Maximising Viva Engage: Top tips for connecting during a period of organisational change
Ventia
APAC | Viva Engage Festival 2024
Join Leonie Thirkell from Ventia as she shares her top tips and tricks for leveraging Viva Engage to foster connection during times of organisational change. This session will provide practical advice on best practices for community admins, using dashboards to streamline digital workspaces, automations, and creating an effective channel mix for frontline workers.
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Our next speaker of the day, we have Leonie Thirkell from Ventia. So Leonie will be sharing her top tips and tricks for leveraging Viva Engage to foster connections in times of organisational change. And I think talking to lots of different customers and organisations recently, I feel like this is a very consistent theme that I'm sure many people are looking forward to hearing about.
I know Leonie has a heap of practical advice to share. So let's jump straight in. Leonie, are you there? I can see you.
Hello. Hello. Yes, I am here.
Let me give you control and I'll stop sharing. There we go. I love that music, by the way.
Thank you. It was something. Right.
Let me know if you can see my screen. Perfect. Good to go.
Thank you, Leonie. Brilliant. Thank you so much.
And thank you for having me. And I'm very excited to connect with everyone here. And I'm a fan of this festival.
So thank you. Cool. So, yeah, as Emily said, this is around maximising Viva Engage and how we did that during organisational change, which I hope is something that you can all relate to.
So a quick rundown of what we'll go through today. We'll go through the context of our business transformation, how we set up Viva Engage for success across our business, how we've nurtured that success, and now how we're maintaining that momentum, because Benji and I, we are prolific Viva Engage users. So just very quickly, I will touch upon who we are, because you may not have heard of us, but now I'm hoping that you have.
You will see our vehicles everywhere. So we are an ASX 200 leading essential infrastructure services provider, which I know is quite a mouthful, but essentially our purpose is to make infrastructure work for our community. So what does that mean? It means that we look after all of the things that you shouldn't have to think about that run in our cities and communities.
So whether that's keeping the lights on, keeping the water running, even picking you up if you break down on the motorway, we do all of those things. And actually pictured here is one of my favorite areas of the business, which is one of our firefighters, because fun fact about Benji is we actually have Australia's largest private firefighting service. So across Australia and New Zealand, we have 35,000 in our workforce, so very dispersed.
And 15,000 of those are direct employees, and then the rest are subcontractors. We have 400 project sites across Australia and New Zealand, and 40% of our people are in regional and rural areas, which is why it's so important for us to make use of a platform like Viva Engage. So if I take you back to 2020-21, we were going through some significant transformation, which I think was probably the case for a lot of you.
As you know, we had to pivot and make some quick decisions as the climate kind of changed. So for us, our situation was we just acquired a major business called Broad Spectrum. And we went from 5,000 employees to 35,000 overnight, which I don't recommend.
It was great to see, but it was a lot. I love those wow faces. Thank you.
Then on day one, it was announced we're all going to be Ventia. So we had to rebrand that business and multiple businesses at the same time, then a couple more acquisitions after that. So we had a complex and accelerated integration, which meant lots of different, in the case of Viva Engage, lots of different Microsoft tenants that we were dealing with.
So that means lots of different what was at the time Yammer. And then, yeah, we decided, or not me personally, but we actually listed on the Stock Exchange, so ASX and NZX in November 2021. And so amongst all of this fun, we decided now is a great time to relaunch Viva Engage.
So we decided, look, we've got plenty of people, some people using Viva Engage, Pockets in the business, some people not at all. So we decided let's just start fresh. And go back to basics.
So the first thing that if you are in a situation where you've got maybe multiple tenants or you've just got some adoption of the platform and not in other areas of your business, we boil things back down to, first of all, the user experience. So some of the questions we asked ourselves was, how are people accessing the platform? What's their experience when they do access the platform? Do they even know how to log on? And even if they do log on, what are they actually going to do when they do that? So first of all, we started with user testing sessions to just inform that relaunch to make sure that we were doing things based on, not assumption. One simple thing we did as well was we just had a massive spring clean.
