Relaunching with purpose!
Arqiva
EMEA | Viva Engage Festival 2024
In During the COVID pandemic, Arqiva made Yammer (now Viva Engage) available to their people. It helped employees stay connected during those tough times. However, as the 'new normal' became plain old 'normal', activity dropped off. New employees didn't even know it existed and the network lacked any sort of purpose.
Helen Nias will share the story of how Arqiva relaunched Viva Engage with a renewed purpose, a new position in the internal channels landscape, and a greater focus on unlocking business value. Hear how they reinvigorated their network to such an extent that Arqiva can now celebrate being crowned a SWOOP Analytics Collaboration Champion – there’ll definitely be some top tips in this talk!
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I'd like to say goodbye to the music, but delighted to say hello to Helen from Arqiva. Hello. Helen is here to share a story that I mentioned at the end of the last session.
A few people have asked questions about and suggested sort of, okay, you know, launching is one thing, but what if you've got a network that's not really been given much love or it was given love and has dropped off? And this is really sort of the backdrop feeding into what Helen's going to talk about. So I won't say any more, Helen, if you could share your slides, get your video cranking and yes, please share your story. Thank you.
Right. Thanks, Pete. So I'm Helen Nias.
I'm comms manager for digital channels at Arqiva. I started here just over a year ago on a six month contract to rewrite and implement our internal channel strategy. But I'll come back to that in a minute.
I also just want to say I'm feeling very unwell today. So if I need a break, if I need to mute myself so that I have a coughing fit, please bear with me. Hopefully, hopefully that won't happen.
So. Slide around. Here we go.
So a bit about Arqiva first, because many of you will not have heard of us, I imagine. I didn't. I hadn't heard of us before my boss contacted me for this job.
So we keep people connected. So whether that's through radio and TV broadcast and streaming or smart metering networks for energy and water. And we're mostly UK based.
But as technology evolves, we're growing our global offering because we're no longer limited to only offering services via our physical infrastructure network. So this tower in the background is actually the UK's tallest freestanding structure at 330 metres. And that's our broadcast master, Emily Moore in Yorkshire.
There are around 1600 of us, including contractors. And we've got very broadly speaking, we've got three main groups of employees. So we've got desk workers like me, people in sales, HR, finance.
We've got shift workers. So, for example, in the broadcast operation centre, where my colleagues are monitoring TV broadcasts 24-7, 365 days a year to just check for any interruptions to services. So think about that on Christmas Day because they'll be there.
And then we have field workers. So that's engineers and technicians who are based all over the country and will literally climb Crystal Palace Tower or track up a mountain in a storm if a relay needs fixing up there. So it's really cool work and a really interesting company to work for.
So I'm going to take you back in time to early 2020. I do apologise, but this is where our story begins. So the team at Arqiva had rather fortuitously launched Microsoft Teams at the end of 2019.
And they planned to launch Yammer the following summer. But when everyone was sent home, they decided to make Yammer available early. And during the pandemic, it was buzzing.
You wouldn't have known it was launched in what I imagine must have been a bit of a panic. I wasn't actually working in 2020 because I had a son in January 2020. But yeah, I can't imagine that would have been a fun time to be working in comms.
And people, it was buzzing because people needed a way to connect when they were stuck at home. But then, tumbleweed. So between a reorg in 2021 and colleagues having the choice to come back to the office, Yammer slowly died off.
And a few people kept using it half-heartedly, but most people didn't know what it was or where to find it. They literally had no idea what it was. And now I'm talking about Viva Engage as well, because when I started last year and I asked people about it, there was blank faces.
It didn't survive because it had no clear owner and no purpose in our internal comms landscape. So I'm going to skip forward to last October, when I had a call with Tara Pollock. And Tara had just started as director of comms at Arqiva after a number of years at BT.
And one of the first things she recognised was that Arqiva's internal channels needed urgent attention. So it felt like there were too many of them. The purpose of many of them was unclear.
And there was also the matter of this flailing social network. Should we shut it down or should we resurrect it? So Tara brought me in to do the untangling. I put on my detective hat, made a cup of damn fine coffee or two, and got to work auditing the channels and talking to colleagues around the business.
