Realising our omni-channel vision at Vodafone
Vodafone
EMEA | Viva Engage Festival 2024
The Internal Comms team at Vodafone have a clear vision of delivering a consistent omni-channel communication experience for their 100k + colleagues. When they moved from Workplace from Meta to Microsoft Viva Engage in May 2024, they took a big step forward in bringing that vision to life. Ed Nunn will share the story of their move to Viva Engage, give insight into the choices and tactics that have helped them unlock real value from Viva Engage, and share how Viva Engage is supporting the realisation of their vision for communications.
-
And I will now invite Ed from Vodafone to step up to the mic. Ed, are you there? I am. Hi, Pete.
Fantastic. Great to see you. And if you want to if you want to share screen and take it away with your fabulous story.
Sure. Thank you. Let me know when that comes through.
Yeah, all clear. Brilliant. Cool.
Well, thanks, Pete. And thanks, everyone, for having me. I'm Ed Nunn.
I look after Vodafone Group's internal comms channels. So that looks after our strategy for the whole company. I've worked here for three years and I'm in this role for about a year.
So still sort of finding my feet. But it's been a bit of a crazy ride, which I'll get into in a minute. Before Vodafone, I worked at a law firm leading internal comms for the organisation.
And I've also worked in channels roles previously at PwC. Today, I'll be talking about our Veera engaged journey, obviously. Let me just introduce Vodafone quickly.
So as hopefully some of you know, we're a telco company. We've got 330 million customers across 15 countries. We also partner with mobile networks in 45 more countries and hopefully some of your customers as well.
Our purpose is to connect for a better future and using technology to improve lives, businesses and society. We believe technology is a force for good. Internally, we've got about 100,000 employees and about 40,000 contractors who do various things in retail, things like that.
We're a matrix organisation, as you probably would have guessed, and internal comms for the group. We look after our global executive committee communications and also functional comms for our core functions. And then we're supported with local comms teams in each of our markets who obviously use our channels for their local messaging.
So thinking about our channel strategy and what we're trying to do, we are trying to deliver an omnichannel experience for employees. So that means we want to deliver obviously seamless and unified experiences right across all of our internal comms channels. So similar to how you'd access BBC News, for example, you might follow them on social media, have the BBC News app, go to the website or tune in via radio or TV.
So it's providing multiple options to consume and interact with the content that we're providing according to your preference. So we want to make it basically easy for people to access our content in a way that suits them. And that's sort of what we're trying to keep at the heart of all the transformation going on and what we're trying to do with Viva Engage.
So thinking more closely about Viva Engage, we were a workplace by Meta customer since 2018, and that was our primary internal comms channel. So all our corporate news would go on to Workplace. We don't have a SharePoint news site or anything like that at the moment, although we're looking at that and I'll come on to that in a bit.
The contract with Meta was due to expire in May 2024. And to be honest, Workplace was a bit like the Wild West about a year ago and we were still flat out using it. There were about 10,000 groups which had popped up since 2018, obviously.
And if you think back, that was before we were using Teams anyway internally. So people were really using it for projects to gather everyone in one place, upload documents, things like that, which is not really what the purpose of it was. So we kind of worked with IT to sort of think about what we could do about that.
And also thinking about the structure of content on Meta or Workplace, there wasn't really a hierarchy of what was need to know versus nice to know, which made it a bit challenging to obviously deliver essential comms through the platform because they tended to slip down the news feed and get lost. I'd say it was difficult to find things. Stakeholders would often say, you know, no one uses it.
Surely this needs to be an email if we're going to get people to see it. And obviously we had metrics to prove that that was not really much more effective than using Workplace. But of course, once it's got that perception internally, it's hard to shake it off, really.
So we worked with our IT colleagues and launched an assessment in August 2023 to look at the other options and the other platforms out there. We were already a Microsoft customer, obviously, with Teams. So Veeam Engage was obviously being considered.
So we were ahead of the migration curve as well. We didn't realise Meta was going to close Workplace, which made the strategic decision easier to make, rather than sort of a reactionary one or panicking because the platform was closing, which worked out for us. And we ultimately decided on Veeam Engage.
We saw it as an opportunity to really enhance what we were doing and to enhance our internal comms, streamline our operation and also save costs, given that the core Veeam Engage license is included in that E5 license that all our permanent employees have. And the decision also supported our technology and IT strategy, which was to simplify our whole tech stack and really strengthen Microsoft as our foundational platform and use Microsoft where we could. Rather than using like shadow systems.
