IFM Investors - Forget all company emails, use the All Company Viva Engage community instead

If you want to reach every employee at global investment services provider IFM Investors, forget about sending an all-employee email. Instead, post on Viva Engage.

Once you’ve posted your message, the Internal Communications team will amplify your message by including a link to your Viva Engage post in a weekly newsletter, as part of a snapshot of conversations that are happening across the organisation.

It may come as no surprise then that this All Company Viva Engage community ranked No.5 from almost 5,000 active Viva Engage communities analysed as part of SWOOP Analytics’ 2023/24 Viva Engage Benchmarking Report. “Active” communities are those with regular activity during the three-month period analysed by SWOOP Analytics.

IFM Investors has a dedicated Internal Communication team that facilitates the Viva Engage network across the organisation. They “promote” posts from relevant Viva Engage communities by linking them to the All Company community, so people can quickly navigate to important conversations across the business.

Some Viva Engage posts with colleagues sharing their tips for Mental Health Awareness Month, posted in the All Company community.

By limiting all-employee emails and instead encouraging people to post in Viva Engage, it reduces the “noise” across the organisation from unnecessary emails, and enables colleagues to comment, react and interact about topics.

Similarly, important Viva Engage conversations will also be highlighted in the weekly newsletter sent to all employees with a direct link to the post to encourage people to read further and join the conversation.

Marissa Johnson, Director, Internal Communications, IFM Investors.

“We send out an email to all employees every Monday and that is a snapshot of our biggest news headlines from the week which we have on SharePoint,” said Marissa Johnson, Director, Internal Communications at IFM Investors.

“It highlights some of the things we’re promoting on LinkedIn externally and it also highlights two or three conversations that have taken place in Yammer (Viva Engage) during the week.

“Our insights show that people click through to those conversations regularly, due to the typically high readership every Monday, with consistent links through to the top conversations or topics we want to highlight.

“Whenever we share news and information, we’ll have a call to action for people to go onto Yammer (Viva Engage) and invite questions to spark discussion.”

An example of a recognition and celebration post on Viva Engage.

While Marissa and her team are following best practices by encouraging people to join conversations on Viva Engage, Marissa says people are still heavily reliant on email across IFM Investors for one-to-one conversations, and within teams and projects. So much so, people will often reply to a heartfelt and personal Viva Engage post with a private email or Microsoft Teams chat message, rather than broadening the conversation on Viva Engage.

Prompting more people to collaborate on Viva Engage is a big step towards reducing email across the organisation, and thereby saving time, while encouraging meaningful interactions. However, Marissa acknowledges moving away from email remains a work in progress, and while there are some pockets of excellent collaboration, there's still a long way to go.

Governance across Viva Engage

Prior to IFM Investors launching its latest Viva Engage strategy, there was a big clean-up of existing communities, and a concentration on a smaller number of high value communities.

Anyone who wanted to create a new community has to demonstrate they are willing to be responsible for engagement by responding to comments, and have content available and ready to keep the community alive and nurture conversations.

Laura Butler, Internal Communications Manager, IFM Investors.

“In all our communications, we adopt a multichannel campaign approach incorporating Viva Engage, especially the All Company community, to promote content and key initiatives,” said Laura Butler, Manager, Internal Communications at IFM Investors.

Another way of getting more people onto Viva Engage is to encourage people to post high value content such as photos, videos, infographics and thought leadership pieces.

Some examples of Viva Engage posts where colleagues have shared their personal experiences.

“We ask people to share links to papers, debriefs on conversations they’ve had with stakeholders, and topics that relate to our purpose or that impact our operating environment so there’s some good quality content there and things that relate to culture and engagement,” Marissa said.

“When you put high value content on Viva Engage, people will go there. So we need to make sure it’s really useful and great stuff, getting people more familiar with putting thought leadership on there, taking photos of events we’re participating in.

“That’s the primary principle, putting high quality content on there. Make sure you’ve got an approach, make sure you’re willing to regularly update things.

“Most importantly, help people feel empowered to share what they know. When you read something that someone genuinely cares about or feels connected to, it shows.

“And colleagues are more likely to be engaged by this content. Aside from the business content we have, some of the most powerful posts relate to people’s own personal experiences outside of work, helping to normalise conversations about inclusion and diversity here at IFM.”

A screenshot of a Viva Engage post with a photo of employees and people @ mentioned in the post.

Looking through IFM Investors’ SWOOP Analytics’ dashboard, the Most Engaging Posts are those that recognise employees and teams, and include attachments like photos, videos or infographics.

Marissa said the biggest challenge now is to move people off the All Company community and directly into the relevant communities.

“Most of our content tends to go through that All Company channel,” she said.

“We would like to get people into more distinct communities and more engaged in those. It’s pretty much an all-in channel where everything goes at the moment.”

Marissa and Laura plan to better utilise hashtags and topics to make it easier to navigate to relevant Viva Engage communities, thereby moving people away from the All Company community into more distinct business-related communities.