So I figured out what we had, analysed the data and employee feedback to determine what was working and what wasn't working so well. So I identified a whole bunch of problems and then proposed a whole bunch of solutions. So one of my key findings was that only a fifth of people were listening to our CEO, Shuja, who's here on the screen, to his five-minute weekly podcast.
And 50% of those listeners were tending to drop off after a minute and a half. So the podcast, the way it worked is the podcast was uploaded to stream, and then it was shared by EA's and Each Function's Teams channel on every Monday morning. And they got almost zero engagement, even when Teams was specifically called out for the great work that they'd done.
So we'd also had feedback that it felt scripted, which it was. And it was just a huge shame because we're really lucky at Akiva to have a very charismatic and inspiring CEO. But people weren't engaging with the current format digitally.
So it was kind of all right when they met him in person, they'd give him feedback, but he's not everywhere. I can't be everywhere at once. So for the people who didn't have that kind of face-to-face with him and the rest of the leadership team, how could we encourage more genuine engagement with our digital platforms for our leaders? There you go.
Right. And then at the same time, although Microsoft Teams works very well for communication within a set group, so whether that's a function, a department, or a defined project team, and there's a bit of this in the benchmarking study as well, there's no visibility across the whole organisation. So you have to really know about a team's channel in order to take part.
And then if you think of the internet, it's mostly one-way communication. And that's a whole other thing that needs a bit more work on it as well. So there was really little opportunity for colleagues to share knowledge and insights outside of their known teams.
So I wanted to know how could we break down silos and increase that visibility? And one of our culture goals or values is around collaboration. So how could I help with that? So I could see from this that there was a huge opportunity to use Viva Engage, not shut it down, but to use it in a more intentional way and solve two problems. So I proposed that we launched with a dual purpose, or relaunched, I should say, because it was already there.
One, a place where colleagues could connect with each other outside of their known teams, and two, a place where leaders, including Shuja, could connect with us and listen to what's on our minds and engage in conversations. I'm just going to have a sip of my tea to help my throat, get to have a pause anyway, right. So with the decision made and thankfully signed off, there was work to be done before actually launching.
So I put in place two governance measures focused on how we'd manage our communities. Firstly, we cleaned up and planned our communities. So when people first, for some of them, for the first, most of them for the first time, I should say, clicked on Viva Engage when we launched, I wanted it to have a really clear offering and not just a bunch of communities that hadn't been posted in since 2021, 2022.
And to decide which ones to keep and which to delete, obviously, I looked at the data. At this point, we didn't have sweep, but I could just kind of see, you know, I went through manually, basically, and when did someone last post something. And I think we had, at that point, we had maybe about 60 communities.
I also made a plan about what sorts of communities we might need going forward. So for example, one about media and broadcast, and one about smart utilities network. So our two main service offerings, because, you know, people across the business are working across these two areas.
So it's important that we kind of had that available to everybody to be part of. And I also created a community for each of our main sites and offices, because that's always super helpful. But what I didn't want to do was delete a community that we would later need to recreate, because, I mean, for one thing, they already have members.
And so the way I went around kind of cleaning up was when a community still had a current employee as an admin, then I got in touch directly. And then I posted this post on all company to say, we were going to delete unwanted communities on a certain date and to get in touch if people wanted to keep them. And a few people did reach out.
So for them, I shared advice on resurrecting their communities. And we kind of thought tactics for doing that. And then I said, let's review it in a few months and see how it goes.
But ultimately, my colleague Sam and I deleted nearly all the existing communities, keeping a few key ones like our thank you community and inclusive Archiva. So that brings me on to the part two, which is the guidelines. So what do colleagues need to know in order to run their community successfully? And what did they need to think about before setting up a new community? So I created a set of Viva Engaged community admin responsibilities and a form which asks people to consider their audience objectives and how they stick to their responsibilities.
And I mean, there was some super helpful presentations from last year's Sweet Viva Engaged festival that I referred to when writing the responsibilities and moderation guidelines. So if you're in this stage at the moment, I really recommend referring back to those. So just sharing what the kind of main responsibilities are.
