Ambulance Victoria (AV) is an emergency service that prides itself on giving patients the right care at the right place at the right time. Ambulance Victoria’s workforce of around 8,500 employees responds to more than 840,000 emergency and non-emergency cases each year.
Client
Ambulance Victoria
Industry
Healthcare
Organisation Size
8500 employees
Country
Australia
Technologies
Viva Engage, Sharepoint Online, Viva Connections
Context
AV’s existing digital workplace was fragmented and no longer fit for purpose, leaving employees overwhelmed by duplicated, irrelevant, and outdated communications across multiple channels.
Feedback from AV employees highlighted significant communication overload, with staff frequently receiving duplicated, irrelevant, and outdated information. This was driven by a mix of legacy and underutilised tools including an outdated SharePoint 2013 intranet, low adoption of Workplace by Meta, limited confidence in Microsoft Teams, and a heavy reliance on email. As a result, employees struggled to access trusted information and stay connected in a meaningful way.
The digital workplace was further complicated by multiple systems and access points, creating a fragmented experience. This was particularly challenging for frontline staff, who required simple, reliable, and mobile-friendly access to information in fast-paced, high-pressure environments.
Challenge
Engage Squared’s challenge was to design a cohesive digital workplace that simplified communication, improved access to information, and supported collaboration while ensuring it met the diverse needs of AV’s workforce. With existing change fatigue and a demanding work environment, it was also critical to bring employees on the journey and build confidence in new ways of working.
Key drivers and objectives
AV’s vision was to deliver a communication platform that engages and empowers its people to connect across OneAV, making it easier to share knowledge, enable two-way communication, and access information when it matters most.
The OneAV project was designed to set employees up for success ‘on any device, at any time’ by delivering:
- A highly utilised, central digital destination
- Targeted, role-based content to ensure relevance
- A single, trusted and secure source of information
- A mobile-first experience for operational teams
- Reduced reliance on email, with modern alternatives through the intranet, Viva Engage, and Teams
This approach was underpinned by strong engagement with employees to ensure the solution was designed with their needs in mind, and that they were equipped to get the most value from the new tools.
Solution
We learned from the project’s discovery phase that AV had a clear goal for their Intranet’s function. The slogan “Make me want to use it” guided every choice made, AV wanted to create a Digital Employee Experience Platform that motivated their employees to use the platform – and thus ‘OneAV’ was created!
OneAV is built on the Microsoft SharePoint Online evergreen platform, and it supports AV’s growing workforce. OneAV is a place to communicate with everyone, as it has been designed to be a two-way communication platform. It will be a place where you can access information relevant to the whole organisation, find out news and events, use frequently used tools and applications and engage with employees
Mobile access was a high priority with a large proportion of Ambulance Victoria’s workforce being on the road, to keep Front-Line Workers (FLWs) connected. Mobile accessibility was a high priority, with OneAV being accessible on the move, via Microsoft Teams through the Viva Connections experience.
OneAV has been designed to be the single source of truth with reliable, relevant and current content. As part of this, a governance strategy was implemented, including a news approval and content review process, enabling content owners to review content published to the Intranet regularly. Several workflows were identified within their existing Intranet, which needed to be re-created within SharePoint Online.
It was critical we didn’t deliver this project in silo from other platform and communication changes occurring at AV, therefore we used our expertise to support AV with their migration from Workplace by Meta to Viva Engage, ensuring the intranet and Engage platforms worked cohesively together.
Our change management approach
To ensure our change activities had a significant impact we utilised a “Change as a service” approach, undertaking a large amount of research before designing a strategy for AV’s launch, within the predefined budget agreed. This research included analysing and gathering feedback from hundreds of leaders and ~50 operational representatives and resulted in a detailed impact analysis, personas, key change scenarios and challenges grouped into themes, all used to inform our approach.
Among both leaders and end users at AV, there was an overwhelming feeling that project announcements were made and then either didn’t happen or were only communicated at the point of going live. While many were interested in colleague connections, cultural initiatives, upskilling, and more, they were often time-poor or simply didn’t know where to look for information. Our mission was to reset the organisation’s memory of change, sparking a cultural shift towards transparency, collaboration, and frequent engagement during large-scale initiatives, while making it easy for users to find information and support.
Activity 1: Change Champion Network
Theme addressed: Desire for two-way communication & increased visibility
We designed a whole strategy for champions, helping AV to set up, recruit, activate and sustain a program with dedicated people from across their organisation. We provided a toolkit for attracting, gaining commitment from, engaging with and rewarding their champions with a structure for ongoing facilitation throughout the project. What’s more, we co-hosted check in sessions to provide sneak-peaks, training and exposure to project experts, iterating both our technical and change approach aligned with champion feedback.
Activity 2: Training expo days
Theme addressed: Time poor workforce with mixed digital skills
Knowing AV’s frontline workers have little control over their calendar, with shifts and emergent care needs dictating their availability, we wanted to simplify their training journey. The team had to remember two dates, each suited to different shift pattern, where if there’s time in the day you can drop into bitesize virtual training on a topic relevant to you. This pick and mix model, with recordings and guides available on demand afterwards, empowered the workforce to attend only if relevant to them and at a convenient time.
Activity 3: Launch campaign
Theme addressed: Communications overload
Our designers used OneAV’s traditional brand colours to create a new campaign with a unique feel to anything that Ambulance Victoria had seen before. Our OneAV mascots and design were used for posters, training materials, teams backgrounds and more. The cohesive nature of the whole projects design meant OneAV materials were instantly recognisable to AV people, helping to cut through the noise and provide easy opportunity to find out more where desired.
Result
The OneAV project brought all digital platforms into the Microsoft ecosystem, providing a seamless, user-friendly experience for everyone at Ambulance Victoria. This transformation created a single, secure source of truth for organisational information, significantly reducing previous communication overload and enhancing overall security.
The importance of communicating up to the minute news and information to AV has never been more important, with OneAV providing up to the minute information around enterprise bargaining along with changes to the leadership team.
The below graph highlights employees’ thirst for information with, the viewers and views of the Interim Chief Executive Officer video compared with the averaged data for the Operations Update video and averaged data for the All Staff and Volunteer Forum recording video.
The video by the Interim CEO had a very high retention rate, with 50% of the viewers watching the whole video. Operations update videos of a similar length have only 38% of viewers watching all the way through.
The digital team at AV continues to work with Engage Squared on the future direction of OneAV to ensure the continued evolution of its digital offering to all employees.