Manchester Airports Group: Connecting our people through community
EMEA | Viva Engage Festival 2023
Hear the story of how Manchester Airports Group launched Viva Engage and made it THE place to create communities, build a sense of belonging and showcase human stories across the organisation.
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It is a pleasure to invite Jacqueline, or Jax, I think you prefer to go by, to share her story of launching Viva Engage at Manchester Airports Group and connecting people through community. So in the interest of time, I'll just stop talking and say Jax, feel free to jump off mute, share screen and share your story. Hello, okay, two seconds.
Always a test this bit isn't it? Hopefully everybody can see the slides, I'm guessing. Yeah, brilliant. And it's been really interesting actually sitting and listening to those, to Freya's presentation and actually what Regina said about connecting colleagues and one of our values is people at our core and so actually our strapline apart from conversation, you'll see some straplines we used around conversation, but it's connecting people through community.
So I think she's spot on with that description and the power of Viva Engage for us. I also feel like I need to do a quick nod to Freya because I feel so far, we've been much luckier to not have those quite significant challenges that I think she's had around content moderation. But I'm going to share the story that we've had at Manchester Airports Group, how we rolled Viva Engage and got it to the stage that we're at now.
When I did this presentation, put the deck together, we were six weeks in, so we're probably about eight weeks now and hopefully it will inspire people and totally open to questions. So let me make sure my mouse is on the right screen. So this is where we started and this isn't our first go.
So Yammer, as it was formerly known, was in the business for about four years. I've been with MAG nearly five years and it was the first project that I was given really to embed within our colleague culture and it was really sort of hit and miss and it was very slow trickle and very slow adoption and rolling it out as a purposeful, committed communication channel, engagement channel, was something that made at that point in the business quite nervous and I've seen some of the chat about moderation and what if somebody puts something that isn't appropriate and for all of those reasons the business was at that stage quite resistant and nervous. So I sort of never got off the ground, it was almost like two steps forward, three steps back with every conversation.
We're going to go, we're going to go, we're going to go, oh no we're not, we're going to stop because there's nervousness. So I took a different approach this time. I took a step back to really look at our landscape and thought this is the time that we need to do it.
Yammer is moving over to Viva. What is it that's been our blockers and what can I do to achieve success this time for us that it's really embraced and it provides that value that everybody's looking for. With three airports it is a complex, fast business.
We have 500 leadership population, we have over 6,000 colleagues overall. I looked at the glint, we work with glint so you'll have people surveys and really thinking about what are the key things coming out of those surveys. It's important to the business that we can then connect to where Engage can have a part in that.
So increasing engagement overall and particularly giving colleagues voices and I'll come to that in a little bit. Leadership and closing that gap, bridging that gap between conversations that might never normally happen and really that personalisation of leaders that they become more human and more accessible to people of all levels and very much that people at our call are creating that sense of belonging which as you'll see through some of the posts that I'm going to share is very clear that we have that at MAG but seeing it on the scale that Viva allows that everybody can see it rather than people in that one singular moment has been magnificent for us. I really did my research, I thought about each of those stakeholder groups and who I needed to get the buy-in to make this a success and enable it and for it to sort of grow its own legs and become agile and so I took more time than I had done previously to understand that and understand the pictures and presentations I need to make that was going to tick those boxes for people and absolutely recruiting allies and this isn't just about doing that pledge of let's go out and find some champions but it's about finding them at all levels.