So we archived a bunch of old communities. So there was a lot of stuff in there, because as you know, anybody can set up a community. So we had to go in there, have a big tidy up.
And then we also did something simple, which I'm told was kind of nifty, which was we introduced some naming conventions. So we just made things look a bit more organised so that when the user came in, they could clearly understand what might be something a bit more fun, what might be a bit more business related. And we also made use of prominent real estate.
So all company, that's your default group. And on that, for example, we've got like a little banner image that sort of points people towards the social media standard. And the point of that is to better inform our people and also give them a bit of confidence about, you know, if you're not sure about what you can post, follow the standard.
Sorry, it just clicked me out into Yammer, forgive me. Another thing as well was just making use of that real estate on the side. So with some simple guidelines and then also some links to those standards as mentioned.
Another simple thing we did was we introduced some fun new communities. And I know this isn't perhaps news to a few of you, but something prolific that we did was introduce Pets of Ventia, which went viral pretty quickly and became our most popular group outside of all company. And to this day remains so.
Now, in terms of setting ourselves up for success, one of the pieces of feedback that we got from the user testing was that people didn't actually know how to get into Viva Engage or Yammer at the time. So obviously you can access from your browser or you could download the app. But what we actually did was we looked at where our people were.
So what apps were they actually using? We knew that Outlook at the time was number one. Now Teams is pretty close to where the adoption of Outlook is. But at the time, yeah, people were certainly starting to use Teams a lot more.
So we decided to meet them where they were. So we'd heard of the fact that you could manually add Viva Engage in your Teams app. You can manually add it yourself.
That was available. But we wanted to actually just make that a default for all users. That was a really simple thing that we did.
So what we did was we pinned it to the Teams rail. So this is the Teams rail here on the left hand side. And as you can see, we have the Viva Engage icon right up the top for all users by default.
This was pretty straightforward. We worked with our digital services team. It required somebody with admin access.
And really probably it took about two weeks. And we timed it with the relaunch of Viva Engage to make sure that overnight that when we were relaunching, hey, here we are. And the cool thing about this, if you haven't done it, is that it keeps you signed in.
So once you just have to have someone sign into it the one time, but then so long as you're signed into Teams, then the user is also signed into Viva Engage. So they never actually have to sign in again, which is very cool. And that means that the updates that we do are easily kind of accessible.
And as you can see the slide before, it's integrated in your Teams app. So you never have to leave Teams. The other thing that we did, which perhaps seems kind of straightforward, but has been quite effective, was thinking about, again, where our users are and meeting them on things like our intranet.
So this is a bit of a screenshot of our intranet. And we introduced just a strip along the homepage, which includes a spot for Viva Engage content to kind of draw people in. Because, you know, once we've made the app accessible, we've got to find reasons for people to come in.
So this is an example here where we're kind of creating moments of FOMO. And of course, it's Pete's Adventure, my favourite. Another one that we highly recommend is finding your influencers.
So every single member of our executive team are users of Viva Engage. And it's not just us. It's not just us behind the scenes writing for them.
They are big advocates. But it also helps that our CEO is a prolific user of... I've said prolific a few times. But he is an ambassador for social media.
So he certainly came into the business knowing the power of platforms like Viva Engage. So here's a couple of early updates from Dean Banks, our CEO. You know, the moment he joined our business during COVID.
Imagine that as a new CEO. You know, from the moment we listed through to actually bringing people back into the office. He is by far our largest influencer.
And while we do have delegate authority, of course, so we can post on his behalf, which I highly recommend if you haven't done before to get delegate authority for those important people that you want to post on behalf of. The other thing he does by his own accord is he likes a bunch of updates on the feed. So he makes time each week to actually go and have a look at Viva Engage and engage.
