CSIRO: Getting started in 90 days
APAC | Yammer & Viva Engage Festival 2022
Find out how the CSIRO team boosts Yammer engagement with knowledge sharing! No matter if staff have been at CSIRO for three days or 3,000 days, the 90 Day Club community members can share their thoughts, ideas, resources, lessons learnt and acronym decoders.
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Hello everyone, I'm Felicity Kelly. I'm a digital communicator at CSIRO. And today I'll be presenting with my colleague, Sarah, from our learning and development, learning and academy group.
And we'll be chatting to you about our fabulous 90 day and beyond community. It's a place where our new and not so new people can connect, share their thoughts, ideas, resources, lessons learned and have our many, many acronyms decoded. I'd also like to just begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land we're all meeting on today.
So for me, it's the Ngunnawal people here in Canberra and for Sarah, it's the Turrbal and Yagara people in Brisbane. And pay our respects to Elders past and present. I just thought I'd give a quick rundown on who CSIRO are, in case you didn't know.
We are the Commonwealth Scientific Industrial Research Organisation. And we are a pretty big complex organisation with over five and a half thousand dedicated people all over Australia and the world and do some pretty fabulous research. We have some core values here at CSIRO.
So our values are people first, further together, making it real and trusted. And we really think Yammer speaks to these values and really helps people become a face, especially in our COVID world. We can work together, collaborate, we can make it real with the transparency of Yammer and being on Yammer and posting helps build trust.
So for us at CSIRO, our purpose is to increase transparency, openness and engagement. Yammer allows for unfiltered two-way engagement from all levels across the organisation. It also assists with learning, exchanging ideas and problem solving, which we do have a lot of that going on.
And it also helps with us increase our social cohesion and belonging by making sure that people can build their morale and connectedness. I'm going to hand over to Sarah, who's going to talk to you actually, sorry, at a glance quickly. This is just how Yammer's going at CSIRO.
We have a 75% active rate over 7,000 enabled users because we have a lot of affiliates as well. 300 plus active communities. We have a returning user rate of 91%, which we're pretty happy with.
And our most popular community on Yammer continuously every month, besides your company is the music corner, where we can share our love of music. So I am going to hand over to Sarah to run a little poll and talk to you about our 90-day club. Thanks, Felicity, great background.
So yeah, before I start talking and diving into the 90-day club, I'd love to get into the mindset of a new startup by doing a quick anonymous poll. So you can probably see it on screen. Thanks, Emily, for popping that up.
Just want you to cast your mind back to when you were new. Maybe you're new now, maybe it was a long time ago, but try and think back to what that felt and just choose one of the options on screen so we can see what the vibe is across the room today. What does it feel like to be a new starter? So 30 seconds, we'll make this one quick.
I'm not sure, do we see how many, maybe we've got a little bit of a critical mass then we can share the results, Emily? Yeah, overwhelming is the top response at the moment. Yeah, right, I'm not sure actually how I can see those results, but. I've just seen the chat, Sarah, I think it might be popping up now, but it's looking pretty even between the overwhelming, all of the above, it's sort of bouncing between the two at the moment.
And let's face it right now in the lead up to Christmas, I get a little bit excited, note to the tinsel and the baubles. Things are just generally overwhelming as well, isn't it? But the new starter experience, 100%, and thanks, Emily, for that, and thanks everyone for completing that poll, because we also asked this question of our new starters, and when it's, you're new into an organisation, sometimes you might not want to choose one of those, confusing or overwhelming, it's easy when the poll is anonymous. But if we close that poll up, we can see what our results were, and overwhelmingly people put a lot of all of the above.
And what this is, I guess, really demonstrating is that the new star experience is a kaleidoscope of emotions. And organisations, you know, we often focus on the positive ones, of feeling excited and curious to learn new things, but it's also important to acknowledge the whole emotional journey new starters go through, including the negative emotions. And we find this helps send the message that you care about your people, and want to support them both through their highs and lows.