So we have Xco which is sort of C-suite and then we have minus one minus two plus our operational colleagues so thinking about each of them and I call them influencers rather than champions I thought it was much more appropriate for the channel and I thought certainly with people coming in who love social media they'll connect with it more and it will feel more prestigious to them and so for me I felt champion was a bit dated for us and that's what we've gone with. This I'm not going to spend too much time on but it very much talks about almost a layer down from that slide that I've just gone through and using words that were familiar to us as a business that our leaders could connect with they made sense to them so thinking about the language that we're using when we're doing those pitches and those initial comms and why the power of Eva and what it will enable within the business and this is really the key point of starting so if you're going to do a screenshot I know we're sharing slides afterwards but this is a screenshot to take it's my wing it plan always love a good pun at mag we use the word landed a lot let's land it and let's take off with success and so the wing it plan is learning from so what I say my mistakes in the past but maybe where I've been running at too fast a pace and I'm not taking that step back actually if I let's throw some puns in there if I'm packing my suitcase and planning my route then this is my my 10-stop plan where which is gonna be be that grounding where I can move it around and tailor it and that's that is what I hope it might be useful to you so I'm going to run through each of these as we go through. I'm an apology I'm going at pace because I know that we've got a time slot so talking very quickly and so we talked a bit already about identifying those stakeholders and getting the buy-in and and this was really important to me so there's a couple of stats I really sort of I don't want to say through our our C3 and our our next levels around leadership population but saying communicated with with strong commitment and intentionality to be very clear that the are we have operational colleagues and we have leadership desk pace colleagues but only around 50 of those colleagues are reading email so I guess that means our desk space are probably our operational aren't so we're paying for these licenses from Microsoft but they're not in the habit of of saying oh I wonder what emails I've got today I must check my inbox and and that is not their habit of their day but what they are used to and bringing our leadership population on this understanding they are used to digital grading they used to in the evening whilst they're watching Corrie or waiting for the kettle to boil or if they're commuting to and from work they are used to digital grading or when they're like me and their kids talking about who's falling out with who at school and well my hubby's got the football on I'm digital grading and that's how we can communicate with our colleagues and best reach them on a platform that works for that most familiar it's comfortable it's less formal and it allows a conversation because at the moment what they're doing is we're saying here's this really strong formal email with all of these big long words somebody that you've never met before that you're probably never going to speak to and by the way if you've got a query here's that here's a nameless inbox that you can go reply to but we're not going to have proper conversation we'll just send you a three-word email back and and suddenly actually what we're doing is we're breaking all those barriers and we're all same and we're all having these conversations I linked it to the glim which I thought was really really important because mag is very much on where are we at what do we need to improve and we do colleague briefings and half yearly where we stand in front of our people and we say this is what you asked for and this is what you delivered so how are we going to deliver that well viva is going to enable that viva engage and then I use microsoft I spoke to other people I got some other stats and for me the most powerful of the two on the depending on which way you're looking at the screen the two on the right we invest millions in business change transformation I don't know if anybody's been particularly at Manchester Airport we've got the incredible terminal two transformation stance has just been improved approved for an extension and we need colleagues to go at that pace and feel they're part of the journey and again sending emails and hoping they're on that track just isn't our best effort but using viva and bringing them with and doing listening groups and talking to them about trials in the moment and recognizing those brilliant people on the ground that are part of it is what will enable them to just adapt really quickly to that level of business change and for our finance people having that stat around the the facts that and the financial targets and and how this links and certainly our latest presentations for colleague briefings is about exit not not just delivering good service but actually those magical moments when a passenger's walking through and how do we go above and beyond to change somebody's day in a moment and that links to financial targets and it links to happy passengers happy third parties or allies or shop owners or retail so all of that was really really important to get that buy-in the other thing we didn't do and I'll go through the structure but we didn't ask permission so previously I had definitely said is this okay you happy for us to proceed we didn't use that language we just said um we want to present our strategy as we're progressing with viva engagement it'll be going live on the 13th of September it wasn't a question it was a commitment that this is part of our strategy we're going with it we'd love to converse