And that means a lot to people to actually see that the CEO has read their update and is engaging with it. Another fun thing that we recommend in terms of influencers was also just finding some of those voices that you want to elevate. So we found... We actually... This is one of our subject matter experts, Mel Anders.
She is an absolute pro when it comes to... She's a lawyer, but she's a pro when it comes to negotiation. So she came to us with the ambition of wanting to post a negotiation nugget each week across 52 weeks, so throughout the year. So she, to be fair, she created all of her own content, including these on-brand templates, and she shared something each week.
So what we did to help her with that was we found ways to amplify what she was doing and whether that was even as simple as I said on the strip of the homepage of our intranet, through to mentioning at training sessions to say, hey, you're missing out if you come onto Viva Engage. You can find these thought leaders. It's not just a place where there's siloed communities.
This is actually a place where you can learn as well. So she's done an amazing job. Another one when you're kind of finding your influences or one of our influences is that we gave our corporate persona, personality.
So a lot of you probably do have a corporate account on Viva Engage. So we have brand marketing comms, but stay with me here. We also have a Border Collie mascot, CC, which stands for Collaboration, Integrity, Challenge and Ingenuity, right? So that is the personality that we assigned to our corporate account, and the team have had a lot of fun with this one.
From practical things like polls that we have run, which we also, as you can see here, I think we had over 500 votes on this one, and that was also another one where we will integrate it into our homepage. We will find other ways to kind of draw people towards these polls, through to the team having a bit of fun with some of the merchandise that we have and making fun little comments about how great they look. Yes, we do actually sell CC toys as well on our merch store.
Through to one of our team recently, Sarah, shout out to her. She has created with AI a little poll here, which is just really fun and engaging. It's really just meant to kind of create moments that have people talking that will bring people over to the platform.
Another huge thing for us is a commitment to training and a commitment to be available to train teams. So, you know, we made a decision between, of course, we have resources available on our intranet for people to learn about Viva engagement. Of course, there's plenty of resources online that you can find with Microsoft, but we actually commit to training in person because we know how much changes and we know that it can be a lot more engaging if we actually do those sorts of sessions online or in person.
So we train all of our leaders, including the executives. We also have trained special pockets like our executive assistants, especially with the delegate authority and training them there. Our graduate cohorts and obviously all employees.
So if I just show you here, it's our team, Sarah Norbury and Ash Rogers. That was, can't see the group that they're training to, but this was our leaders forum just a couple of months ago where they provided some specialised training. Around Viva Engage, 100%, it does make a difference to engagement on the platform.
Once you give people the confidence to actually know how to use it, they will come on board. Another thing that we do is we bribe people with Tim Tams. So we talk about, we position our training around, this is not just about us, this is actually about you and the best project you'll ever work on is you.
So this was one of the Tim Tams we used at a strategy roadshow where we did some training on Viva Engage. So just a quick look at our all employee training, which I'm happy to provide a skeleton of the slides that we do if no one has embarked on this before. Obviously we run through the basics of how to sign in, how to access the app.
We have people sign up. We always have a couple of options. So when we first started, forms was what we used.
Now you've got the webinar functionality, which is great, but this is actually a screenshot of one of the old forms. Our training starts with encouraging everybody to just engage with the feed. So step one, sign in.
Step two, just look, like join some communities and just start engaging, liking. Don't have to comment. You don't have to post anything.
There's no expectation here. It's really just about you starting to connect. We do provide examples of what to post and we name drop.
So it's awesome that we can name drop our CEO and say, hey, if you do start being active on Viva Engage, you might just get a like from the CEO. Another thing as well that we introduced partway through the training, because we do run about three sessions a year, at least for all employees, is we do live demos now of the platform because it was kind of hard to talk about how to use the platform without actually showing people. So I know that can be a little bit clunky when you're screen sharing, but I actually highly recommend because it really helps people understand how to use it and see that it's not that scary.
