Victoria Police - How internal communications helps catch crooks
It’s the human-interest stories about colleagues that grab their co-workers’ attention. Like this one about Victoria Police officers Priyank Vakharia and Asif Shamim, and their remarkable ability to identify potential suspects.
Whenever police officers circulate photos or footage internally of a person of interest following a crime, Protective Services Officer (PSO) Acting Sergeant Priyank Vakharia and Supervising Police Custody Officer (SPCO) Asif Shamim can frequently name them, almost immediately, often leading to apprehensions.
In the past two years, PSO A/Sgt Vakharia has nominated 86 names after seeing images of persons of interest, with 84 of those identifications being correct. In one month alone, he accurately identified 11 persons of interest.
It’s very likely SPCO Shamim has a photographic memory, and his record for identifying persons of interest is 60 in a single month. He’s even identified suspects based purely on a mole he spotted on a man’s arm, a tattoo he spied on someone else, and from the body shape of a woman.
Supervising Police Custody Officer Asif Shamim, Victoria Police. Copyright Victoria. Not to be used or reproduced without permission.
It’s these sorts of stories fellow police officers across the state want to hear more about, want to engage with, and learn how to tap into this remarkable resource. Victoria Police’s internal communications team knows these are the yarns colleagues love – it has the data from SWOOP Analytics to prove it - but how do you find them, and how do you share them?
At Victoria Police, the answer to finding these stories is Viva Engage, and the answer to sharing these stories is SharePoint intranet.
These are exactly the sorts of stories people will share in their local Viva Engage communities. They receive great engagement within the community, but the rest of the police force would probably never hear about it. That’s where the internal communications team comes in, scanning these local Viva Engage communities looking for stories with a broader appeal.
Once a story is identified, the internal comms team can learn more and write an in-depth story to be shared on Victoria Police’s intranet, for everyone to read. Sarah Larsen, Senior Corporate Communications Channels Advisor at Victoria Police, said the intranet and Viva Engage are two channels that cannot be used in isolation, they work together.
The initial Viva Engage post about Protective Services Officer Acting Sergeant Priyank Vakharia. When the internal communications team spied this story, they dug deeper for a full story to be shared on the intranet for all to see.
When the full story is published on the intranet, Victoria Police has enabled a webpart to be added at the bottom of the intranet news story, allowing access to the original Viva Engage post so anyone can comment. It’s a case of coming full circle, from Viva Engage to the intranet and back to Viva Engage.
A screenshot of the bottom of the intranet story about Protective Services Officer Acting Sergeant Priyank Vakharia and Supervising Police Custody Officer Asif Shamim, with the webpart linking to the original Viva Engage post.
Sarah Larsen, Senior Corporate Communications Channels Advisor, Victoria Police.
This is a customised webpart built by consulting company Engage Squared to feature a specific conversation from Viva Engage on a SharePoint Online news page.
“We embedded that at the bottom of our news article so then people could comment from the SharePoint page, or click to go over to Viva Engage,” Sarah said.
“We’ve turned off the comments on SharePoint, so all interaction is on Viva Engage. If we have a news article, we’ll embed the webpart at the bottom and encourage people to join the conversation, and that conversation is always on Viva Engage.”
Intranet = information; Viva Engage = conversation
At Victoria Police, SharePoint Online is mostly an information repository, with the exception of news articles, while Viva Engage is a dynamic platform for conversation and knowledge sharing, Sarah said.
“The two rely on each other and you can’t really have one without the other,” she said.
“We’re just finding a way to make them work well together.”
One of those ways is to bring the local stories on Viva Engage to life as more in-depth intranet news articles, like the example of officers Vakharia and Shamim.
Copyright Victoria Police. Not to be used or reproduced without permission.
“The very localised – the regional, the divisional, the police station – communities on Viva Engage, that’s where we will pick up content from employees and then we’ll help them promote it and feature it and spread it further and/or we will take it and repurpose it and turn it into a news piece, or we’ll leave it alone and let it do its thing organically,” Sarah said.
