on board.
These communities took to it really well in terms of posting and engaging. So I'm talking here about things like the pride community or the black community and all those other different diversity networks to ready for launch. I worked with all of our other big sites as well to establish themselves in readiness for the groupwide launch.
And because of the London site launch, we had a ready made comms campaign plan. They could then adapt and make their own so they didn't need to start from scratch, which was super useful. I established all the big organizational comms communities ready to populate with members, for instance, our tech community or capital markets business.
And similarly, similarly, we had ready made comms plan templates for them as well that they could just pick up and make their own. So based on our phase rollout learns, we worked with the relevant comms leads to populate the feeds in advance so that, again, they weren't empty and people understood how to engage on the platform when they arrived and invited to the communities. As we did in London, we planned for plenty of surround sound to promote the platform across our offices with digital signage, Internet takeovers, a really good early week's content plan and things like that.
And we also used our CEO to launch with a video announcement to everyone globally, which still remains one of the top engaged with posts. And we also, following the learns from operations phase, we gamified with a really fun Viva engaged treasure hunt across the platform, which got around 900 people entering. And to date, it's still the best the only competition.
And it also acted as a really clever way to educate people on how to explore the platform because they had to go to different communities to complete the treasure hunt. As I mentioned, our support resources from earlier, we pushed them in all of our comms, help and support community and support hub. And that really helped.
And we were really pleased with our early week's results. Around 80 percent of our audience was reached, around 30 percent accessing weekly. And the first six weeks we generated over 5000 posts.
So we were pretty pleased. But, you know, this is what I class as the launch phase, and I'm sure many of you know the hard work is is that ongoing adoption. And on this, I found it a little harder to distill some of my key learns into a few broad themes as I'm a firm believer that I guess there's no silver bullet to drive adoption.
To me, it's lots of incremental changes and activities over time that just nudge up adoption here and there, build that digital maturity and get people returning time again. But I've tried to capture it in these five kind of areas. These are a few things that I think have really helped us on our journey.
Having a really clear and joined up channel and content strategy and being insight and data led, having a steering group there to help bounce ideas around and make decisions, migrating comms activity to Viva Engage, continuous and continuously experimenting. So let me just give you a little more detail on each of them in terms of a channel and content strategy. During launch and afterwards, we made sure to be super clear on the channel purpose.
We've clearly articulated to our audience what you'd use the channel for versus others. And we've also updated our border internal comms channel and content strategy. So we as a team are clear how we use Viva Engage, what content goes there versus other channels, how we link up the channels and cross promote them.
And next year, we're moving it further by still by encouraging the use of Viva Engage in some areas as the primary channel. Data and insights, sadly, we haven't had the luxury of a platform like SWOOP to leverage for analytics and insights, nor have we. Well, up until this week, at least had Viva Engage premium features.
We've we've got access to them this week, which is great to track how we're doing and help us make those data driven decisions. We've had to do it all ourself. We developed a quarterly dashboard and consistently track data points that were important to us over time.
And we've used this in two ways. We help show progress in what we're doing and we've seen small but steady improvements in all our metrics, which is great, but also to bring stakeholders with us, sharing rankings of the most active communities and best performing pieces of content. And it's also given given us a lot of insights into what content performs best, how to format posts, tease messages and whatnot.
We use these insights to plan, optimize and encourage best practice use of the channel. I talked a moment ago about our steering group. For me personally, this has been key in helping us get a lot of what we've done over the line.
So responding to feedback from the team who wants to get a lot closer to Viva Engage plans, I brought together a group of 12 people from across our internal comms team to help shape those plans. Not only does it help us make better decisions, such as when we roll out certain features, but also creates a shared sense of ownership across that group who all feel invested in moving the dial around adoption. And the time we spend together is really valuable in terms of me being able to upskill them, but also me learning in terms of more about what they're doing in their areas and how Viva Engage can help them.
Migrating comms activity is also a really key thing which I found works. Not only will it help drive usage of the platform, but it will have the dual benefit of making some existing processes a little bit more efficient and a better digital experience. So, for instance, we had a press summary email which went out daily to around a thousand plus people.
I approached the press team and this is now migrated to VE as a daily press summary announcement, replacing an email, making the process for the team a lot more efficient because they no longer need to manage a distribution list of people. But it's also a better digital experience for users because they can ask questions and comments. Some other examples where we've done this is migrating large site newsletters to Viva Engage and divisional leader email messages too.
Finally, experiments. This is something I'm constantly doing to kind of see what works and what doesn't work. Content in particular is an area we've done lots of experimenting.
We've experimented with Who posts using aliases to post, using images versus videos, the copy and announcements. And we've also used AI to help draft content. So this post on screen is a great example of how we created an authentic piece of content quickly using AI.
Pilar qualified for the Paralympics in Costa Rica and I helped her share that achievement. I called her up on Teams really simply. I turned on the transcript and then asked her a few questions about her amazing achievement.