So on the SharePoint site, I go into a bit more detail, but ultimately this is what it boils down to. So number one, work in a team so it's not all on one person. Number two, make it presentable.
And it's not about making it look pretty for the hell of it. It's about making so people can quickly see if something's relevant to them or not. So here I give advice about the description and community info, character limits on that, pinned links, avatar, cover photo.
Do people always stick to it? No, they do not. We've got plenty of little avatars which are little photos instead of icons. But yeah, it just, it kind of helps.
It helps most people. Number three, keep it active. So simply asking people the question about how people would keep it active, which is something that's in the form, by the way, that gets them thinking about whether it's the right thing to create it or not when they actually seriously think about it rather than having this, oh, I've got a great idea for community for X, Y, Z. So I share a few ideas, including sweeps three, two, one rule.
So that's one post, well, you all know this, one post, two comments, three reactions. And then finally, you're the moderator. So community admins need to understand our acceptable use policy, which I rewrote in plain English.
And actually everybody, when they first go into Viva Engage, they have to accept it. And that links through to our social media guidelines, which I wouldn't expect everyone to read because they're a lot longer. But again, I went through that and tried to give it the plain English treatment.
And there were also some moderation guidelines that I created. And again, I appropriated a whole load of stuff from last year's Viva Engage festival. So if you want any more detail on any of this, I'm really happy to share it.
So just email me if you want that. So what did the relaunch actually look like? So last January and February were about creating that guidance and planning the community. So here's a screenshot from the FAQs on our intranet.
And then in February, I had my first meeting with Shuja to talk through his Viva Engage strategy. So he was already familiar with why we were launching as he'd signed off the channel strategy, but I wanted to know a bit more about his personal motivations when it came to social media and figure out the best way to work together to support him with posting regularly on Viva Engage. I advised that we use his storyline for his posts so that colleagues can follow him and get notifications in Teams because we also added the Viva Engage app to Teams towards the end of February.
Because if you post in a community, it has to be an announcement to get the notification. And if that ever changes at any point, let me know because that's how it feels, seems like it is at the moment. He shared a couple of posts in February, including a great icebreaker, asking people to share their halftime holiday pics.
And that just helped him get the hang of it and populate his storyline. Then on the 4th of March, he posted an announcement which went out to everybody and welcoming us back to Viva Engage and explaining that the info from his podcast would now be on Viva Engage and not in the podcast. And he'd also kind of built up to that in his last podcast the previous week.
We added a feed to his storyline on our intranet homepage, which is also our homepage and our new tab and everything on the web browser. And we also featured it in our weekly newsletter, which had recently been redesigned because that needed a bit more love as well. And for the first few weeks, I included a weekly tip of the week to help people learn how to use the platform and links to our FAQs.
I mean, one of the things is optimizing notifications, especially for people who are on call and on shift because they don't want a notification in the middle of the night from the CEO. It's bound to wake you up. So what happened? Well, I'm going to show you this tumbleweed data from the last three months, so September to November, 2023.
And then I'm going to show you the last previous three months. But really what I could see, I'd start with the data because it shows what I could see that people were discovering and using the network. So this time last year, we had 16% interactive users, 28% multi-group participation.
And then it's gone up and to 38% interactive users, 55% multi-group participation. And you can see we are far from a perfect network. We've got a lot more work to kind of go into it, to kind of get more people involved.
And there's a lot of other areas in SWOOP where we are not quite at the flag yet. But yeah, it's a big change from, if I just toggle back to how it was when there was no guidance at all. And what I don't show here is that it's people across the business.
We can see that from SWOOP as well, from operations to technology. And it's people across our three main groups of employees. Although with all our internal comms, people in service operations, so that's the people monitoring screens on shifts like that.
The engagement is always lowest for them across all of our internal channels, but that's a story for another day. And if anyone's got any tips on that, please do email me. So in July, I had an email from Pete and Nicole at Swoop to let me know that our network had ranked number one across Europe, Middle East and Africa, which is not too bad a resurrection from that tumbleweed.
