Westpac New Zealand - Authenticity, fun and informality: a recipe for Viva Engage leadership success
Every time a new Executive Team member joins the ranks of Westpac New Zealand, they’re also introduced to the organisation via Viva Engage.
This is no usual biography featuring a corporate photo and listing the manager’s career history and hobbies. Instead, the camera is rolling, and the new executive is asked random questions, literally pulled from a jar. Things like: “Do you prefer Vegemite or Marmite?”, “Are you a dog person or cat person?" and “Would you prefer a holiday visiting museums or drinking cocktails by the pool?”
Fiona Roberts, Senior Digital Engagement Manager, Westpac New Zealand.
“How many times have you worked somewhere where a new starter is introduced with the standard ‘Welcome to Jane. Jane is married and has three kids and outside of work she likes yoga and painting’,” said Fiona Roberts, Senior Digital Engagement Manager at Westpac New Zealand.
“That feels very formulaic, and it doesn’t tell you anything about the person. So, we give our Executive Team some random questions, including some funny ones, to allow their personality to shine.”
Fiona said this approach was influenced by short-form video content often seen on TikTok or Instagram. It’s more casual, and a deliberate move away from formal corporate videos.
“These videos go straight to Viva Engage and people love them,” Fiona said.
A screenshot of a Viva Engage post with a live video introducing Westpac New Zealand’s Chief Financial Officer Tania O’Brien by asking her a series of random questions.
“We’ve had a lot of really good anecdotal and survey-related feedback that staff prefer communication that’s a little bit more authentic, and not too polished. They don’t want to see corporate spin.”
These types of videos interacting with general managers at the bank are not a one-off at Westpac New Zealand. In fact, they’re a great introduction for new leaders to the culture of interacting on Viva Engage at Westpac New Zealand.
Led by leaders
Most of the Executive Team at Westpac New Zealand now have their own Viva Engage community where they post at least once a week. Everyone in their departmental teams are members of the community, and throughout the week, leaders scroll through their communities to listen to conversations, react to posts, tag in colleagues, and contribute comments.
There’s some friendly (and sometimes a little fierce) competition between leaders to see where they rank on Westpac New Zealand’s Influential People list on SWOOP Analytics for Viva Engage. The competition started last year when Chief Information Officer Russell Jones was ranked outside the top 100 influencers on the bank’s Viva Engage network, and a month later he had shot to No.2!
Russell came from nowhere to take a top spot on the influencers’ list (of more than 6,400 employees) simply by posting on Viva Engage once a week and taking a few minutes from his busy schedule to respond and react to other people’s posts.
A Viva Engage post from Reuben Tucker, Managing Director, Institutional & Business Banking, at Westpac New Zealand, sharing an informal photo from his day.
He is not on Viva Engage every day, but he does make an effort to post at least once a week with an update about what he’s been doing, to recognise the great work of his team, to call out service anniversaries, or share some thoughts. Importantly, he also replies to comments, reacts or responds to other posts when he can – a true indication he is listening to employees - and tags colleagues into posts. Read more about how Russell became an influencer in a month.
Proud of his impact, Russell has encouraged his fellow leaders to do the same. In fact, he shared his story to the Executive Team, which Fiona said resulted in an “avalanche” of GMs coming to the Internal Communications team asking for their own Viva Engage communities.
Fiona and her team do a monthly report benchmarking leaders’ activities, including top posts and influencers, on Viva Engage using data from SWOOP Analytics. This report is shared with the Executive Team. She said it works as a positive catalyst to encourage leaders to lift their game when it comes to connecting with colleagues on Viva Engage.
Ask Me Anything
In the past financial year, three of the top 10 most Influential People across the entire Westpac New Zealand network have been members of the Executive Team. The Most Engaging Post for the year also belongs to an Executive Team member who held an Ask Me Anything session on Viva Engage.
Helen Ryder, Managing Director, Consumer Banking & Wealth at Westpac New Zealand knows the value of connecting with her people. It’s especially important in her business, which is geographically spread. As part of her responsibilities, she looks after more than 100 branches from the top of New Zealand’s North Island to the bottom of the South Island. So, the diversity of her people and their locations is one of the main reasons she is so keen on using Viva Engage.
A screenshot of Helen Ryder’s Ask Me Anything Viva Engage kick-off post.
“If you look at Helen, she’s particularly astute at understanding what good leadership looks like, and that Viva Engage is a key component of enabling that, through regularly being able to talk to, and hear from, her people and get them on board with new initiatives and ideas,” Fiona said.
