Milking the Power of Employee Engagement with Viva Glint

Our client is New Zealand’s leading dairy farm solutions business, supporting over 10,000 customers. With 1,800 employees, they deliver integrated services across herd management, animal health, farm automation, and data insights to increase farm productivity and profitability.

Challenge

Our client was using Organisation Health Index surveys to measure employee satisfaction, but the process of analysing results and identifying actions to improve the employee experience was lengthy, manual, and primarily owned by HR. This led to slow, infrequent, and often ambiguous momentum for change following each survey.

They needed a solution that could capture and amplify the collective employee voice while enabling meaningful, organisation-wide change.

Their key drivers and objectives included:

• Improved employee engagement: Address engagement and retention challenges to strengthen organisational culture.
• Empowerment: Equip managers with timely, actionable insights from survey data to take ownership of their team’s performance.
• Visibility: Give HR and leaders the ability to track frequent, incremental improvements and clearly identify where to focus efforts for the greatest impact on engagement and retention.
• Ease of use: Implement an intuitive, user-friendly platform that aligns with their culture and values — and feels more like a conversation than a formal survey.

Our solution

We partnered with a specialist employee experience consultancy who helped our client select survey questions aligned to their goals and priorities. From there, we configured and deployed their chosen survey on the Microsoft Viva Glint platform, while upskilling key stakeholders to scale and sustain the implementation.

Viva Glint, part of the Microsoft Viva employee experience suite, enables organisations to listen to employees, understand their needs, and take meaningful action. It combines real-time feedback, AI-powered insights, and action plans to help foster a culture of growth and performance.

Our implementation approach included:

• Collaborating with the client to understand their vision and success measures, aligning them with Viva Glint’s capabilities and best practices.
• Configuring and deploying the Viva Glint platform, customising it to reflect the client’s branding, values, and language.
• Designing and uploading the HR data file to accurately represent employee hierarchy and demographics within the platform.
• Piloting the engagement survey with a select group of employees and managers, refining the configuration based on feedback.
• Launching the engagement survey to 1,000+ permanent staff, with plans to extend it to their seasonal workforce in future phases.
• Training administrators and managers in survey reporting and action-taking through interactive sessions and user-friendly guides.
• Providing recommendations on how to tailor Viva Glint to surface insights for different employee groups (such as seasonal vs permanent staff) and explore further survey options to support their retention and engagement goals.

Results

Having previously used surveys to capture employee feedback, our client had high expectations for Viva Glint — and we’re delighted they rated the solution so highly. Their Chief People Officer noted that the platform’s customisations and setup made it feel on-brand, aligned with their culture and values, and much more conversational than their previous formal survey.

Key features of the Viva Glint implementation included:

• A customised, branded survey that reflected the client’s culture and values, with a more conversational tone than before.
• A flexible, scalable platform enabling deployment of the engagement survey across different workforce segments.
• A user-friendly interface empowering managers and leaders to explore survey results in detail.
• An intelligent analytics engine delivering actionable insights and recommendations, benchmarked against global and aspirational organisations.
• A collaborative platform to create and track action plans, and share best practices organisation-wide.
• The option to run various survey types (pulse, lifecycle, etc.) in the future.

Impact highlights:

• Improved usability and access for over 1,000 permanent staff, with plans to extend to seasonal workers.
• Measurable success through benchmarking and prioritised actions for engagement and retention.
• Cost savings and increased ROI by transitioning from their previous provider and leveraging Viva Glint as part of their M365 licenses.

By partnering with our client to implement Viva Glint, we helped transform their approach to employee engagement — moving from slow, manual surveys to a dynamic, scalable platform that truly captures the employee voice. This solution not only aligned seamlessly with their culture and values but empowered managers with real-time insights to drive meaningful change. With over 1,000 employees already benefiting and plans to expand further, our client is seeing measurable improvements in engagement, retention, and operational efficiency — all while unlocking greater value from their Microsoft 365 investment. This case underscores the power of combining innovative technology with tailored change management to create lasting organisational impact.