Published 26 September 2022
Each year Engage Squared holds an annual retreat and this year we were spoilt when the Australian and New Zealand teams got together on the Gold Coast. With hybrid and remote working now part of everyday life, our company get-togethers are a fantastic way to reconnect.
There’s the ‘work’ part of course, as we re-grouped on our business strategy and attended workshops ran by senior leaders. And then, there’s the ‘fun’ part. A chance for everyone to let their hair down with those they are familiar with and bond with newer members of the team.
However, no retreat is complete without our employee value awards, affectionately known as ‘The Monkies’ – a nod to our CEO, Stephen Monk. Our awards celebrate our people and projects from the past 12 months and are aligned to the values of Engage Squared. All awards are voted for by our employees.
This year we set sail to celebrate our awards night and enjoyed a wonderful evening by reflecting on past projects and celebrating our people. Below is a recap of our winners and why they were voted top of their game.
The most impactful large project award
Finalist: Digital Workplace Strategy for healthcare
Finalist: Multi-lingual intranet for multi-national engineering firm
Winner: Briefing Management Platform, Vic Gov
The Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet matters were previously managed in person, through a time intensive, paper-based briefing system, which lacked the required transparency to manage and report on briefing statuses and negatively impacted the environment. With urgent briefs and correspondence, including Covid-19 specific matters, crucial to be approved and heard in a timely manner, it was critical for Victorians that this briefing system was upgraded to a modern digital platform.
Over a 12month period, our team of experts developed an end-to-end digital workflow solution to manage departmental briefing, correspondence, and parliamentary records and deliver a digital briefing platform known as ‘ABC’.
ABC received glowing feedback from the department and was awarded the ‘Service Design’ award at the Victorian Premier’s Design Awards.
Read the full impact ABC had to the department in this case study.
The most impactful small project award
Finalist: Viva Insights and Employee Wellbeing for NSW government agency
Finalist: Viva Connections deployment for 6,000 frontline staff
Winner: Extranet for 2,000 transport staff
Our client’s old extranet was a much-used portal, used to surface informative documents as well as sharing announcements, services changes, rail safety, engineering standards and more to its 2000+ employees. However, it wasn’t without its issues, as information was difficult to access and slow to update with high technical debt. With its end-of-life approaching, our client required a new solution.
Engage Squared worked closely with our client’s IT department and document controllers to understand their business processes and specific needs. Engage Squared proposed an unconventional solution and over a 6-month period developed an extranet built on Power Apps that was scalable, faster, and less reliant on our client to manage with login capabilities available across different platforms.
Once deployed, positive feedback was felt across the organisation with employee engagement and efficiency improving. A key benefit of this solution included enabling document controllers to control which documents uploaded into their SharePoint environment were automatically surfaced onto the extranet for the first time, saving employee time and energy. The customised capabilities were also well received, with document filter, search and metadata functions, and the ability to subscribe to specific document types relevant to job roles widely praised across the organisation.
The we mean business award
Finalist: Thomas Lalor
Finalist: Ruby Bailey
Winner: Claudia Piscitelli
Claudia Piscitelli started at Engage Squared in 2019 and was a staple part of our Adoption & Change Management team (ACM). As the organisation grew, so too did the needs of the team, and Claudia was quickly promoted to Practice Lead.
In late 2020, Claudia moved away from ACM to oversee our marketing efforts where she could combine her internal knowledge of the business, alongside aligning our focuses to what our customers wanted from a consultancy. Within her first 18 months of this role, Engage Squared went through a much-needed brand refresh, won Partner of the Year for Australia 2021 and global Employee Experience award 2022 at the Microsoft Partner Awards, plus managed the development and launch of our brand-new website. Through her fantastic efforts, Claudia was promoted to Chief Marketing Officer.
More recently, Claudia has been asked to head up our people and culture division and has been promoted to sit within the exec team alongside our founders. If three promotions within three years doesn’t sound like someone who means business, we don’t know who does.
The we’re creative award
Finalist: myHR system
Finalist: Better meetings Teams adoption and Viva Insights campaign
Winner: Brief and Matter Management System
For one of our NSW government clients, staff previously collaborated on information relating to state prosecutions by downloading, emailing, and uploading documents across collaborative agencies.
