Cricket Australia (CA) is the governing body of all things cricket in Australia. From a community level to an international level, it all starts here.
Client
Cricket Australia
Services
Microsoft Viva Insights
Industry
Sporting
Country
Australia
Context
With the vision of uniting and inspiring communities through cricket, and the goal of making it Australia’s favourite sport, Cricket Australia and it’s 230 employees work tirelessly all year round to bring the best cricket to our screens and communities every summer.
Emma Cashen, Cricket Australia’s Senior Client Services Manager, knows that to fulfil CA’s vision and successfully promote the love of cricket and get engagement from the wider Australian community, the organisation must look after their own teammates first and foremost by making employee experience and well-being a priority for everyone from an executive level to people leaders, to employees.
The challenge
Once this key concern of burnout and decreased employee engagement had been identified, the next challenge was to discover if there was any quantifiable data behind these sentiments that could support a change to ways of working; what was causing these longer working hours? What kind of working habits were being modeled? Which key groups were being impacted? By shining a light on and measuring these patterns, CA would be able to put new practices and strategies in place to increase awareness, employee well-being and engagement.
The best way to approach this challenge was through exploring the benefits of Microsoft Viva Insights.
The solution
Viva Insights is a module of the employee experience platform Microsoft Viva. Powered by Microsoft Office 365 and experienced through Microsoft Teams – which CA was already using – Viva Insights would enable the organisation to identify groups of people who were feeling overworked and were working longer hours by seeing if the data actually reflected these sentiments.
Cricket Australia and Microsoft have a close relationship, and Emma says that CA tend to be early adopters of a lot of Microsoft tooling and privy to new products. So, when CA approached Microsoft about how Viva Insights (and the broader Viva suite) could help them, Microsoft reached out to Engage Squared as their preferred partner to help CA and to run two Viva Insights workshops with key stakeholders across technology and people and culture department.
The Viva Insights workshop intended to provide an in-depth exploration of personal, manager and leader insights with privacy controls and data analysis capabilities to:
- Understand the impact of work patterns on productivity and wellbeing
- Provide privacy-protected insights and actionable recommendations
- Address complex challenges with advanced tools and capabilities
From this, CA partnered with Engage Squared to understand the value of Viva Insights, what Viva Insights can do, and also to come up with key problem statements for CA that they would like addressed through Viva Insights.
As part of this process, Engage Squared set up a trial license for Viva Insights for CA, downloaded dashboards and gathered data over a 6–8-week period to capture insights into working practices and habits at CA to see if the results aligned with the data in the employee engagement surveys.
Phase two of the workshop was to review the data with CA and map out any necessary and practical next steps.
Based off the Viva Insights workshop, CA continued to work with Engage Squared to get support in giving senior leaders and other key stakeholders access to relevant data within Viva Insights and Workplace Analytics through reporting dashboards.
This engagement covered three key steps:
- Conducting a discovery to understand Cricket Australia’s vision and objectives around the use of Viva Insights and confirm which three of the out of the box dashboards (OOTB) will be most useful to implement to track the employee experience
- Assisting with setting up out-of-the-box dashboards from the WpA portal. For example, the ‘ways of working’ dashboard
- Creating a Viva Insights user guide that covers key functionality and will sustain knowledge after the project concludes
The purpose of this stage of the project was to start building Viva Insights into ways of working at CA on a leadership level with the intention of influencing working patterns of staff, as well as eventually having a wider rollout to staff within CA, as well as rolling out the broader Viva Suite across the organisation.
The result
Once the insights were gathered and assessed after the first Viva Insights workshop, Engage Squared and Cricket Australia found that the data (which picks up signals from Microsoft Teams and Outlook) was not reflecting feedback from employees who were reporting working long hours.
But, as an events business, CA knew that employees often use other collaboration tools, for example the humble phone to work with their peers. Taking these other collaboration tools into consideration, and qualitative feedback from staff, helped paint a more accurate picture of what was happening ‘on the ground’.
CA has plans to use the data in Viva Insights to inform their People & Culture strategy and employee wellbeing programs.
