Viva Connections supports 10,000 employees at multinational insurance company

The challenge

Our client’s IT and HR teams lacked central platforms where users could go to reliably find information, resources, tools, news and events. IT information and services were spread across various disconnected platforms and there was no consistent means of communicating with staff about important IT news or updates, including system outages and upgrades. There was also nowhere to host self-service IT help information and so large volumes of queries would come through the IT mailbox, taking up time from the IT team who had to work reactively.  

The HR and onboarding teams had lots of useful information, but it was spread across different locations and was not easily accessible, navigable or readable, and content was often out of date. There was no easy way to share news and information, especially with frontline workers. 

We were initially engaged to help solve this challenge for the client’s IT and HR teams in group headquarters in Hong Kong, but our success there and a realization that offices in other countries were facing very similar challenges led to us expanding our role to also assist the client’s teams in Vietnam and Singapore. 

Key drivers and business objectives

At a glance:

• An improved, simple employee experience for a dispersed workforce
• Encourage interaction with users across the business
• A central location for users to find and engage with news and events
• A central location for users to find key HR information, resources and tools
• A central location and single point of entry for users to find key IT information
• A platform for IT self-help articles and information
• Push notifications to staff for important announcements
• Reduction in volume of email notifications from many different systems
• Accurate, comprehensive search from a single-entry point
• Consistent and recognizable branding across the platform

The solution: Viva Connections

We leveraged Microsoft Viva Connections to design and implement a user-focused solution for the client. Working collaboratively with each of the teams in each country to understand their particular needs and tailor the approach to address these, we captured requirements and designed and developed modern portals on SharePoint Online that would serve as a centralised single point of entry for users to find key information, access tools and resources, and discover news and events.

Viva Connections allows these portals and content to be surfaced within Microsoft Teams, where staff members were already spending the majority of their working time. Viva Connections supports a seamlessly integrated, cloud-based experience on both desktop and mobile devices, which was important for supporting the client’s diverse set of employees, including frontline workers who may not have access to desktops or laptops at work.

We supported the project delivery with change management planning and guidance and launch campaign material, to ensure a smooth transition and launch of the new platforms to staff and to maximise the successful adoption of the solutions.

The result

Each of the tailored Viva Connections portals were developed within the space of a couple of months and launched to users in Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore, providing them with a user-friendly, centralised platform for finding and engaging with information, resources, news and events happening around the organization.

In the IT portal, staff now have many different IT portals combined into one global IT platform where they can find self-service support, search across all information and resources in one place, initiate and track service requests and find and engage with news and events.

The HR portals for each country have provided the client with a platform for sharing news, events, HR information, resources and tools with staff all in one place. With information centralized, it is also much easier to manage and keep up to date and accurate, overcoming a key frustration for users. It also makes it much easier for staff to navigate and quickly find what they are looking for. Custom organizational branding across the portals provides a consistent and engaging experience for staff in each of the different operating countries.

The ability to send push notifications via Teams for important announcements ensures that all staff are kept informed and engaged, including frontline workers who in the past had been difficult to reach.

The impact

Each of the portal sites recorded tens of thousands of visits within weeks of launch. They also had hundreds of social interactions from users with news and announcements, demonstrating that staff were not only receiving information, but engaging with it and with their colleagues via the platform.

Large numbers of page views came from mobile devices and from frontline workers, who had been difficult to reach in the past. An extension of the core solution to provide enhanced news notifications via Teams chat and notifications for key news posts ensured that those communications in particular had very high numbers of impressions from right across the employee base.

Throughout the project, we worked in partnership with the client’s project teams, upskilling their resources along the way and transferring knowledge regularly, so that they are empowered for ongoing successful management of the platform, and for continuing to build upon it in future.