When we came to migrate content, we decided there was just too much of it to be worthwhile copying over and looking at it. Most of it was in the moment, so around events or org changes that had taken place or, you know, things like that really that are really relevant and need to be heard at the time. But after a year or so, there's no real need to refer back to them.
And we did do some manual migration. So a bit of copying and pasting. I spent a weekend doing that, which was fun.
And that was just for a handful of key announcements from our Xcode that we thought we might need to link back to. Because obviously, once you start publishing on Veeam Engage, it's a sort of linear timeline. So anything that we published from the workplace world would obviously appear nearer than the content that started to be published.
So we made sure to copy across what we could, all those key posts first so that it showed up on the feed. And also that there was content for day one. We also were able to use the workplace reporting to speak to our workplace group admins.
So for those key communities like our employee networks, the popular social groups, the pets group, which I hadn't mentioned before, always popular. So we were keen to sort of make sure that they had early access, felt supported in the change. And they were able to sort of have a bit of time to explore the platform and get confident with it.
Of course, we also invited our internal comms teams to use it early as well so that they could do what I was doing for our group leadership within their markets as well. So their leader stuff was also brought over or just the essential stuff. We announced we were moving at the start of May and then workplace was switched off at the end of May.
And that's this year. So we gave everyone a month's notice. That's the whole company.
And the call to action on our pre-launch campaign, as you might have guessed, would be to download anything you want to keep before it goes forever. We thought there would be a bit of pushback against that or panic. But really, I don't think there was.
I think initially there was a bit of a sort of gasp of like, oh, my God, all this content is going. But then when you actually kind of go down the timeline and see what type of stuff is on there, you realise that, like I said, it's kind of more in the moment than needing to be copied across just for the sake of it. And it really allowed us to start with a clean slate and only copy over those posts that we wanted to refer back to, like I said, because it would have been a nightmare to try and organise those 10,000 groups.
We did obviously filter them and about the first 1,000 were active or had been used in the last six months. So we were reasonably confident that those groups that we weren't directly engaging with were perhaps not used as much or had been abandoned, essentially. So talking a bit about the Communities and Communications bundle, which I always stumble over, we really built the business case for investing in this prior to launch.
The project itself was IT led, so we really had to demonstrate on the comms side why it was worth investing in the CNC bundle, as we've called it. You can see the features on here now. Some of these were really important to us and how we operate as a comms team in terms of being able to publish on behalf of leaders so that those key announcements go up there in a timely fashion and appear from them as well.
So we were able to get buy in from our leadership by really explaining features like Leadership Corner, how it worked, campaigns, the analytics that you can get from the platform and also like even things like featuring posts that is viewed by everyone. And then since then, we found them really crucial for driving that employee engagement. And I think most big organisations would need these features as well as providing those valuable insights into the effectiveness of the comms and how they're doing.
And yeah, being able to publish on behalf of leaders is definitely something that we would struggle without, I think. And it also aligned with our channel's vision for internal comms and really gave us the core tools we needed to sort of start realising this and looking ahead, thinking about Amplify and Copilot, which we knew were on the horizon. So it made sense to really try and invest in the CNC bundle to start with.
So we were able to use those features and obviously be first when all those new features come online, like Copilot. So just a quick look at our launch campaign. This is something that we launched on day one, which was Say Hello to Be Re-Engaged.
And that was sort of on our intranet landing page, that banner that you can see at the top left there. We also had slides for our digital screens in the bottom left there where we're trying to sell some of the benefits. And it did cycle through some of those.
So finding the news, hearing from your leaders, things like that, and encouraging people to use the hashtag on the platform to talk about what they're most excited about or what they're looking forward to. And also posts on the platform, obviously, we tried to be quite sparing with announcements, especially as there was a lot of noise as people got used to the platform and set up communities, which I'll talk about in a bit. But we did obviously use the platform to promote itself.
And I'm pleased to say that the launch went really well. We had 58,000 visits to Be Re-Engaged over the course of the first three or four days, which was more than Workplace got across the whole previous month. So we were really pleasantly surprised at how people were embracing it.
I think people were definitely curious to start using it and to seeing what was different. One thing I will say is that there were lots of Be Re-Engaged emails as people were added to communities. So our launch campaign, we pivoted that to include some guidance on how to configure those as one of your first steps, as well as like pinning the app to Teams to encourage you to sort of have it where you're working.