with you and answer any questions that you have but we really want you on the journey and we're going to show you the value it's going to bring to your communications and engagement it was a totally flipped approach and it worked so we looked at the current structure and we engaged with people that had quietly been on yammer and it'd been working for them and talked about what might work better we looked at what other companies were doing I thought this was really interesting that Freya was saying where people write content for right community all company was like a junkyard it was just spam a lot um and so all company we have changed to um we change it now that it's just all that content we were sending through those company emails is now unless it's something really formal that needs to get financial results would be an email company structure would be an email but pretty much everything else now is in all company so our c-suite and internal comms posts on all company but we invite questions we say what do you think of this let us know we're here to talk and and certainly ed and i as well big events that we're doing around 89 all going all company and journey makers is an internal phrase an internal brand that we use about our journeys here at mag but we now have a different airport for each community really important because somebody in stansted probably most primarily does not really want to know about east midlands and Manchester airport so we we sign people up automatically to all company and then the airport they're physically located in they they are all open communities so they can join the other communities if they want to be connected to all three but it's a personal choice we also have 365 tips and tricks which i love it's great to sign post people to that one leadership and high performance i've not created these my own a lot of community managers have done them um our crgs we have a women's network we have embrace network flowery pride mental health parenting holiday tips because we're in airports so why not buy and sell and the veterans one is is one of my proudest and again it links to something that frayer said and we haven't yet had to remove any comments and it's and it's not the approach that we want to really take if we were forced into that situation we'd address it what happened with our forces day last year or earlier this year is that we missed it it wasn't on our comms calendar nobody brought it to our attention and we didn't do anything for our chaplaincy we haven't we have an in-house chaplaincy and also we weren't aware of it through them so somebody quite annoyed quite frustrated went on all company to share with our entire business because we hadn't done this by then how frustrated and hurt they were that we hadn't acknowledged armed forces day and all and they were an ex-veteran and they had given their time to our country and we hadn't acknowledged that and it was quite vocal quite frustrated um and and verged on inappropriate but it was on that borderline and somebody said have you seen i said i've seen it what are you going to do about it i'm gonna wait i'll wait and see what happens next one person who was obviously his mate so they'd obviously discussed it he pasted it and that person commented again totally agree it's ridiculous they do all of this for ed and i and why aren't they doing it for veterans and then i carried on waiting and everybody said aren't you going to edit it are you to put something no i'm going to give it half an hour an hour so i did okay i went had a coffee i came back and no one else commented so then i leaned in i did have a chat with people partner and i said this is what i think i'm going to put are you happy with it so we were collaborated so people would come but the people team were comfortable with it and then i said thank you so much for sharing this and i'm so sorry that we missed it i really thought i've taken time to think about your post and um we would love to organize a committee like we have our crgs for ed and i we'd love a veterans committee we'd love for you to lead that with us would anybody else on here like to join that and help us plan on forces day for 2024 and we have armistice day coming up and we'd love to get these communities at each of our airports so you feel acknowledged heard and part of our communities it's now got around 100 veterans they were part of our armistice plans and we're now planning for armed forces and the difference it's made and the amount of content they are posting of when the where they were based and what they were doing and their pictures and sharing memories is phenomenal and i'm super proud that that came out of somebody that posted something quite virgin gone aggressive and delicate and made people panic and i think had that happened had we done this earlier and i and had we not done it with the approach that we did it this time around it would have been deleted and then there would have been an email from the people team to remind them of the policy and it would have been a different approach and i totally get with Freya's it feels a more contentious work environment but for mac it was the first time and it worked well with that approach so we did the briefings we did in-person briefings and on teams briefings and i was really pleased that the majority of our leaders turned up for the briefing so we had about 100 people each time and as i said we were asking for i had that email ready to go so the minute i finished the last briefing i won the email to all of our colleagues to say we're launching beaver just to let you know so there was no going back at that point and it was really important to me to not that breathing space for anyone to say oh hang on a second let's let's take a moment we didn't we were committed we were on the journey we talk about being on the blue train if you don't break through we were on the blue