And it also opens up opportunities to identify pain points and find solutions. So yes, we are a very complex organisation, and I'm sure some people on the line really resonate with that. You know, we have the geographically dispersed teams, working over multiple time zones, flexible working arrangements, and of course, throw in the big C COVID.
We found that building the 90 day club gave us a way of tackling some of the challenges that new starters in particular were facing by just bringing up this cohort together and giving them a home. So if we go on to the next slide, you can see that just in this quick few minutes, we have together, I'll talk through five things. So what was the purpose of the club, our plan, what was our secret posting formula, our results and some plans for the future.
So what's the purpose of the 90 day club? Well, let me give you a little bit of background to set the scene first. So building a community and being a community leader isn't actually within my remit, though I do get a lot of support to do this. When I first started at CSIRO 18 months ago, I was struck by the new starter experience.
For me, it had been over 10 years since I was a new starter. And here I was starting a new role in a complex organisation in the middle of a pandemic with a young family of five in tow. And it was really exciting, but it was also a little bit terrifying.
And so I had this strong desire to help others going through the same thing. Now, the beauty of how we use Yammer at CSIRO is that there are no barriers to setting up a community, anyone can do it. So when I saw it was within reach, I thought, you know, why not experiment a little? Here I am at CSIRO, we do experiments, let me do one of my own with Yammer.
And as I said, I did get that support, which is wonderful to do it. So the 90-Day Club is a place for new starters to get together, ask questions, share news and connect with others. And we cast a pretty wide net.
So while it's targeted to people in their first 90 days, as the title suggests, we encourage people to join whether they've been here three days or 3000 if it meets their needs. And I find it always helps to have clear objectives with starting anything new. So the 90-Day Club has four.
Oh, there goes my sensor lights. No, that's not going to come back on. Anyway, so yeah, our four objectives.
Increasing engagement, so the first one in wellbeing goes hand in hand with our value for people first, as Felicity mentioned. The second one, creating a self-sustaining community. Well, that was kind of my cheeky way of thinking about succession planning and also knowing that the best communities are co-created with all its members.
The third one, leader involvement. This was something that was also important because to really look after new starters, we want to help them develop positive relationships with their leaders and vice versa. And lucky last, well, when I was new, right, brand new at Sira, a key message that really came across was our focus on cross-team collaboration.
So I wanted to see if we can fit that in there as well. And I did see that it was within reach. So that's our four objectives.
But what was our plan to achieve them? So, well, as the saying goes, if you plan to fail, you're planning, sorry, if you fail to plan, I've already failed at it, if you fail to plan, you're planning to fail. And thanks, Benjamin Franklin, for getting me tongue tied on that one. But while the 90 Day Club started as a passion project, I guess I wanted to make sure it had some structure around it.
So I created this five-step plan to keep myself on track and accountable for its growth. And it's based on a variety of frameworks I've used over the years and adapted to the needs of running a community group. It's also very colourful, which keeps me engaged.
I also wanted to keep it just pretty simple. So some steps you can just see quickly on this plan are quite linear, like launch, because at Sira, as I said, anyone can create a Yammer community. And once that's done, you've spread the word across other strategic channels, this step is complete.
Other steps though, like review and iterate, they're more cyclical because they feed into each other to ensure the cycle of continual improvement is occurring. So if we had more time, I'd dive deeper into that, but that just gives you kind of broad brushstrokes of our plan. So what about the formula? Now, I can imagine that lots of people have different formulas, and this is the not so secret secret formula.
It's just something we use to guide our posts, and we're not perfect. Not every post has all these different four little elements, but we notice when they do, we do get a little bit more engagement and conversation. So you can see up there, we've got a hot topic, something visual, a problem, and an action, and we've got some examples underneath.