And I'm just gonna talk here briefly just about the CEO side of things, because I realised that not everyone is lucky to have leaders that see the value in engaging employees this way. For some of you, it's a real hard slog to like show a lot of data and a lot of proof points to get there, if you can. But for us, as far as the kind of what happened part goes, it didn't take long for our CEO to see the effect that Viva Engage was having.
So he could see the 1,000 plus post views, the reactions, the comments, he could reply to questions on his posts and around the network. And I occasionally hear colleagues ask about bringing back his podcast, because of course it was helpful for some people who listened to it. And it came up in a Teams live Q&A in July.
And I sat there and I was kind of helping manage the event and I sort of held my breath. And I thought, is he going to change his mind and reinstate the podcast? But he said, no, he said, Viva Engage actually has four benefits over the podcast. So one, more viewers than listeners.
Two, and I quote, when I create the content, I get a response, people ask questions, there's more back and forth. Three, there's more spontaneity because it's in or near real time. And four, the effort to impact ratio is more effective for Viva Engage.
So this is all great recognition that we've set off in the right direction. And like I said, there's still loads of work to be done with supporting our leaders and helping nurture those communities. But, and also I'm kind of doing that, trying to balance all the other elements in my role as a channels manager and a part-time work schedule.
So it's not, yeah, it's not time to do everything at once, but I can see we've got a lot to aim for next year, which is exciting. Before I close off, I just want to talk about communities again to let you know how the governance measures are going in practice. So we've got 34 communities at the moment and not all of them are thriving.
So I've marked out a few that need some extra guidance and nudges over the next couple of months. Since we launched, I've deleted one community as it wasn't used and the owner agreed it could go. And that's actually one of the ones that he asked to keep from the initial lot, but actually it didn't really work out and that's fine.
I am really glad that we restrict access to creating communities and have a form that makes people think about what they want it to achieve. Because after initial conversations with some colleagues, it feels like actually it's not the best way forward. Their thing might be too niche.
And remember, there's only 1600 of us. We're not a big company. So sometimes we try an alternative like managing and joining forces with someone on an existing community, broadening that out slightly.
Sometimes it's campaign. So we've got an engineering hashtag, which again is a cross Archiva hashtag, or it might be subject matter experts using their storylines. So one example I can give you is also where I've had some pushback is around our people network.
So we're really lucky at Archiva. We've got a number of great people networks and some of these are private Viva engaged communities. So for example, there's a veterans network, which I see is quite active in sweep, although I can't see any of the detail because I'm not part of that community and it's private.
But other longer standing networks, like our working families network, they've got a thriving teams channel, as well as their Viva engaged community, which is barely used. And I think it's bad user experience because you might think the Viva engaged community that is visible is a networks only home and then you join it and then nothing really happens. And actually that's what I thought when I joined.
I didn't know about the teams side of it for a long time. And so I think in this instance, where we're talking about parents, I think the reason teams works better and I can relate to this is that even though that it's an internal platform, people still feel more comfortable sharing information and photos of their children in a closed network with other parents rather than sort of publicly to the whole company. So Viva engaged really, I'm struggling to see what a value that it's adding.
And I think it's actually kind of detrimental to have that as well. But I've had some pushback because there are some things I like to post on Viva engaged, but I think that actually, if you've got a cake sale happening in Crawley Court or a book sale, then post it in the Crawley Court group. Don't post, you know, there are other places on Viva engaged that are a bit better suited to it.
So once the internet page is up to date, because that's the kind of other piece in the puzzle about findability. Once that's up to date, I hope that I can convince my colleagues to close the community. But yeah, to conclude, there are nuances and I'm really not just going about deleting stuff that isn't performing because it's important for me to have that conversation about it.
So colleagues understand where I'm coming from and I understand where they're coming from. And actually, sometimes it's me who changes my mind and I'm fine with that. But I do aspire to be firm while building those strong relationships with my colleagues, because ultimately we've all got the same goal, which is to enable a thriving community of people.
So thank you for listening. I'm very happy to take questions. I'm not sure how quickly I rattled through that or how on time I am.
But yeah, if you don't get it in now, then please feel free to get in touch and email me. Helen, thank you. Even in your not 100% state, you have been absolutely spot on, bang on time.
