Westpac New Zealand - Banking on Viva Engage & SWOOP Analytics to achieve top collaboration
When Westpac New Zealand’s internal communications team is about to launch a campaign, engagement on Viva Engage & Yammer is a priority. It’s a deliberate move away from traditional communication channels, like the intranet, to a platform where employees can engage in the content.
Take for example the Most Engaging Post on the bank’s Viva Engage network for the past 12 months. It was a post informing people that Westpac NZ was behind a country-wide campaign to get 90% of the eligible population vaccinated against COVID-19 before Christmas. The Viva Engage post asked employees what they were getting vaccinated for, and what they were most looking forward to once New Zealand came out of lockdown. Also on offer were three $50 gift cards as an incentive to get people engaged.
Westpac NZ deliberately chose Viva Engage & Yammer as the primary channel to support the vaccination campaign so people could engage and share their stories, many of which became personal and emotional.
“We chose Yammer for this campaign because we needed to get everyone behind vaccination,” said Fiona Roberts, Senior Digital Engagement Manager at Westpac New Zealand.
“Given its importance, we wanted our people to be able to have a conversation and share their perspectives on a highly relevant and emotional topic.”
The Most Engaging Post on Westpac NZ’s Yammer network for the past 12 months.
The post was viewed by more than 1,800 people, almost a third of the entire workforce at Westpac NZ, with more than 350 reactions and more than 60 comments, according to data from SWOOP Analytics.
A screenshot of Westpac NZ’s Most Engaging Posts measure from SWOOP Analytics.
The responses to the post were heartfelt and met with support from other colleagues.
Some of the replies to the original Yammer post on vaccinations.
This campaign is a perfect example of how the Corporate Communications teams at Westpac NZ intentionally use Viva Engage & Yammer as an employee engagement tool.
“We’re quite purposeful with how we use Yammer,” Fiona said.
“We don’t think of it as social media, we think about it simply as a channel with which to communicate. What we’ve seen is a really deliberate move away from the intranet, and of pushing news and information, to using Yammer quite a lot more as our primary channel so we’ve got an opportunity to create news and information and campaigns that engage people.”
It may come as no surprise then to learn Westpac NZ was ranked the No.1 Viva Engage & Yammer network across the world in SWOOP Analytics’ 2022/23 benchmarking analysis of 97 organisations. It was also the first time a medium-sized organisation (between 1,500 and 5,000 active staff) has taken out top honours in eight years of SWOOP’s benchmarking. Usually it’s a small-size organisation that tops the rankings as it’s often easier for smaller sized organisations to perform better.
“Our internal communications team has got Yammer as top of mind so when they’re creating a campaign … they are constantly thinking about how to use Yammer to engage people,” Fiona said.
“That’s probably what we’re seeing as the key driver and the key shift. The team are now corralling behind Yammer as that primary communications channel.”
Fiona Roberts, Senior Digital Engagement Manager, Westpac New Zealand.
The shift Fiona refers to has been from thinking of Viva Engage & Yammer as just another communications channel to now deliberately planning how initiatives can be brought to life through Viva Engage & Yammer.
“It’s much easier to try and get people to engage with the topic when they are allowed to talk about it and ask questions,” Fiona said.
“It’s much harder when we’re pushing it in one-way communication via email.”
Rise in Yammer readership, a dip in participation
Despite the impressive result from Westpac NZ’s benchmarking data, some of its SWOOP measures have dropped compared with previous years’ analysis. This is a reflection across the entire global analysis which can be explained by an increase in Viva Engage & Yammer usage through readership but a drop in participation, meaning the percentage of those interacting on Viva Engage & Yammer has actually fallen, even if raw numbers for Viva Engage & Yammer usage have increased.
Fiona believes that as more and more people use Microsoft Teams for everyday work at Westpac NZ, along with Viva Engage or the Communities app in Teams, Yammer readership is increasing. However, after two years dealing with COVID-19 lockdowns and huge changes to the financial services industry, there can be an overload of communications, and fatigue is setting in.
“It’s no wonder people are looking at Yammer but not necessarily participating,” Fiona said.