train we were off we were going um and then we recruited influencers and we did the same sessions with them to get their buy-in so five six seven on our wing it plan is about creative engagement and how it looks exciting those team briefings in-person events we did pop-up events going into the terminals to speak to colleagues in their areas and we put lots of content on our intranet about how to engage i've got still got hot too but it should be how to and faqs and videos and and this is a game which is slightly different probably quite a bit different than what Freya did but acceptable use and personal device policy i put it at number seven the reason viva never launched before when it was yammer as an official comms channel with my opinion at mag is because it was number one on the plan before it was the first thing we all discussed and that's why it didn't happen be it number seven we approached it in a calmer conversation so actually it was it was it was with our compliance team our gdpr team and our policy team and it was it was about what do we have in place and how is this different to anything else in terms of code of conduct so i'll show you what we did and personal device as well so this is we talked about approaches enabling how people can access it be it through the team's platform the web platform downloading the app we we educated everybody on all the different accesses here's what our intranet looked like with questions interactive questions and then we had digital screens go up so we explained what viva engaged was in short and joined the conversation and then we just had that real impact screen and they pulsed as well which was quite nice and for acceptable use we did have community managers and they are all leadership population level and this is what the only thing that we pushed out around acceptable use and then we linked to our acceptable use policy which was already in place because it talks about your conduct and it talks about your conduct on email and in person and on social media already so we didn't create anything new we utilized what we had and we said it applies and we said speak to people online how you would speak to them in person and you are a mag employee in a mag space and that was as much as we have indulged it it is there it's like touch and if we need to do more we will address it as we as we grow and so finally it was about bringing our leaders onto this journey and moving them from that habit of email oh I get that we've moved away from email and we're using viva but not for my stuff right my stuff will still go by email because my stuff's really important and having those conversations and being firm and then showing them the benefits of moving over and layering our different comms channels and when they get that interaction that's when they see the benefit and then also allowing teaching them about right channel for right comms and allowing the space for the communities to grow and this is how our communities have grown and so this is something that one of our security officers in Manchester posted and this is when I talked about those moments that nobody else would really know a passenger collapse it is really sad and he responded and he called emergency services and he stayed with that passenger in that time nobody would have known but the family came back in and they left a letter for that that Philip who helped not only did he post it but our managing director Chris Woodruff of Manchester Airport saw that post which he might have just he might have known somebody might have told him in previous viva world and he'd have just gone that's wonderful could you know that's wonderful we appreciate it actually in this situation because we have either he responded directly not only did he say Philip this is incredible but he shared his own personal experience of a family loss that he'd had very recently and how much that would have meant he understands how much that would have meant to the family and having that connection from an MD to somebody on the shop floor was so nice and you can see it was seen by 798 people saw that interaction and saw that person connected with that story we have Rob Sawyer who constantly shares all the old makes us feel super old of all the old pictures at the airport we celebrate Diwali so everybody shared their Diwali pictures our mental health group do lunchtime walks so they do updates in each airport community and if people want to go black history month we had steel bands I'm office based and if you're like me rarely leave my desk it was great to see and feel part of that energy that was going on in our terminals and I would not have known about it did we not have viva engage and my favourite is lego phil so not only is phil a brilliant security officer but we now have this thing with lego phil lego phil post when he's walking in the hills and lego phil does have now md chris has his own lego chris and it's become this phenomenon that people following on viva engage and and we we love lego phil and his adventures the stats are really important stuff because I know I'm running over it a few minutes and the proof is in the pudding I did try and come up with a flight one for this I just couldn't think about it but we're six weeks in and these were the stats at six weeks in so if you look at when we were ticking over we yammer 32% up on active users 300% up on our activity counts per month and 750 I hope my maths is right 750% up on our reaction counts even if my maths is wrong and my percentages I would say that just looking at the figures we've gone up so substantially it is more used than than email we we're not abandoning email but it's just understanding the power of each and actually how you layer and reduce reduce some copy and make it more personalized going forward it's really about continuing those conversations and embedding it using the data and looking