In terms of what we've learned since our launch in May, I think leaders are definitely our key influences. Getting them to interact with posts is our number one sort of aim at the moment. We've had mixed success.
Some leaders are doing it really well, others not so much. It's just getting them to think of it a bit like LinkedIn and, you know, cycling through their social media apps to spending five minutes on there and just interacting with a couple of posts from your team, things like that. Leadership Corner is really working well, I would say, in helping to get buys on posts.
It really works in prioritising leaders' content in people's news feeds. We do that for our CEO and Exco and then also our market leaders, obviously, in their markets, their audience is set to that group of employees, which works really well. We are working to better understand the algorithm, I'd say.
Sometimes the unexpected content does a lot better than I would have thought. And then sometimes more strategic content doesn't do as well. So we're still learning with that and really understanding when's the best time to post and things like how it's included in the digest emails.
And one challenge we've got is that we're not able to restrict community creation that I know has been talked about already today. We've got a global setting. That's a global setting, I think, that affects all Microsoft 365 groups.
So it would affect the ability to create teams and share points, which when you've got 100,000 people who need to create for their job, we need to think hard about how we would improve our governance on that and any sort of system to regulate that. So we're leaning more on the governance side and trying to keep an eye on our communities and make sure that none of them are growing too big that we aren't aware of or we're not supporting. So we're making sure that there's a consistent sort of approach to that.
I would say also content takes time to build. So more so than workplace. So don't be surprised if you're posted an instant hit.
That's what we say to our stakeholders. It takes over maybe about a week before the views start trailing off. And I think that's because of the digest emails that come through and obviously content tends to feature in those.
And people might not necessarily go to be engaged every day. They might see one or two posts if they've got the Outlook emails turned on that might interest them and they might click through. But otherwise, I think we are learning that people don't spend every day on there.
They might just dip in when they see something that piques their interest. We're also encouraging our community owners to use announcements sparingly. Obviously, it is quite disruptive, especially to an audience of 100,000.
If there's an announcement going out to a big group of people, that's a lot of people who are instantly distracted with a Teams ping and also an email we see after a couple of hours. So we're asking people to use them very sparingly, but no more than like once or twice a month when there's a clear call to action or you need someone to action something straight away. Otherwise, have faith in the algorithm that the content will reach the right audience.
As you might expect, engaging content is king. Short videos and people stories all do really well. I'm sure you guys know this as communicators.
Encouraging conversations by seeding a few comments from a few local or sort of helpful people in the organisation goes well to start the discussion. Obviously, competition. Some of our markets do really well in the UK.
They give away things like Glastonbury tickets, which sadly I'm not eligible for because I don't work in the UK team. But those obviously go down really well with people and really get engagement on the platform and on the post. And using different posting styles just to break up the feed.
I think when there's so much noise on a platform, it can. Yeah, just having a question or a poll or praise in the news feed really helps to catch the eye and just breaks up the feed a bit, as I said. And also including relevant images or video, which sounds simple, but some of our communicators do forget to do that in the moment.
So it's always worth just reiterating that. And I think experimenting and learning fast is one of our sort of values here at Vodafone. So don't be afraid to try something new and then share the results back with us, because obviously we're all learning.
We've had the platform for six months and we try to do that with our comms network as well and really try and get the markets that we work with to kind of feedback how they're finding the platform. And then if they can, if we can improve anything or help them tweak leadership corner or anything like that. So in terms of our objectives going forward, now that we're six months in, we want to secure and maintain a 75% adoption rate amongst our employees.
We're seeing about just over that now, I think about 75 to 80%. Over half of our views are through Outlook. So I think that's great because obviously people are engaging with content in a way that we weren't able to measure before when we were using Workplace.
We couldn't measure those in email views, but we really want to encourage native viewing. So people going to the Viva Engage site, obviously the page, downloading the app or pinning it to the desktop so that they really start to build it into their cycle of stuff to get the latest news that they need to know to do their jobs, essentially. Engagement.
We want to achieve a 20% engagement rate. We're about 15%. I think that's been crept up from 13% over the summer when it was a bit quieter.
We're really aiming to increase that to 20% by May next year or mid next year by working with our key content writers to really position the post, encouraging people to comment and share and obviously react and like stuff. And also leaders play a part, which I'll come on to a bit more in a minute, and then to really increase their presence on there and getting them, as I said, to think of it like LinkedIn. So in terms of why leadership visibility is essential, this is one of the slides we show to our leaders to really sell the benefits of Viva Engage.
