Aggreko - Stories from the heart
The best stories about Aggreko come from within, from the people who have lived the experiences. They’re the stories colleagues want to hear, not the stale corporate announcements.
So Aggreko, the global leader in providing energy solutions, made the decision to replace the news feed on its SharePoint intranet with the Viva Engage All Company feed.
The All Company Viva Engage feed was renamed “Aggreko news” and all 5,500 employees now have editorial access to share their news with everyone in the business – on Viva Engage and via the intranet homepage.
A screenshot of Aggreko’s intranet homepage for AMEA colleagues with audience specific content tiles and the Viva Engage All Company feed, renamed Aggreko News, on the right-hand side.
Aggreko wanted its people to be involved with sharing news, so it scrapped the traditional approach of sharing corporate news front and centre on the intranet homepage.
Paul Brereton, Head of Digital Communications, Aggreko.
“The problem we found was everything was posted by internal comms so no one else was able to share news,” said Paul Brereton, Head of Digital Communications at Aggreko.
“So we moved it to (Viva) Engage in the hope that everyone would share news because there’s lots of great news stories happening across Aggreko.
“If we kept the news on the intranet it meant that unless we opened up editorial permissions to everybody in the organisation, it was limited to just corporate stories. We wanted to devolve editorial ownership back to the business.
“Now we’ve got 5,500 news editors because everyone is able to post in Aggreko News on Engage.”
This approach to sharing news on Viva Engage helped Aggreko take out top honours for medium-size organisations in the EMEA region in SWOOP Analytics’ 2023/24 Viva Engage benchmarking analysis of 97 organisations.
Every time someone logs onto the Aggreko intranet homepage, they will see the latest posts on the All Company Viva Engage community, and can navigate directly to Viva Engage to join in the conversation.
“We wanted everyone to be empowered to share their own news whether that be a leadership update, or really great customer stories, or just something cool going on in the business,” Paul said.
An example of a post in the Aggreko News Viva Engage community, which is also shared on the intranet homepage.
Not once has Paul had to remove or edit a post on the Viva Engage feed, and sharing news this way has uncovered so many otherwise unheard stories.
“It’s really lifted the lid on the business,” Paul said.
“We knew there was lots of great things going on but it never really made it anywhere because there was nowhere to post it.
“We only had corporate news on the home page. Now we’ve empowered everybody and people are sharing more and more things and I would say 99.9% of it is business related.”
Paul said there is an occasional social post; “but even then there’s a hook back to Aggreko in some way or other”.
Aggreko has continually been amongst the top performers in SWOOP Analytics’ annual Viva Engage and formerly Yammer benchmarking and has a healthy culture of sharing and conversing on the platform. The old intranet didn’t allow for the two-way conversations, hence the deliberate move to substitute news on the intranet for the Viva Engage All Company community.
“We wanted it to be two-way and we wanted people to interact and react to the news but also we were just bored of putting the same old corporate messages up on the home page,” Paul said.
“It’s dull. Whereas we knew by going out and speaking to the business there’s some fantastic stuff going on across the Aggreko world so we wanted to put the spotlight on it and what better way than to make news social.”
It may come as no surprise that the Aggreko News community ranked amongst the top 5% of the almost 5,000 active communities (those with significant activity over a three-month period) analysed by SWOOP Analytics in the 2023/24 benchmarking study. It was the top ranked community at Aggreko based on SWOOP Analytics’ in-depth measures.
How to become a Viva Engage guru
An example of the MD’s Viva Engage post. He uses the @mention feature to recognise team members for a job well done.
Paul shared the journey of Aggreko’s Managing Director of AMEA region and how he has become one of the most influential people on the company’s Viva Engage network just by making the conscious decision to be better engaged with colleagues in the Asia, Middle East and Africa region.
Paul said this MD, who has chosen to remain anonymous, wanted to increase engagement with colleagues in the region, and he wanted that engagement to be more than a townhall approach.
Initially, he was unsure if Viva Engage would be the correct platform and he was uncertain of how best to use it.
“After some light-touch coaching he started using Engage and was rewarded with great levels of readership and increasing levels of engagement,” Paul said.
“It turns out he was a natural and immediately became totally self-sufficient, writing his own content and posting when the need arises – and leveraging features such as @mention to bring his leadership team and/or SME’s into the conversation.”
A post from Aggreko’s MD of AMEA. Paul said he makes good use of the @mention feature to make posts collaborative and ensure the right people are aware and involved.
Paul said the MD’s community now always features in the top five Most Engaged Communities in Aggreko’s monthly ENGAGEment report.
“He has transformed himself into an Engage guru,” Paul said.
“We all look forward to his posts now. He gets deep into the business.”
A Viva Engage update from the MD on a trip to Indonesia, along with an informal team shot.
The MD posted a selfie on Viva Engage with a frontline team member, along with a group shot of technicians, which later became the Viva Engage community cover photo in the month it was posted.
Viva Engage Storylines
Paul said Viva Engage Storylines are slowly starting to be embraced by some at Aggreko. It was never consciously promoted across Aggreko due to the timing of the introduction of Storylines during a busy time at Aggreko. However, it was switched on and some people started using it.
“It’s slowly taken off,” Paul said.
“We’re seeing lots of people starting to follow people and you see a real mix of people in there, everyone from financial planning and analysis to someone posting about a company football match.”
Learn more about how Aggreko is connecting its people through it’s Viva Engage photography community - Aggreko - Breaking geographical barriers with Viva Engage.
