Key insights from 2024/25 Viva Engage Benchmarking Report
SWOOP Analytics
Viva Engage Festival 2024
This year’s Viva Engage Benchmarking Report is loaded with evidence-based metrics that helps you with just about all aspects of Viva Engage and is coupled with insights from previous years’ benchmarking award recipients.
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I have the great pleasure of handing over to, I think Cai is going to share slides, and we're joined by SWOOP's Chief Scientist Dr Laurence Lock Lee and our Director of Communications Sharon Dawson, who are kind of the key authors of our recently released Viva Engage benchmarking report. I will hand over to you to share how this year's report unfolds. Thank you Pete, and thank you Paul and Stephen.
That was so inspiring, insightful, and please tell Greg I will RSVP. I just need to get a ticket from Australia to Edinburgh. I'd love to be there.
That was fantastic. But welcome everyone to our presentation now on SWOOP Analytics 2024-25 Viva Engage benchmarking report. It's called How to Get the Most from Viva Engage, and quite honestly, this report really does show you how to get the most from Viva Engage.
It's a completely new look report this year, and it's designed as a companion guide or a handbook for navigating every stage of Viva Engage. So keep those questions going in the chat, and I'd like to introduce you to the report authors, although actually Pete you've probably quickly done that. I'm Sharon, I'm the Director of Communications, and you'll hear from Dr Laurence Lockley, who is SWOOP's Chief Scientist, and we're all familiar with Cai from the earlier session.
He's the SWOOP Analytics CEO. So this is our 10th year doing Viva Engage benchmarking, previously Yammer benchmarking, and the reason we do benchmarking is to see how people are really using Viva Engage. So unlike surveys, our benchmarking is based on real-life data, so we can measure exactly how people are using Viva Engage, not just how they think they're using it.
And unlike surveys, we measure every person, not just those who respond to the surveys. And we can track trends in Viva Engage through our benchmarking, and we can also identify the top performing organisations, the top performing communities, and even the most influential people. So this allows us to set goals for best performance, and it's based on this year's best practices and backed by a decade of research.
So in this year's report, we analysed more than 15 million Viva Engage interactions, the Viva Engage behaviours from more than 3 million employees, 3,751 Viva Engage communities were analysed, and that was across 70 organisations over the same six-month period this year. So anyone who's already seen this year's report, you'll notice it's a completely revamped report compared with our previous nine Viva Engage or Yammer benchmarking reports. And as I said, we've designed this report to be a one-stop guide for anyone using Viva Engage.
So it's effectively a companion guide or a handbook for using Viva Engage. And of course, that's all backed by 10 years of data and research based on our global benchmarking. So if you're making a business case to use Viva Engage, check out that top section, section one, and we have a complete section on community management.
And in that, we've addressed most scenarios that you might face, and we've given advice on how to deal with situations using real life examples and case studies. So there's lots of links to case studies throughout the report, and they're all real life ones. So if you're building a business case, for example, for Viva Engage, check out section one of the report.
But we want to start by looking at the role of Viva Engage. So something new we've done in this year's report is tap into the wealth of experience and knowledge from people we believe to be the world's experts in managing and facilitating Viva Engage networks. So these are all community managers, just like many of you.
And you can see here some of their comments. This is their comments about the importance of Viva Engage and what makes it unique. And clearly, the role of Viva Engage is to provide two-way conversation and communication and to give every employee an equal voice.
Exactly the sort of thing Andy and Paul and Stephen were just talking about. So this giving people a voice and the two-way conversation, that's what makes Viva Engage distinctly different to every other digital communications channel. So if you want a culture of transparent communication, knowledge sharing and inclusivity, Viva Engage must be an essential part of your internal communication strategy.
So I'm going to hand over to Laurie here, and he'll show you some of the key insights we found in this year's report. And these insights also really emphasise the role Viva Engage plays in any communication strategy. Laurie, I'll hand over to you.
Okay, thanks, Sharon. So what I'm going to talk about is understanding your audience. Now, one of the things we measure is, you know, how much are things read, which is clearly things I see people are interested in.
For our last few years studies, we've generally found that readership is around the 80% level. This year, 78%. Now, when we compare that to the more common channel of email, and I know whilst we'd all like to be places for people type organisations, the research I read is showing that email is still the dominant channel.
But also it shows that, you know, over 30% of people generally don't open those sorts of emails. So already people are reading more on Viva Engage than they're reading an email, I could say. Now, but that's not really the point about reading, it's really about what the purpose is.
And as Sharon said, our leaders are telling us, it's a two-way channel. And thankfully, that's something that we've been measuring from day one. And, you know, if you think about email, people expect a more formal sort of communication with email.
So, you know, I tend to think of it like a poetry recital, where people sit back very respectfully and nod at the right times. But Viva Engage is our social channel, this is like an outdoor rock concert, where success is really when the audience is really energised, interacting with each other, interacting with people on stage and so forth. And that's what we measure, we measure this sort of the interactive uses.