We also have some post-event resources that we provide to people, including for those who want to be more like Mel Anders and maybe have some negotiation nuggets or they want to share some of their expertise. We have a bit of a checklist that people can go through and a bit of a brand plan around what do they want to be known for and how they're going to go about that. The next thing that we have been exploring with the help of Microsoft as well, and Avanade, I should say, is we've been building a Viva Connections dashboard within our Teams app.
So there is an out-of-the-box solution for the dashboard, which anybody here, I assume on this call, can actually do, which is about bringing your intranet into the Teams app. So this is a screenshot here of our universal Viva Connections dashboard. And we worked with our digital services team, again, someone with admin to get that live.
And that's what it looks like. So it's really just the, this is the Viva Connections logo here. And what we do here, as you can see in the card circle, we encourage people to join the conversation on Viva Engage.
There's lots of different things that you can have on that dashboard. It's really like a wallet of just all your important things. But we're using it for Viva Engage.
And one of the next things that we're exploring right now is how we can target that experience. So maybe this isn't new to some of you, but certainly new to us is around how can we create a kind of customised, personalised experience for different target groups within the business. And in particular for us right now, our frontliners.
So in terms of, and I feel like I've just flown through, so forgive me. In terms of our high-level analytics of how we've actually gone and keeping track of our results, we do have a Power BI sort of dashboard. It's not ideal, but it kind of gives us a bit of a feel for the analytics.
But yeah, we started in 2021 with 4,000 active users. Now we actually have, just checked yesterday, 5,412 active users on Viva Engage. And since then, on average, we've seen 53% increase in active users.
So that's amazing. 77% increase in activity. So of those who were active, the activity, oh, the lights are just going out here.
The activity that they were actually performing on Viva Engage was quite low. So one of the things we have in the training is make sure you're active, make sure you're at least liking content, engaging. So we've seen that massive uptick in activity.
More people are actually reading what's on Viva Engage. So we've seen a 30% increase there. And a 41% increase in activities per user, which is crazy.
I think yesterday I saw that it was about 50 on average per active user, which is a lot. And so that's it really. I'm open to any questions and happy to share any resources that might be useful.
Fantastic. Thank you so much, Leonie. And you're actually spot on on time.
That was absolutely time to perfection. So thank you so much. We do have about 10 minutes now for some questions to Leonie to learn a little bit more about how this is all working at Ventia.
Leonie, I will say the training slides that you mentioned, I can see there has been a flurry of interest from people who would really love to see those. So perhaps we can coordinate to make sure that we can get those slides to people who would like to get a bit more of an insight. Now, just having a look at the Q&A and for everyone listening in, if you do have some questions, please do pop them in the Q&A.
I think there's also a little bit of interest into what you mentioned about your corporate personas and actually how you set these up. So I love the insight about keeping it fun and fresh and giving it a bit of personality, but how do you actually set up these corporate personas? How does it all work? Yeah, that's a very good question and one that we asked ourselves as well when we first did this. So we had a shared inbox for brand marketing comms, which the business we obviously monitor.
And so we knew that we had a 365 profile for that shared inbox. So we didn't know technically how to do it. We spoke to our friends in digital services.
To be fair, it was a little bit of an ordeal. We had to get hold of the password for that account, but now it is shared between our team. But it may or may not be shared between our team, but we certainly all have access to it.
And no, actually, I have access to the account and I have given delegate authority from that account to the rest of the team. So that is how we did it. Sorry, that is quite critical.
I see. No, yeah. Great, great to know.
And only one of us. Yeah. Got it.
And then just another question as well. Can you provide some sort of comment on how you're approaching resources for your frontline team members? Like any ideas or anything that you're running specifically for frontline? I think some insights and that would be awesome. Yeah, absolutely.
We've been running a pilot with the Viva Connections dashboard as a starting point to sort of put all of those things on the dashboard that our frontliners would like to access that they commonly use and also bringing them into Viva Engage as well to kind of create that sense of community. What we've actually found from that is not only an uptake of just bringing in our frontliners to use the dashboard, they're also now using Teams for different ways of just chatting or being able to call from within the Teams app as well. So that's been great, the adoption of Teams that we didn't expect.