That’s why Westpac NZ values SWOOP’s global benchmarking.
“We always like to know what else can we do, where our gaps are, where the opportunities are, or where we need to focus,” Fiona said.
“We like to see how we compare with others. It’s really important for us to know if we are using this channel to its best capacity and the way that we can make it not just engaging for our people but that we’re using it to its fullest.
“We love the benchmarking report; it gives us a really good platform to springboard off for the year and it helps us to set those goals and gives us a clear vision of where we want to go for the year.”
For other internal communications specialists feeling disparaged by a drop in Viva Engage & Yammer participation, take heart from Fiona.
“It’s a very communication-intensive environment that we live in at the moment,” Fiona said.
“Yammer is just one platform in which our people communicate so it gets harder and harder to get them to focus on one particular channel.”
Fiona acknowledges it takes hard work and constant stoking of the fire, even though she counts herself lucky that in a country like New Zealand and a company like Westpac, everyone works together as a community and Yammer has become an extension of that supportive community.
“It does require constant effort,” Fiona said of Viva Engage & Yammer.
“You do have to keep stoking the fire to make sure things are going the way they should. Most of the time the community is just great, they rally in behind each other but it still needs work.”
Using Viva Engage & Yammer to help with hybrid work
The city of Auckland, where about half of Westpac NZ’s 5,500 employees are based, was locked down from August to December 2021 and for extended periods through 2022, whilst the rest of the country also faced restrictions. With the exception of employees required to provide services in its branch network, most employees were forced to work from home. Once lockdowns were finally lifted, Westpac NZ wanted to rebuild the sense of community that had always existed and get people back into offices, if they wanted to.
Fiona and her team launched a campaign called “Together Again in the Office” on Viva Engage & Yammer. The focus was on FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).
“We wanted people to get a sense that coming back into offices was something that you wanted to do – there was still a vibrant community of people here and you could come in and meet your colleagues,” Fiona said.
“That meant you could brainstorm, have coffee, go to cafes, or get together with your colleagues for drinks.”
Photos were posted in Viva Engage & Yammer of teams meeting up in person in the office, of what was on offer for the day at the office café, what art exhibits were on display around the offices or special deals available at local shops.
“Even though the campaign is officially over, we’re still doing this to encourage people back in,” Fiona said.
“So we’re really subtly, and not so subtly, showing people what they are missing out on.”
Knowledge sharing on Viva Engage & Yammer resulting in ROI
Westpac NZ recently ran an external home loan campaign for first home buyers, encouraging first home owners to get into the property market. As part of the campaign, Westpac NZ’s Consumer Banking & Wealth team ran an internal Viva Engage & Yammer campaign to engage employees with the external marketing effort.
In a nutshell, the Viva Engage & Yammer campaign was a place to share ideas and knowledge. For example, branch teams shared photos of their in-branch displays, while others shared examples of how they had supported customers through their home-buying journeys.
The initial Yammer post about the external First Home Buyers campaign.
Some of the responses posted on Yammer to the First Home Buyers campaign, sharing ideas and photos.
Each post carried a hashtag so weekly reports could be compiled, via SWOOP Analytics, to see how the campaign was tracking.
“I can see with SWOOP if we are getting a good cross section of people across the bank engaging,” Fiona said.
“I can see what’s happening branch by branch, if there’s a particular branch manager that’s doing a good job engaging the team, or where it’s not going well. You can watch and see who the (SWOOP) Engagers are and it does give those teams a really good idea of where they need to do more work to support that campaign.”
The huge success of this campaign though, according to organiser Robert Fernandes, Regional Manager Auckland Central East, came down to Viva Engage & Yammer being a fantastic visual platform where people could share information and stories.
“It’s one of the first times that an internal Yammer campaign has created such a vibe that its positively impacted on the success of an external campaign,” Robert said.
“We were really lucky to have senior leaders involved as well and that role-modelling helped people get engaged and made them feel like they were all part of a team.
“It’s really spurred us to look at what we do for future campaigns as we can now see the return on investment through using Yammer.”