And at the moment, that's sitting around just under 30%. It has been higher, but you know, nevertheless, think about your organisation and how much are they interacting with each other. Now, the next thing I want to talk about audiences is, if you're posting, when should you do it? Now, what we found when we analysed all the benchmarking partners and all the posts that they made, that generally people like to look for Viva Engage posts, when they start to work around the 9am, 8am, 9am time during the week.
You know, Wednesdays and Fridays were the better days. But generally, if you get in there somewhere between eight and two in a weekday, you're going to be pretty fine. Now, finally, in terms of, as I said, there's different expectations for Viva Engage versus things like email or even meetings or even events for that matter.
We have done a fair bit of research on the different channels. And what we find is that people that engage on Viva Engage tend to also look at SharePoint, you know, there's quite a commonality between Viva Engage and SharePoint. And they also tend to use Teams channels more than anything else.
People that use email tend to favour chat and they tend to favour meetings, right? So they're really quite two, not quite distinct, because there are overlaps. But what it tells us is that if you want to maximise your reach, you really need to do both of these things. And certainly the social channel, like the places for people to sit, putting them in the middle, you know, really gives you the best chance of getting that reach that you're looking for.
Next slide, please. Impact and engagement. So at SWOOP, we think about engagement as people-to- people engagement, right? It's the relationship sort of thing.
Now, I know content plays a very important part, but in fact, what the content is for is really to enable that people-to-people engagement. That's the sort of thing we measure. We measure in depth within SWOOP.
Now, when you think about two-way communication, you think about conversations and how do you promote that conversation? There were some wonderful examples at the places that people had in the previous talk, you know, about people posting questions, you know, and Greg was a superstar, of course. You know, how many of your leaders actually post questions on Beaver Engage? So when you post a question, you're going to get, on average, 150% more replies than you do if you didn't post it as a question. But unfortunately, only about 12% of posts are actually framed as questions in our benchmarking.
The other technique that people use is tagging and mentioning. And of course, you saw that in the last talk as well. You know, if you mention a column, you're actually inviting them into the conversation.
Only about 14% of posts include a mention at the moment, although that is starting to trend upwards. That's good news. And the third thing is about attachments with your posts.
You know, should you put attachments with your posts? Well, unequivocally, the answer is yes. So 82% more replies when you put an image, 168% more if you attach a video. And I'm calling this the TikTok effect, because they're like the short form videos that the younger generation really become, you know, quite engaged with.
You know, in fact, one of our benchmarking partners, a media company, their difference was over 1000%. So in other words, if you didn't have a video attached to this post, I'm not even going to bother reading it. So the answer for that is yes, use attachments.
I'll pass now back, I think, to Sharon. The next slide, Cai, is that changing? Back to Sharon, tell us a bit about the fun. Yeah, thanks, Laura.
So this one's all about bringing the fun to work. And Andy, when you gave your presentation first up, you mentioned this about making posts fun and how that got a lot more engagement. So in this year's analysis, three of the top four ranked Viva Engage networks were based in New Zealand.
And so that was our overall enterprise benchmarking. And then we also benchmarked those 3,751 individual communities. And we found a quarter of the top 20 ranked communities were also New Zealand based.
So we discovered this Kiwi connection when we approached these top performing organisations to ask them to share their best practices with us. And the secret to their success turned out to be simple. It was about bringing the fun to work, just as Andy was talking about.
So rather than stick with plain corporate comms messaging, they often present messaging in a fun and a more engaged way. So we had this one example of a multinational organisation, and they shared the same messaging about a new corporate initiative across two different countries. So in one country, this messaging was presented on Viva Engage just as a formal text-based post.
So plain text, and it received very little engagement. Exactly the same messaging was presented in a Viva Engage community for New Zealand based employees. Only this one was written as a parody from the Bridgerton book and Netflix series.
Thumbs up if you know what Bridgerton is, the Julia Quinn books and series. So if you're familiar with Bridgerton, you'll know about Lady Whistledown. Oh, there's plenty of people who know about it.
So the New Zealand based community recorded this really witty video to relay the corporate messaging as an extract from Lady Whistledown society papers. And it was complete with the Lady Whistledown voiceover as well. And it's been the most engaging post in this New Zealand based community for 2024.
So think about that. So it was exactly the same messaging in two different countries. One was plain text, virtually no interaction.
The same messaging was presented in a different way, and it became the most engaged post for the year. So I think the takeaway is think about how you can frame corporate comms in a way that will appeal to your audience. Laurie, do you want to talk about where people should post based on the data? Where should you post? All right.
So in 2022, Microsoft introduced storylines. And actually in the talk previously today in APAC, Microsoft internally said they love storylines, but now that doesn't show that. In fact, we find that only 1% of the activity that we measured was actually in storylines.
So I'd have to say that's been largely a fail, but it might be different in your organisation. But we can see that there is use cases of that for senior leaders, very visible ones. Maybe short storyline could be useful for them, but largely people are posting and interacting in communities, and they're getting more response in communities.
The second thing about where is communities, whether they're open or private, right? So you can have open or private. By default, they're open. We've always thought that Viva Engage should be open communities, because open communities, open sharing, and so forth is like in the DNA of Viva Engage.