We have a decent chunk of time now for some questions before our next session. And there's been a fair few questions in the chat, a couple on the Q&A. Just to kick things off, I'm going to start with the first question I'm looking at in the Q&A here, which is from Uta, who's asking, what do you think is the real turning point for increasing your audience? I'm thinking that's the audience engagement, the level of interaction in there.
What was the real turning point for increasing that? Was it a different layout? Was it more clarity around the strategy? Was it learnings from the past, from the first time, or more maturity in the social business media in your company? So what do you think were the key points? I mean, I think for us, it was more, it was not even, you couldn't even find it. People didn't even know where it was. So putting it into Teams made it really clear.
And then having that clear announcement with a clear purpose from the CEO was the kind of point where people were like, okay, we are using this. And for all the people who had been using it and kind of wanting to get more out of it, they, I mean, they're still there and they love it because now their messages aren't getting lost and other people are joining the conversations. But it's definitely, yeah, I suppose that was the turning point, but it's an ongoing thing.
I hope that helps answer. But it was just, it wasn't findable. Like it was not, it had no visibility.
Yeah, yeah. It's gotta be seen to be felt, right? Yeah. Another question that I noticed in the chat from, I think it was from Tasha, who asked a question around, what's your approach around email versus Viva Engage? Because you mentioned that you do an email news wrap-up message.
What's the approach around email versus Viva Engage? Yeah, so we, I mean, Viva Engage is still a, it's a voluntary channel still. We might rethink that in the future, but at the moment that's kind of how it is. So if anything important is posted on Viva Engage, and we've had a few wins in the utilities sector recently.
So they've been posted on there as announcements on all company, which should kind of reach everybody. But I've kind of re-popped that into the newsletter. So our newsletter goes out every Thursday.
And the way we kind of bill it is that if it's really important, if it's important information, it'll be on the hub. But also now we're kind of putting stuff that's important on Viva Engage as well, but then it's all going into Connected. And then Connected, we've got the sort of need to know section as well for anything that we really need.
Mostly that's actions for people. So yeah, does that kind of help? I mean, that is, yeah, that's a really important part of our kind of channels strategy in total. But Viva Engage is sort of, I didn't know, I didn't really know how we would use all company when we launched in March.
And over the course of this year, I kind of feel like we've got a bit of a better flow with it. And it feels a bit more clear, but I still haven't written that down. So, yeah.
Yeah, but I think one of the really important things that I pick up from you is, you know, there's nothing really set in stone, right? It's all about trying something with a purpose in mind. And then, you know, as a sort of customer, you're measuring things as you go, you're learning, you're adapting. And that I think is a really important thing, particularly in the modern digital comms landscape.
Like you're not making hard and fast decisions and sticking to them, irrespective of the experience. You're out there listening. It's really clear from what you've presented.
You're listening, you're assessing, you're looking at the data, you're getting insights and you're adapting as you go. There is a question that's very specific to SWOOP from Karen that says, did you have SWOOP to measure from the start of your relaunch? How did you convince management of its benefits? We didn't have SWOOP until July, but it's really helpful because you've got that two years of data beforehand. So that's how I could get that data from last year.
I mean, you can see, I mean, for Shuja, it felt like it was very simple, really. He can see the post views in Viva Engage and that was, you know, execs love vanity metrics, but it was still telling him something. Like when he found out that, you know, only a fifth of the business were actually listening to his podcast and that half of those were dropping off.
I think that was part of the proof point. So, but yeah, we were lucky that he could see the value in it before we went with it. And also that he's very up for trying things out and experimenting.
And I don't think everybody gets that in their leaders. So yeah, I think I'm probably not the best person right now to kind of give advice about convincing leaders who are a bit unsure. Although there are people in our executive committee who need a bit more handheld holding and kind of a bit more nudging.
And one in particular, who doesn't like to write his posts, but then he wrote one the other day and it was great. So I don't know, it's, yeah. Again, it's that adaptability thing, isn't it? Is so important, not forcing, not pushing against a closed door.
But I guess when you've got the SWOOP data and you can run some analysis on particular leaders, you don't need to convince all of them at once. You can just start with the open door and then use the data to build the case. Yeah, and that's what we did.