I guess this is an area that's so hard to tackle for a lot of businesses, but we think that digital is the way to go and we see Teams really as the portal for us to explore. Mind you, we are exploring other things, but certainly from a comms perspective, we find a very effective way of keeping people connected. That's what we're doing right now amongst a few other things, a few other comms tricks, screens at all our sites and messages that we amplify there.
So yeah, I think it's a real combination of things because it's like any kind of comms approaches that you've got to kind of catch people where they want to be or where they are. Perfect. And obviously you've had some really great success with your leaders and their uptake of Viva Engage.
You can just see there with a few of those examples that you've shared. It's great to see that you have not only just a few of your leaders on board, which is what we do typically see with a lot of organisations. It might be one or two that have really embraced it, but they're really struggling with the rest of them.
So that's been a really positive thing to see come to life at Ventia. Do you have any other insights on how you work with your leaders? How did you get them to this point? I understand for some of them, they're quite in tune with using digital and social, so maybe it came quite naturally to them. But then how did you nurture that over time? That's super savvy.
Yeah, look, it helps that our CEO, Dean, is a massive ambassador for actually having an online presence. So they obviously have a strong connection into the business, but also, yeah, that online presence is encouraged at the very top and cascaded through the executive team. We do, every executive has a stakeholder, you know, a mark on sort of stakeholder who will work with them as well.
And we'll sort of sit down and have personal sessions around, you know, what are some of the things coming up? You know, yeah, those kinds of things, like what are we actually gonna be posting? So there's a little bit of a plan around it, but some of it as well is really just demonstrating that they are out and about in the business and the things they're learning or sharing, you know, just sharing it beyond their kind of in-person interactions, I suppose. And just a question as well here, what are the triggers that you use to turn users who are silent observers into the active ones? Like you've got really great stats there for that uptake over the last few years, of course. And I know you've also shared some of those insights throughout the presentation on, you know, getting people on board, setting them up for success.
But any sort of tactics or tricks that you've used to, you know, get those people talking or at least doing something on Viva Engage? Yeah, I mean, I think for us where I'm happy personally, if they're actually just going to even sign in and at least be seeing what's going on on the platform, there's no, I mean, we build their confidence through the training and we're always available to answer questions, of course. But, you know, if there's always those observers, even on external social media, so that's okay by us. But certainly those key ambassadors, finding those influences are critical.
But I think over time as we build their confidence, you know, those users hopefully convert. I have seen some cool analytics before and I think it is actually SWOOP that actually shows you like who your most prolific users are. We haven't got that yet, but that would be something like that would be actually quite amazing.
Amazing, yeah, just being able to identify the influences. Although you already have your influences, which is, and some of those ambassador type campaigns I think have been really cool to see. And then Leonie, I'm just wondering as well, like you've spoken a little bit about your channels mix and use of the intranet.
Did you use, sorry, I'm just referring to a question in the Q&A. Did your company set the main page of the intranet page for all corporate devices? Is that something that you could kind of set across the board? Yes, yeah, absolutely. So that is, so yeah, our intranet homepage gets around 8,000 sessions a week on average.
So that is the sort of universal view. But I know now with targeting, you can actually target to different groups, different stories and things like that. But that strip is universal.
Yeah, everyone, they can't get away. Well, Leonie, thank you. Thank you again for sharing your insights.
There may be a few extra questions that will perhaps come through in the next few minutes. So if you have, if you are able to hang around and maybe provide some written answers in the Q&A, that would be incredible. But otherwise, if everyone could please join me in thanking Leonie for sharing the Ventia story.
Thank you so much for having me and I hope to connect with you afterwards.
Meet the speaker:
Leonie Thirkell
Manager - Brand & Marketing
Ventia