But we also saw that there were some good use cases for private communities, especially in what I would call the shop-based businesses, where you might have retail stores where they have a community just for that store. But when we did see that, we did see other overarching communities that they could share between stores and so forth. So yeah, so mostly we prefer the public, but there are use cases for private.
So the next slide, Guy, we'll go quickly, we're moving on time. In terms of the trends, you know, this year we did some interesting analysis of what types of roles are actually using Viva Engage, and we found that the ones that were most prolific are the sort of people that are in functional roles or support roles, and you can see some of the names here. They were tended to be the most active and engaged in Viva Engage.
In terms of leaders, we had some wonderful case studies, and we continually publish those, but as a cohort, they are still trailing. So we've still got work to do with leaders. In terms of the bigger trends, over the last five years, and you'll see in the report, we have seen, which is disappointing for some of us, some of the people-to-people engagement measures like two-way, curiosity, the engaged persona, have been tracking down.
But I think there's a story behind that, because when Viva and when Yammer first came out, it was really the only collaboration tool. So pretty much communication and collaboration was what Yammer did, but then we had COVID, then we had Microsoft Teams being introduced to do more collaboration sorts of things, and then we had internal communications taking on the stewardship of Viva Engage. So I don't know that this is necessarily a bad thing.
I think it's just coming to the right level now, and the good part is that what internal communications have been able to bring to Viva Engage is a larger audience. So in 2020, we had on average about 20,000 organisations, about 20,000 people on Viva Engage. This year, it was closer to 40,000, so more than double, if you like, the size of the audience within the enterprises we're looking at.
So a broader audience, maybe a little less depth in the collaboration, but we can build, we can work on that from now on. So I think we'd better move on, because we're running out of time. Yeah, so we'll just touch on community management.
So as you can see from what Laurie was saying, in the report, we explored so many aspects of Viva Engage, but we don't have time to go into depth into them all now, so let's focus on communities. So communities are at the heart of Viva Engage networks, and it's inside communities where most of the real work happens. So communities will experience different rhythms in their activity, but it's important that valuable communities don't disappear through a lack of care and attention.
So sometimes this is where you're going to have to maybe revisit your purpose, hold an online event or a competition, or post some compelling content, and also tracking the health of the community. So I'll hand over to you, Cai, to explain a little bit more about tracking the health of especially at-risk communities. Yeah, I'll just be very brief.
What you heard earlier today, and I think throughout the presentations, is how important the conversation aspect is, and there are some metrics that we use in Spook to help us really understand that. I might skip the two on the side and just focus on the one in the middle, which is about tracking response rates. It's a really simple thing, and I saw in the chat some of you mentioned the one, two, three rule that we often advocate for in Spook.
So every time you do one post, you should have two replies and at least three likes. The response rate basically measures how many of those posts are going to reply, and the average sits at around 49 percent, but we really think you should try and get to 59 if you want to compare yourself with the top engages. But the moment you start to slide below 49 percent, it looks like it's becoming more and more, I guess what Laurie is talking about, the risk of this being more broadcasting than real conversation.
But communities is not the answer, and it's been great, it's been covered both in the APAC sessions today and being covered during the talks yesterday, how important it is to get senior leaders on board. And there's a whole chapter in the report with examples, case studies, and how you measure senior leaders, and I gave you a little snippet of Dr. Spook about how you measure Dr. Spook, so I'll skip that part of that today and then hand back to you, Sharon, to talk about the other fantastic things that are there in the report. And there's also, Sharon, there's a whole section about goals.
Yeah, yeah, so what I wanted to say is like if what we've touched on today seems overwhelming, don't worry, because the way we frame the report this year is we've answered a whole lot of questions. So this is just a short sample on this screenshot of some of the questions, but you literally just have to click on it, find it in the contents page, click on some of those questions, and it'll immediately take you to the answer based on all the data. But one of the best things about our annual benchmarking is identifying the world's top performing Viva Engage enterprise networks and the top performing communities.
So drumroll, please. These are our 2024 Viva Engage champions, and in number one position globally for the top performing network is Australian health insurer Medibank. So in the report, we have a fantastic case study from the team at Medibank.
Congratulations, guys. And number two globally, no surprises here, is Westpac New Zealand. So congratulations to Fiona and the team.
And this is where it gets interesting, as I mentioned earlier, number three and number four globally were also New Zealand-based organisations. And probably even more interesting, six of the top 10 ranked Viva Engage communities from the 3,751 benchmark were all based in South Australia. I don't know.
It's interesting. So the APAC region's definitely kicking goals, and congratulations to all our winners. And we can't leave without getting you to download your own copy of our benchmarking report.
And if you need help setting goals and measuring the impact of your communication efforts, we're here to help. So scan that QR code, and we'll get in touch and set up a demo with you.
Meet the speaker:
Sharon Dawson
Director, External Relations & Communications
SWOOP Analytics
Dr Laurence Lock Lee
Co-Founder & Chief Data Scientist
SWOOP Analytics
Cai Kjaer
CEO & Co-Founder
SWOOP Analytics