So a hot topic, well, in the first post, our CEO is always a hot topic. So, you know, something related to the news or a key figure, recent event, maybe the Cyrus strategy or our values, anything like that will work. Something visual, a GIF, we use custom memes, selfies, always entertaining, or even other things that engage other senses like, you know, some audio podcasts or something.
So it doesn't always have to be visual. Then the first one, sorry, the third one, a problem. We got some feedback from new starters when we asked them, and they've really, one thing that they want to get out of the club is solutions and problems to, sorry, problems and solutions to new starter challenges that they're facing.
So they really want it to be quite personalized to their needs. And then of course the action is, you know, giving members a bit of a nudge. It doesn't have to be something really big like complete this project.
It could be answer this question or check out this resource or get involved in this project that another team in another business unit is running. So it can be a variety of things. But yeah, that's our not so secret formula.
And the results, I guess, just quickly giving you a bit of an overview of those. Well, they've been quite promising since we started it about 18 months ago. We can see growth in membership and engagement levels, though definitely room to do better.
And on this slide, I've added some highlights, which speak to each of the four objectives I showed in the beginning. So the first objective looking at engagement and wellbeing. Well, when I asked members, I asked them the question, do you feel the 90 Day Club helps and supports you as a new starter? Now 56% said a resounding yes, but then 33% said maybe.
It's like, oh, there are maybes out there. Oh my gosh, what can I do? So we have some work to do to convince the maybes and demonstrate the value of the group. Also, maybe we should work on our word choice of our quick polls.
But yeah, it was a good signal that, pretty much the majority, half of people said yes, but it was good. It gives us that little bit of drive to do things a bit better. We did a post called Mateship Monday, which attracted a lot of attention.
And it was a nice bit of evidence that showed us that 90 Day Clubbers are keen to be part of the conversation. Sometimes they just need that right facilitated kind of nudge. For the second one, the self-sustaining community.
To date, 92% of the posts on this channel have been shared by members and non-members. So I am not the community leader me. And this highlights a great level of member participation and proactiveness, which I love.
A big source of this are the do-it-yourself intros that we encourage new members to do when they join. So we say, join the group, and when you feel comfortable and ready, say hi, and we'll welcome you into the fold. Tell us a little bit about your hobbies or whatever it might be.
And we get a really great response from that. So for leader involvement, this is something to focus on in 2023. Currently lining up a podcast series called the Hello Initiative to try and get some more leaders involved.
So watch that space. And then the fourth one for cross-team collaboration, scrolling through, like I just love sometimes scrolling through the group and you can see the highlights and the conversation and the buzz and energy. And you can see a great example of members reaching out to the group to find, for example, there's one person who introduced themselves, said, I'm a business analyst.
Across CSIRO, are there any other business analysts that I can link up with? And she got some nice responses to that. There was also a post calling for members to have their say on some new onboarding resources we were developing. And we got an overwhelming number of responses both on the group and also people privately emailing me saying they'd like to be involved in that review and testing phase.
So that cross-team collaboration is something that I would love to even try and spur on a little bit more next year. So what does the future hold? Well, to help us shape the future and continually growing the 90-Day Club, we ask members what they want. And from our little survey we did, they're the three top things shown on screen.
And we have some ideas and plans on how to address these. They're not all massive game changers. Some of them are just small, teeny, tiny steps.
And some of them are quite subtle as well, such as when other people across the business are posting on the New Starter Club, really thinking about how they can personalise their posts and their topics to new starters and not just taking a generic post and popping it on there. So some of them are quite small. But with all communities, ours is a work in progress.
And even anyone on the line, if you've had experience in this area or have ideas, please reach out, feel free to share them. But all in all, our initial experiment has been a success and we're excited about what 2023 will bring. So I just wanted to finish off with a quote, which just reminds me why I really love being a community leader, because people really get out there and share and connect and engage.
Meet the speakers:
Felicity Kelly
Digital Editor,
CSIRO
Sarah Eqbal
Learning Strategy and Experience Lead, CSIRO
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