But it's been so helpful having SWOOP since then, because you can obviously benchmark your leaders and there's just so much that you can do. But we were fortunate that I didn't need it. I mean, I almost need, for us it needed to be the other way around because we had Viva Engage already.
So that was kind of free and SWOOP is obviously not free. So it was almost the other way around. Like we could see the value on what we were getting and we wanted to get more out of it.
So we kind of got the proof point and that helped for my argument for installing SWOOP. Yeah, nice. This has turned into a very good advert for SWOOP.
Thanks to the questions that we've had. A question's just come in from Anne around... Oh, sorry. It's from Petra.
There was a delay on my chat feed. Petra is saying, thank you so much, Helen. Do you help senior leaders with ghost publishing contentious? So there was a point where I hadn't written any of Shuja's posts and I remember my colleague, the employee branding manager being like, does he write his own posts? And I was like, yeah, he does.
Because I started when I sent him every week, I sent him suggestions of things that he can post about or comment on or someone to follow, et cetera. And I started out when I was doing that by drafting something and then he'd go and write his own thing and it was just miles better than what I could write. And then since then, there have been a couple of times where I ghost wrote something because it was kind of like a comms message or whatever.
And funnily enough, they didn't get much engagement. So I think that's a really good argument. And the executive that I was talking about before, many of his posts are ghost written.
I don't know, I don't really spend, I don't have time to kind of work one-on-one with everybody. So, or ongoing kind of work with them. So I haven't kind of analysed his posts and seen what is the most popular.
But yeah, I did notice that he wrote his own post, completely wrote his own post the other day. I had to check in with my colleagues to just double check. And personally, I thought it was much better written than anything.
Because they're leaders, they're charismatic. They can talk, they can write. So it is a shame when, I mean, we're comms people, we can obviously talk and write as well.
But like, it is still a shame when it's not their voice. So yeah, not much ex-publishing at all. And I would argue that, I would probably argue that I'd say, I really don't want to do this anymore, but I can't 100% say that I won't write a future post for Shuja because occasionally that happens.
And if that happens and it falls flat again, then it's more argument to not do it again. A question from Kate that's just come in. How granular is too granular with communities? We're a small service line within a wider global business.
Our community would be around 130 members. There are global belonging groups around hobbies, areas of expertise as part of the wider business. I worry about diluting our community by creating more than one within that wider mix, but also don't want to create a noisy space.
So this is like a classic community manager therapy question. If someone in your organisation came to you and said, you know, I want to start a new community, what would your advice be around the size of that community and what's going to work? Well, yeah, it's kind of, I've got this conversation next week with somebody in quite a small team and I need to, because I've not been well, I haven't had time to kind of prepare for it yet. So hence pushing it back to next week.
I just need to get as much information really from that person as I can about how they're going to keep it active. I mean, we're so small, like one of our most popular groups is the Lego group. There's actually only 40 members, but it's like often like the top group because it's a really active community.
Yeah, it's difficult. I mean, you just have to try things out, I think. I saw someone else posted a comment, something about like have a pet's community instead of dogs and a community and a cat's community.
And I think that's kind of the way I kind of think about it. Like if there's a way that we can group things together, then let's do it. And then for us, actually, if it's really something that's very niche, for example, we've got my colleague who does career mobility.
I kind of feel like for her or the person who does benefits, I feel like for them and I've advised and we'll see how it goes and maybe we'll change tactic next year. But for them, they're building up their storyline instead because it's kind of one obvious subject matter expert. But yeah, it's kind of difficult to... I just try a few different things out and then you can always, when you close a community, you can always move the posts over anyway.
So yeah, a bit of admin. That's a great note to end on, I think, which is just give stuff a try and see where it goes. Yeah.
Thanks so much. Really appreciate the story you've shared. Congratulations on what you've achieved with reinvigorating our Viva Engage community.
It's quite phenomenal, the impact that it's had and really having the purpose being at the core of that. So thank you so much for sharing your story. Thanks for having me.
Meet the speaker:
Helen Nias
Digital Communications & Channels Manager
Arqiva
