Hong Kong company launches Viva Engage and consolidates 85 Yammer networks across 5,000 employees
Our client is a Hong Kong-based supply chain management company that is the “go-to source” for apparel, toys, and other consumer goods manufacturing for western brands and retailers.
Client
Withheld
Industry
Manufacturing
Organisation Size
Medium
Country
Hong Kong
Technologies
Viva Engage, Microsoft Teams, Power Automate
Context
Communication is key for employee engagement, but too much of anything can also be a hindrance. Our client had previously dabbled in Yammer (as it was known then), at their own organisation, their sister companies, and across individual employees, resulting in a Microsoft tenant that housed 85 Yammer networks. This caused siloed communication lines and an organisation that was not engaged, despite there being no shortage of information being shared.
Engage Squared were delighted to consolidate these Yammer networks into a single network and prepare them to launch Viva Engage to 5,000 employees.
The challenge
Enterprise social networks are crucial for connecting workforces, big or small. Whether the updates are organisational or there are personal announcements, they help employees feel connected and informed – without clogging up their email folder.
Our client recognised the importance of having a social network for their employees to connect, share and engage and were early adopters of Yammer. However as early adopters, and with no strategy in place, 85 Yammer networks sprung up across the multiple companies within the wider group, as well as individual networks created when Yammer first launched. Whilst it was positive that employees were so interested in engaging online, having so many networks caused siloed communications streams and a lack of clarity about officially supported channels, meaning information was getting lost and not always reaching the right people at the right time. In turn, this made employees feel less connected and caused extra work for organisational updates to be shared across multiple networks.
In addition to social communication, they had also taken to running video calls across their organisation to keep their thousands of employees updated. However, given the number of those attending, the connection often failed, and the experience did not encourage attendance. They needed a tool to cater for their 5,000 employees.
With an investment in M365 already in place, our client wanted to move their legacy Yammer networks into a single network in Native Mode and launch Viva Engage, as well as and run large scale meetings through the Live Events functionality through Microsoft Teams.
Our solution
To begin this project, we started with a requirements workshop to understand the overall objectives our client wanted to achieve by migrating their 85 Yammer networks and launched Viva Engage. It was evident that communication was not the problem but surfacing the communication across a single social network was. Simply launching a new network would result in a loss of information and would likely cause issues along the way with links lost and communication lines broken.
From here we were able to identify that workflows built on Power Automate were needed to help them manage their community. This included automated reporting and auto-enrolment of new employees into nominated company communities on Viva Engage.
Engage Squared supported every step of the process of consolidating 85 networks into 1, in the move to Native Mode, set up 9 communities – each now able to natively support Live Events for large video conferencing – and added membership to each as defined by the client and supported the client in deploying the workflows we developed.
We supported the launch of Viva Engage and user education by:
- Running four end user training sessions
- Running a training session for Community Managers
- Delivering training decks
- Producing Viva Engage best practice guides
- Producing workflows admin guide, as well as guides for the IT team to bulk managing users in AAD
The result
Launching Viva Engage has been met with nothing but praise from our client. Employees now feel empowered on where to share updates and communication across the business has increased with 90% of users active.
Other key results include:
- The migration and consolidation of 85 Yammer networks into a single Viva Engage network.
- 4,500 active users since Viva Engage launched.
- Access to enhanced compliance features across all communities within the Viva Engage network.
- Access to Live Events across all communities within the Viva Engage network.
- 16 communities created with a consistent approach and a good user experience.
- Improved user experience.
- Workflows supporting enhanced, automated reporting via email and managing auto-enrolment of new users into nominated communities and sending them a welcome message via MS Teams.
