The National Australia Bank (NAB) is one of Australia’s largest financial institutions, often referred to as one of “The Big Four”. It provides a wide range of banking and financial services to personal, business, and institutional customers across Australia, New Zealand, and internationally.
Client
National Bank of Australia (NAB)
Service
Viva Engage
Organisation size
40,000
Industry
Financial Services
Context
National Australia Bank (NAB) – one of Australia’s “Big Four” banks – had been using Workplace by Meta as their enterprise social network since 2018. While Workplace was deeply embedded in daily work, culture and leadership communications, engagement on the platform had started to wane, due in large part to lack of integration with Microsoft platforms like Outlook, SharePoint and Teams.
In late 2024, with Meta announcing the retirement of Workplace, NAB set a bold goal to transition more than 40,000 colleagues to Microsoft Viva Engage by 1 May 2025. This was an opportunity to reset, simplify and align enterprise social with the bank’s strategic behavioural pillars of customer obsession, winning together and keeping it simple.
To deliver this ambitious transformation, NAB partnered with Engage Squared to collaborate on everything from strategy and governance design to training, communications and launch execution.
Challenge
Replacing a platform used daily by tens of thousands of employees is never just a technical project – it’s a cultural undertaking. NAB faced the dual challenge of orchestrating a complex platform change while preserving the energy and collaboration built up over years on Workplace.
The team needed to ensure that employees felt continuity, understood the change and were excited to adopt a new way of working, all under the pressure of an immovable deadline.
Specifically, NAB needed to:
- Ensure a smooth tech transition across multiple entities and domains, each with unique technical and regulatory contexts.
- Enable NAB leaders to be culture carriers for NAB’s strategic ambition.
- Create a vibrant community that delivers business value through authentic conversations.
- Maintain engagement momentum, ensuring employees continued to connect and collaborate without disruption.
- Deliver against a fixed deadline (1 May 2025).
Success required a solution that balanced technical execution with human-cantered adoption, ensuring that tens of thousands of employees could move seamlessly to Viva Engage without losing the vibrant connections that made Workplace successful.
Solution
Engage Squared approached the project with a people-first philosophy, recognising that technology adoption is only as successful as the experience of those using it. Our role was to guide NAB through every step of the transition – designing a program that built confidence, inspired engagement, and made the new platform feel natural and valuable from day one.
Our approach unfolded across three phases:
- Strategy and planning: We worked with NAB stakeholders to create a change management strategy and community architecture that would give Viva Engage a purposeful, well-governed start. We supported NAB’s “clean slate” approach to rationalise communities and not migrate content, focusing instead on robust processes to keep community numbers low and value high. In parallel, we aligned with NAB subsidiary Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) team to ensure a consistent experience across their separate network.
- Enablement and training: Rather than create a traditional ‘Champions’ network, the NAB team focused on leaders and ‘leader enablers’ as the visible drivers of change. We supported with role-based training and multi-format learning resources – from quick guides to how-to videos. We also ran deep-dive workshops with IT and communications teams, ensuring technical readiness (such as directory synchronisation) and confidence in new features.
- Communications and launch execution: To create excitement, we co-designed a multi-channel campaign branded “It’s Easy to Engage”, with teasers, storytelling, office signage and digital comms building awareness ahead of cutover. Launch was timed with NAB’s half-year results town hall, giving Viva Engage a spotlight debut, complete with live demos of interactive features. On go-live day, Senior leaders welcomed colleagues via Viva Engage from day one, signalling its importance from the top.
Results
NAB’s Viva Engage launch was delivered on time and under budget, exceeding expectations across adoption, engagement and cultural impact.
- Colleagues onboarded: 98% of the 40,000+ workforce accessed Viva Engage at launch, significantly surpassing Microsoft’s 75% benchmark.
- Active engagement: 31% of employees actively posted, replied, or reacted in the first month – far above the 8% target and beyond the 25% stretch goal.
- Positive sentiment: 73% of surveyed employees expressed favourable feedback, highlighting satisfaction with the clean start, modern interface, and Microsoft 365 integration.
- Leaders engaged: All Executive Leadership Team members exceeded the 70% engagement target, with leadership content driving around a third of all reactions.
The launch not only ensured a seamless cutover from Workplace but also delivered measurable cultural impact, simplifying NAB’s digital toolset and strengthening connections across teams.
NAB’s Viva Engage launch demonstrated how a people-first, leader-led approach to change can transform enterprise communications. Routine communications – from newsletters to Q&As – shifted smoothly to the new platform within weeks. Within months, tens of thousands of employees embraced a modern, integrated platform – setting the stage for ongoing digital transformation across the NAB Group.