at the data to inform and I think for us that's where we get that increased buy-in from our leadership so that they are using it and they continue to use it which they are and empowering those voices you know there's a real hand on shoulder approach when you meet people wherever they are and say oh my god have you seen it on Viva and taking that five minutes to show them and I did that with a frontline colleague that I met last week and evolving it so we're really looking now at Viva connections as our evolution and increasing what we do with influencers so when I have a leader come to me and say I've got this campaign and can you promote it as comms I go do you know what I've got a team of fantastic influencers let me add you to their community on Viva if you post on Viva they will amplify that message to to their populations and they're your sales team and and so we're looking at the content we're looking how to use those influencers so they feel valued and special and leaders see their value and that's everything so I'm sorry I've gone over but hopefully it's useful now Jax that's that's fantastic thank you so much for for sharing your story the the chat has been buzzing away we've got three minutes I'm gonna I'm gonna jump in and take a question from the Q&A and put that to you from Jutta who's asked you know it what does internal comms then use the intranet for do you still have one you've mentioned you do still have one but how does that work in the channel landscape now I feel that an intranet or certainly for us intranet is more of a library resource so it's it's we will still post news there so you have static news articles and people can comment but they don't tend to and it's where those fuller articles so a really good example is we're doing something called GIFmas where we're asking for donations for our local community the big article with all the information you need to know is on the intranet we would have normally sent an email so the approach that we have this time massive article then we have a post in each airport to say what is going on about GIFmas in your local airport and how can you get involved and hear and ask us any questions with your community members and then the only email that goes out is on a Friday normally on a Friday each airport has an email from their MD that goes to all their people and it's got small articles so we have a very small article and again it would have normally gone to just the intranet story so again no interaction so now we go if you've got any questions you want to connect with our community manager click here to the viva engage post and if you want the full details you can find them here on we call it magna so it still has a part to play but it's it goes back to that redefining your channels um and and making them enabling them to complement each other that's a really nice way to put it i think yeah um in the last minute i actually just want to share a comment that's coming and get your thoughts on this so there's a comment in the chat rather than really a question around someone who's shared that they have a uh a vp i think who is very anti non-work i can't actually read it in the chat because the chat's gone nuts but ah here we go svp of corporate comms is strictly against any extra professional communities apart from arguing in terms of adoption ie taking the first steps on engage what other reasonings would there be inclusion diversity so from your perspective if you've got a leader who's against we you know we can't have this non-business activity what's your response to that um i think that it's really difficult because i think they see the value almost once it's going we definitely had leaders that didn't lean in to begin with in launch and what they've done is they've seen the others and they've seen the value so again that's not if that if that is the person that is going to say no you can't no you can't do it then um i totally happy to have a longer discussion about an approach that might work for you and things that work for us because i've had those conversations but if he's one of several and he he or she is not not on on that blue train then then let them sit where they are that's okay and go with the others um the the we had a brilliant leader the one that did that high performance that's the leader who absolutely believes in this and he when i was doing those presentations at the really first stage talking about this is what we're doing we're going to launch we want you to be part of it he then i knew he was super keen for us to launch it so i said any other comments and he goes oh i said oh we've got a question for Pete surprise and then Pete said oh hi jack thanks so much for letting me speak i actually don't have a question i just wanted to say i think this is brilliant i can't wait to use this um and i've already thought about some communities i'm going to launch so having the influences at that level and then if those don't want to come they can just sit on the sidelines and watch because that interaction between and Manchester and philip and the power that that did is is incredible and when you align that with those stats about financial performance business change people staying in the business people referring people to so all the money and i hope nobody's on here that's a recruitment consultant that gets upset with me but all the money that you spend on recruitment consultants actually if you think about refer a friend initiatives and what you could say if your people are super happy connected feel involved want to be there feel valued and then go off and and recruit for you like is that not a reason good response great point it's the comment that's just popped in the chat as i said that phrase so yeah thanks Jax fantastic presentation.
Meet the speakers:
Jacqueline Shalks-White
Internal Communications and Engagement Partner
Manchester Airports Group