Given the highly sensitive nature of these documents, there were security concerns around these collaboration processes and in 2021 Engage Squared began a creative and multi-phased program of work to secure, migrate and integrate information related to serious crimes committed in NSW.
The first phase was completed in late 2021, focusing on connecting client’s primary legal matter management system to Microsoft 365 and has had fantastic results throughout the department. Through this phase our client has lowered the use of shadow IT, increased their accessibility of information – including access to documents offline, and saved an estimated $855k in productivity savings per year through faster completion of tasks.
The we care award
Finalist: Chelsea Geldard
Finalist: Grace Geldard
Winner: Georgie Yeandle
Georgie Yeandle started at Engage Squared in 2018 as HR Manager and is the rightful winner of the ‘we care’ award for two years in a row.
Whilst Georgie’s job naturally sees her interact with all employees, her working relationship with employees doesn’t end after new starter inductions, or a problem arises, she always makes time for everyone. Georgie’s ability to create genuine and meaningful working relationships is a fantastic trait and she does this through sharing and learning facts about all employees and building relationships from the foundations up. Georgie also acts as an extension of our directors, who often lean on her for business support, knowing she’ll always do a fantastic job with care put into every task that’s asked.
The we’re tenacious award
Finalist: Rachel Harnott
Finalist: Rob Reitsma
Winner: Grace Geldard
Grace Geldard was hired as Associate Project Manager in October 2021 and has jumped in feet first with a can-do attitude.
As she manages multiple projects at once, Grace’s ability to show tenacity in managing each of our client’s expectations and manage challenges along the way is always handled with care. Client feedback is often glowing when Grace is involved in managing the project.
Grace is admired internally for taking on any project that comes her way and has a fantastic ability to context switch but prioritise each project and their needs when the time is needed.
With a desire to succeed not going unnoticed by her team, in May 2022 Grace was promoted to Project Manager.
The Engage Squared MVP award
Finalist: Maksim Murashka
Finalist: Gorica Mitrovic
Winner: Jeremy Stokes
Senior Consultant Jeremy Stokes is 18 months into his role at Engage Squared and was recommended by a long-time employee who knew Jeremy would be a fantastic asset to Engage Squared.
Jeremy helps any member of the team but more importantly he’s happy to help. Whether it’s a customer query, delivery question, demoing a solution, or sharing his behind the scenes website knowledge on our very own digital home, Jeremy is always there to help. It’s no surprise he was the worthy winner of our MVP award.
Space-time continuum award
Finalist: Andrew Jolly
Winner: Stephen Monk
Stephen Monk was a worthy winner of this award but it’s for good reason; as CEO of our company Steve is a busy man as he works across Australia, New Zealand, Belarus and now Japan time zones. With a calendar so full, we can let him off for sometimes being a few minutes late to calls.
The human Wikipedia award
Finalist: Rob Carrington
Winner: Andrew Jolly
Andrew Jolly is Engage Squared’s Information Management Practice Lead, and the information knowledge doesn’t stop at work. AJ knows something about everything and is always willing to help. He is also partial to a good story which often goes hand in hand with his sharing knowledge, helping everyone to remember the answer to their burning question.
The Gif-God award
Finalist: Roy Badawi
Finalist: David Fogarty
Winner: Rob Carrington
Humour comes naturally to our Business Applications Practice Lead, Rob Carrington. Rob is one of Engage Squared’s longest employees and as technology has improved over the 6 years Rob has worked here, so too has his ability to send a perfectly timed gifs in one of the many chats across Teams.
The cutest pet award
Finalist: Miso
Finalist: Haku
Winner: Bosley
Bosley is the proud fur baby of Emily McPherson, Practice Lead for our Adoption & Change Management team. Born in 2022 and by no means a ‘covid baby’, Bosley is a mini retriever who won the hearts of our team. Known as justbeingbosley on Instagram, he enjoys nothing more than playing with his favourite chew toy and enjoys daily walks with his paw-rents, often being rewarded for good behaviour with his much-loved treats. However, what makes Bosley the cutest pet at Engage Squared is his ability to modestly accept attention wherever he goes and look cute in his ever-growing dog wardrobe.