“That’s how we approach the non-professional news writers where all of that localised content comes from. It’s very much a centralised approach for news and organisational updates.
“You can interact with it, so you can give it a reaction, or you can actually comment on it (via the webpart). It doesn’t automatically take you over to a new site, people can write their comments and interact with the post externally to Viva Engage.”
Using multiple communication channels for true employee engagement
This is a best practice example of using multiple internal communications channels to achieve true employee engagement across Victoria Police.
It’s not something that’s happened overnight though.
The intranet has been in place at Victoria Police for many years, while Viva Engage was launched during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sarah said Viva Engage started as a social tool, and because of that it also attracted its share of criticism, but it’s now become a true operational tool. She shared examples like the one above where photos and CCTV footage have been shared on Viva Engage, and suspects have been identified as a result.
“Viva Engage has increasingly become an operational tool,” Sarah said.
“It’s actually used for work purposes and daily duties, rather than just having the Pets of VicPol and other nice-to-have communities. Then we link the two (intranet and Viva Engage), particularly with news and project and organisational announcements as well.
“So if the source is on one, we generally try and share it on the other, and vice versa.
“If a news article is posted on SharePoint news, then we would generally encourage a relevant member from that team to then post about it in Viva Engage and then direct the traffic that way. So they work together.”
Governing an intranet for 22,000 employees
In SWOOP Analytics’ 2024 benchmarking of SharePoint intranets, Victoria Police was among the highest ranking organisations for Health Scores, meaning most intranet pages have good readability, few spelling errors or broken links, and strong engagement.
Victoria Police has about 40 different sites on its intranet, with the internal communications team being the content owner of the entire intranet.
Sarah said the way these sites are governed to ensure a good health score is to give access and training to a small group of site managers for each site. Each intranet site will have two to five managers from within the actual department. There will also be approvers, those with the ability to publish, and editors, with the ability to edit but not publish.
“Those groups are all nominated and managed and granted and revoked within their own teams or departments. It’s kind of self-managed,” Sarah said, adding that the internal communications team steps in to help whenever necessary.
“We have yearly formalised training for the site managers and then separate training for the approvers and editors. We record those sessions and have them on our help page, along with various user guides, and we’ve started to do a yearly audit on the site managers to make sure they can opt in or opt out of that role, it reminds them of their responsibilities and just refreshes the list.”
Sarah said for some departments the site managers are IT coordinators or executive assistants, while for others it might be a regional superintendent.
“It’s good to see a bit of diversity. We don’t generally want it to come from the one team,” she said.
“We would like various teams across the department to be represented, if possible. It’s really up to them as to who it suits and who has time.”
Sarah said one of the biggest challenges when it comes to intranet site managers is the movement of staff, which is part of the nature of a police force, as people move across departments and across the state.
“The major issue that we have is the turnover and movement of people,” she said.
“So you’re constantly having to train and retrain, and introduce yourself to new people.
“The structure of having site managers is designed to mitigate that a little bit. If people have general enquires, or general questions, we can start sending them to the site mangers to handle that.”
Finding gold in Viva Engage communities
While the site managers are focused on keeping content up to date, it remains the function of the internal communications team to share news, including corporate updates.
“So members in single stations out in regional Victoria feel like they’re up to date and they can land on our home page and know what’s going on,” Sarah said.
“Not just feeling informed about operational updates but one of our strategies is to celebrate policing. We want pride in what we do. A lot of things come to us in terms of operational updates or organisational updates but celebrating policing, that’s usually where we scan Viva Engage to get those kinds of stories because there’s gold in some of these communities and they don’t think to utilise comms channels, they’re just telling their station mates about a beautiful letter they got from a resident to thank them for their job, or a really good case that they’ve solved, or even just identifying offenders on Viva Engage.
“It's part of our job to create news and content so Viva Engage is generally where we’ll go.”