And after the 20 minute call, I asked Co-Pilot to turn the transcript into a short blog in Pilar's own tone of voice and got a brilliant blog that she then tweaked and posted, which turned out into the most highly performing organic piece of content on the platform we've had to date. As you can see, I don't know if you can see, there's over 900 likes and loves and over 150 comments. So we're really pleased with that.
Some other areas we've experimented include, you know, using Power Automate to fire off welcome messages to new joiners, tell them about Viva Engage and sharing some resources. Similarly, we've done a similar thing about welcome messages using Power Automate when people join communities too. So how are we getting going? All in all, we're pleased with our progress.
It's slow, but we're always prepared for it to be slow. And we're seeing lots of the same trends identified in the recent benchmarking reports. You know, less interaction, but high reach and things like that.
I should say, there's also lots of things we want to do better, such as focusing and driving in our leader communities, for instance, which is one area we're definitely yet to crack. So any advice there, please stand my way. Right.
I'm going to leave it there. I hope you found it useful. I want to leave a little bit of time for questions.
I'm sorry if I've raced through. I'm conscious I do speak fast. Pete? Andy, when you get a chance to look at the chat, you'll see people have got a lot from what you've presented.
I think there's, I'm feeling like a few people might be finding you on LinkedIn and reaching out with some questions. Well, I have suggested people connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm very happy to kind of connect with anybody after the session as well, if you want to talk.
Fantastic. And do you take a moment once you're off screen, you can have a chance to look through the chat and look at the Q&A, there's been quite a few questions coming in that would be great if you do have a few minutes to look through and answer those questions, because obviously we can't cover all right now. But there's a couple of questions I wanted to call out.
One was the first one that caught my eye was a question from Jared. Is there a dedicated channel manager for each platform? So one specifically for Viva Engage or do you have multiple looking after Viva as part of other responsibilities? Yeah, so we're a small channels team, there's four of us and we each lead on one channel, but we're all we work across all of channels. So there's this I primarily lead on Viva Engage and I've got somebody else as well who kind of also lead.
So there's there's probably two people I'd say that works on Viva Engage. But yeah, we work across all channels. And Justine has asked around how many associates in your org, but Lindsay has commented on that question as well, saying it would be good to know how many internal business partner roles you have supporting an organisation of this size.
So people are really interested in the structure that you've got. So we've got around we're quite we've got about 35 people on internal comms team and we've just had a reorg in terms of those numbers. And so I'm not sure of the exact numbers now, but we're a pretty well resourced team.
We need to be because we kind of service lots of different businesses with with with different needs. But we also also spread out across the globe. So we're not just based in London.
So I've got I've got team member in India. My other colleague works in New York and then I've got somebody in London who works in the channels team. And we've got another team member in Bucharest too.
That's always good to have a decent, solid level of support, but I think that the really important thing on that is the amount of work that you have to do, like each of those phases that you described of sort of building up to launch. They all have so much work in each of those phases, but then it pays off, you know. Yeah.
Final question before I need to jump on to the next thing, because I think a lot of people were interested as you were talking about the specific work in those phases. Chris has asked what examples of gamification did you use? So you spoke a little bit about treasure hunt, but were there other things in terms of gamifying adoption? Yeah, so I see Theo is on. He posted a he posted a message in the group.
So he was one of the leads in terms of the operations community. And so he created a I think a competition around Be The Banner. So people kind of submit in photos to be the banner of the community, which was which was quite well engaged with the treasure hunt was really good in terms of other competitions.
I think there was another one around winning an iPad, I think, for for different for different poll as well that we're doing. It's a daily poll and people have to guess the correct answer. And we gave iPads away at the end of that.
So, yeah, there's been a few different examples across the business, but. I think the big thing that speaks to is the the opportunity that they were engaged as a channel. So the features and functionality of it presents to do that sort of thing, to have treasure hunts and do competitions and all that.
And it these things do work right. Like they they the proof is in the pudding, getting people engaged, getting them to get over that first hurdle of getting engaged and clicking and and interacting on the platform. Yeah, they definitely do.
And one thing we we haven't had, but we did have during the launch phase. So we trialed Viva Engage premium features. So we got to kind of explore advanced analytics and the campaign hashtag campaign landing pages and whatnot.
And that that really helped us understand the value that the Viva Engage premium features can bring. So I think I mentioned towards the end of my presentation, we've just got our hands on Viva Engage premium features from this week. So we're looking to kind of explore and drive even more engagement, hopefully using some of those premium features over the next few months.
Nice, Andy, it's time to move on, unfortunately, but thank you so much for kicking off with such a such an inspiring, insightful presentation, really appreciate it.
Meet the speaker:
Andy Pamphilon
Senior Manager, Internal Communications
London Stock Exchange Group