So we want them to lead by example and be visible advocates and present as a new way to interact with employees, especially now in a hybrid world. And obviously, I'm in a global role and my teams are fragmented all across the world. So it's a real good way for leaders to reach their teams with short, informal updates and interactions that you might have done in the office before.
There's another slide that we show to our leaders when we recognise that not all of them are automatic influencers and we have really different styles of leadership voices at the company, as you might expect, ranging from casual users on the left there to influencers on the right. And we're asking them to start by dipping their toes in to comment on a few things, even essential, like simple things like downloading the app onto their phones, helping them with that from the work portal. Right through to on the right there, some of our leaders are great at holding ask me anything sessions and, you know, encouraging, engaging with other people's posts.
So we're encouraging that influence and behaviour by where we spot one of our leaders being particularly present and good at using Beaver Gage. We're adding them to leadership corner to make sure that their posts are maximised and viewed to their relevant audience. And then finally, last slide, I'll just share quickly where we are on our journey now.
As you can see, my background is about Copilot. We're just launching Copilot for M365, which is the one that obviously interacts with the office apps. We're rolling that out to 68,000 of our 100,000 employees.
We're seeing great uptake on that. We've launched live training e-learnings to really help people understand what it can do for their roles. And Viva Engage is playing a key part in that.
We've set up the Viva Engage community, which is for anyone with a licence for Copilot M365 to join in. We're really sharing that best practice in there and it's a space for Q&A. As I said, it's a closed community and there's been over 500 posts and questions so far since we launched in mid-October.
And then it's also the community with the highest engagement, as you might expect, across November, which is great. We've also got a campaign hashtag powered by Copilot, which has reached 76,000 people with 68 posts, which is performing above our baseline, which is brilliant. And we also use Populo as our primary email tool internally.
We've got Amplify that we're looking at and we're looking at piloting that. I think we're going to wait for it to integrate with Viva Engage so you can publish once and then post to many. So it'll publish across to Viva Engage, to SharePoint and obviously to Outlook as well.
And we're hoping that that can really help dial back that email usage using that sort of more intelligent publish once approach rather than just sending an email through Populo. And really helping to target comms according to user preferences. OK, so that was a sort of run through.
So happy to take any questions now. Thanks for listening. Thanks, Ed.
Really, really fascinating session. We do have a couple of minutes for a couple of questions. I want to go to this question from Rick, because Rick was the best behaved questioner and he put his question in the Q&A.
There's a few other questions that were in the chat. But Rick has the question. You said the algorithm is unpredictable.
That's our experience also, says Rick. How do you get around this with important content? Yeah, that's a good question. So we tend to use, like I said, leadership corner and use our leaders as our influencers.
So if you've got a big org announcement, we would always push that from a leader CEO, ideally, or someone on the Exco who has that sort of leadership corner presence. And what that means is their post is boosted and shared to the entire organisation. And basically the algorithm will make sure that people see it either in Outlook or as they're scrolling through another community on Veeam Engage.
Yeah, nice. A comment I want to raise is from Sarah, who said, I'm seeing a common theme in these presentations that leadership is key. You just can't get away from it.
A question I've got around that is what more are you doing? You shared those examples around sort of explaining the importance to leadership. But what do you do as kind of extra training or extra support to help leaders get on board if they say, yes, I want to move up that kind of maturity model? What what kind of things are you doing there to help leaders? Yeah. So I would offer them a like one to one session and we try and like roll it into like a social media crash course almost with my counterpart in the external team so that we can sort of take them through the LinkedIn basics.
But also Veeam Engage, sort of get them to think about it in the same sort of bucket almost. And then simple things, like I said, like making sure they've got the app on their phone and it logs in properly, because I think lots of people have challenges with stuff like that, where it's a work portal and things. So really spending a bit of time with them.
And also, if you can't get the leader engaged, then working with their teams to sort of find out if you know someone in their team or their support team, like finding out if there's any blockers or what I can do to sort of help them be using the platform a bit more effectively. But I'd say the leadership board also that is included in the base analytics is really useful because you can see how they're doing and how they're comparing with each other. We haven't started sharing that with them yet, but I think that's our next sort of thing to do to really get a bit of rivalry going.
Meet the speaker:
Ed Nunn
Global Internal Communications Manager - Channels
Vodafone
