NZ Post - Delivering community and connection

It must be every executive’s dream! The Most Thriving Yammer community at NZ Post is one that connects the leaders of those that deliver mail and parcels across the entire country of New Zealand. 

NZ Post’s Customer Service Delivery (CSD) Yammer community was ranked in the top 10 of the Most Thriving Communities in SWOOP Analytics’ 2022/23 Yammer benchmarking of more than 3,200 communities, based on the measures of community performance, energy (sentiment) and growth (activity and members). 

Members of the Yammer community are the service delivery managers and team leads who oversee mail contractors, courier drivers, operations staff, mail sorters, posties – everyone involved in the physical process of getting mail and packages delivered across New Zealand. 

Perhaps what makes this community of customer service delivery managers even more important is the difficulty in reaching frontline staff with official communications. The managers and team leads involved in the Yammer community have a face-to-face connection with NZ Post’s operations staff, meeting often on a daily basis for team briefings to relay information, much of which has been shared from head office in the Yammer community. 

Tara Hayes, Corporate Communications Lead, NZ Post.

“The people in CSD represent those in frontline positions. Most don’t sit at a laptop on a day-to-day basis, if at all,” said Tara Hayes, Corporate Communications Lead at NZ Post. 

“Their main link to communication with NZ Post as an organisation would be through face-to-face team briefs that might be held at the start of a shift on any given day. The people who are active on Yammer represent a small percentage of those broader teams.  

“For us, getting (communications) to those frontline people is our biggest challenge so to know that there is a portion of those teams really active and engaged on Yammer gives us some clarity into how they use that platform, and how they disseminate information that way.” 

Celebrating colleagues and creating an online community  

While sharing information about new safety measures or guidelines feature in the weekly official updates in the CSD Yammer community, the posts with the most engagement are those that involve celebrating people, whether it be a work anniversary, a birthday, a great photo someone has shared of a NZ Post van delivering a package. 

NZ Post Channels Specialist, Shaina Eng, said many of these types of posts in the CSD Yammer community feature on the Most Engaging Posts list across all of NZ Post’s Yammer network, according to data from SWOOP Analytics. 

“Most discussions in the group are updates from those leaders that generate a lot of conversation, or it’s content posted from the community itself,” Shaina said. 

Shaina Eng, Channels Specialist, NZ Post.

“They’ll share things like a pretty picture of one of our vans and there’s a bird on top of it, or they’ll talk about service anniversaries. If someone is celebrating their 20, 30, 50-year anniversary there will be a lot of kudos posted for that person and then a lot of discussion after the fact.” 

One of the Most Influential People across NZ Post, according to SWOOP Analytics’ data, is Jenn Nikora, Regional Service Delivery Manager. Jenn is almost always in the top five Most Influential People list at the enterprise level. When it was her birthday in April, her colleagues across the country used Yammer to celebrate. 

A Yammer post in the CSD community to celebrate Jenn’s birthday.

The simple birthday post had loads of comments and reactions from people dispersed right across the country. Data from SWOOP Analytics shows Jenn’s birthday post as one of the Most Engaging Posts of 2022 in the CSD Yammer community. 

“It’s these types of posts that tend to do really well in our communities, the ones that are very personal and really not work related, that celebrate the people that they work with,” Shaina said. 

While these posts are not specifically related to work, they are about recognising and celebrating colleagues, creating a sense of belonging and community across the workplace. This can become especially important as many of the workers spend much of their day alone, delivering mail to the households of New Zealand. 

Learning from those who have always worked in a hybrid environment 

As more of NZ Post embraces hybrid work as the new norm, Tara believes the rest of the business can learn from the CSD community and how they’ve learned to overcome geographical boundaries to build an online community. 

“It’s interesting that these people who have always had to find some way of connecting outside of these platforms which we’re now relying on a lot more because of hybrid working, are the ones who are actually thriving in it because they’ve always had to find a way to do it,” Tara said. 

“Whereas those of us who have relied on being face-to-face with people, we’re having to learn it in a different way. They’re a bit ahead of us in that respect because they’ve always had to do it, whereas those of us who are used to working in an office-type environment are coming to Yammer with a different perspective.” 

Why curated comms don’t cut it 

The post shared above about Jenn’s birthday is clearly an authentic, spontaneous, heartfelt Yammer post, and as such it received huge engagement. NZ Post’s Chief Operations Officer Brendon Main, and manager of the CSD team, is a strong proponent of Yammer and leads by example, encouraging his managers and team leads to also post on Yammer.

“Brendon is very keen on using Yammer to engage with his people, so I think that’s also a big element, that he’s a big champion and proponent for using Yammer and empowers his leaders to use that platform to communicate with their people,” Shaina said. 

Conversely, the weekly updates about safety procedures or corporate communications that need to be relayed to teams gets little to no engagement on Yammer, despite having a high number of views. 

“In my experience in having seen how people engage with Yammer at NZ Post, people are very supportive of anyone who shares something personal,” Tara said. 

“By comparison, we will push the team brief out every week. We do not get engagement with it because people know it’s curated and edited content.” 

“Since the team brief is pretty straightforward, people will read it and share it with their teams, but very rarely do they ‘like’ it or comment on the posts,” Shaina added. 

Quieting the noise on Yammer 

While the value of personal connections on Yammer can’t be underestimated, it can also create unnecessary noise for some people. In a physical workplace, if personal conversations are happening and you don’t want to be involved, you can walk away and go directly to the person you want to have a conversation with. In Yammer, it can be harder to scroll through the personal conversations to the work-related one, Tara said. 

NZ Post recently conducted a staff survey which found an element of frustration with Yammer. 

“People can’t always easily find the information they’re looking for, and how information is fed to them in the algorithm means the information they want to see at the top isn’t always there,” Tara said. 

“So while we know people are using it, and they do use it for gathering information, there are inefficiencies to it.” 

Tara said that’s the challenge faced by the internal communications team to adjust the channels to make it easier for employees to find the conversations they want to join, while also competing with a plethora of other communications and notifications on numerous devices. 

“For us, the challenge is how to we make sure the stuff we put out on Yammer is not just seen as noise,” Tara said. 

Parcel sorting at NZ Post’s Auckland Operations Centre.