“She does an excellent job of communicating with her people, who may not see her very often in person, but she makes them feel included and part of something bigger.”
Fiona said Helen’s Ask Me Anything session was completely in her own words and unscripted, albeit carefully planned. She opened the conversation with a Viva Engage post asking colleagues to hit her up with questions.
A screenshot from SWOOP Analytics for Viva Engage showing Helen’s Ask Me Anything post as the Most Engaging Post for the 2023/24 financial year across Westpac New Zealand’s Viva Engage network.
Even though the Ask Me Anything session was eventually “closed”, months later questions still come trickling in. It’s one of the ongoing benefits of Viva Engage – it allows everyone time to ponder their question, or dwell on a response, and follow up with more questions.
Equality for all in a safe space
Fiona said Viva Engage has become a safe space at Westpac New Zealand where everyone is encouraged to share their voice, and everyone has an equal say. There are also communities to allow people from similar cultural and language backgrounds to connect.
“We’ve got people from a vast variety of cultural backgrounds and for some of them English is not their first language, or culturally the way they communicate may differ,” she said.
“We have Māori and Pacific Island employees, for example, who want to communicate in their own language. We’ve got people who are neurodiverse.
“Viva Engage is that safe place where you’re not on camera, you’re not front and centre, but you can ask anything you want and it’s a really open and accepting place, accepting of people from every possible background. Two-way communication really helps break down barriers.”
“It’s the great leveller because ultimately Viva Engage is just the tool set which enables everyone to meet and come together.”
Bringing the fun to work
Westpac New Zealand’s Viva Engage network was ranked No.2 in SWOOP Analytics’ 2024/25 global benchmarking of 70 organisations. The bank has consistently ranked in the top three organisations in SWOOP Analytics’ annual benchmarking analysis over the past five years. This ranking takes into account the performance of every community across an organisation’s entire Viva Engage network – the high performing communities, as well as the lower performing communities.
What was surprising in this year’s analysis was three of the top four ranked enterprises benchmarked globally were all based in New Zealand. We also ranked 3,751 individual communities based on measures for participation, people-to-people engagement, sentiment, growth, responsiveness, and innovation. A quarter of the top 20 ranked communities were also New Zealand based! These came from a range or organisations.
It was a result that didn’t surprise Fiona.
“I think when I compare our work to other organisations or countries I’ve worked in, the videos I’ve made here (in New Zealand) are more informal, chatty, and fun,” Fiona said.
“We really push the boundaries sometimes. Some of the highest engagement we get is with our Executive Team who open up, have some fun and just be themselves.”
She said “not taking ourselves too seriously” is something Kiwis do particularly well.
A screenshot of a fun post on Viva Engage.
“I think New Zealanders can be quite casual. That doesn’t mean we’re not professional, but we can lean to the informal where it lends itself to that,” Fiona said.
“We’re informal in the way that we dress, meaning we (mostly) don’t wear suits to work anymore, and we’re informal in the way that we talk to each other.
“But I don’t think it’s just us, I’ve noticed a real casualisation of communication globally, likely influenced by social media. Here at Westpac, in amongst our professional day-to-day work, we like to have a lot of fun as well.”
Fiona told how the consumer banking arm of the business did a virtual tour of the country, with each physical bank branch posting on Viva Engage with a quirky meme or funny video or photo. When the latest season of the Netflix series Bridgerton was released, based on the books by Julia Quinn, one branch created a clever post, superimposing their own faces on Bridgerton characters’ faces.
“It was hilarious; the teams had so much fun doing it, and we had a lot of fun reporting on it,” Fiona said of the virtual road trip.
“When people come to work, my feeling is that they want to be motivated, energised and engaged but in a genuine way - they don’t want what they perceive to be old-fashioned corporate spin.”
Regular governance guided by analytics
It’s no fluke Westpac New Zealand regularly ranks as one of the top performing Viva Engage networks in the world. Every six months, Fiona does a regular check of poorly performing communities across the network, as identified by SWOOP Analytics, and culls them if there is no longer a purpose for them, or she reaches out to the community admins to offer one-on-one coaching.
“If someone’s got a serious community topic they want to keep going, we’ll do a one-on-one with them to review what’s going wrong in that community and get it back on track. But it doesn’t end there, support needs to be ongoing,” Fiona said.
“We encourage them to use regular analytics from SWOOP to say; ‘Where are we at? What else do we need to do?”
Fiona admits a successful Viva Engage community does not survive without work and analytics.
“It does take quite a bit of work. You can’t just set up a community and let it run,” she said.
