How Medibank used Viva Engage to amplify its commitment to mental health
Medibank
APAC | Viva Engage Festival 2025
Join Cat Owen, Employee Change and Communications Partner at Medibank, as she shares how Viva Engage became a powerful platform to bring Medibank’s mental health commitment to life.
In this session, you’ll discover how Medibank used Viva Engage to spark meaningful conversations, foster connection, and empower employees to be part of the story. Highlights include:
CEO-led live stream events that gave employees a first look at external campaigns and created a sense of shared purpose.
Tailored storytelling and social content that invited employees to engage with Medibank’s external mental fitness messages in real time.
The rise of #familyroast, a national campaign that inspired employees to connect and share personal mental health experiences – turning an external commitment into a top trending internal moment.
Whether you're exploring ways to deepen employee engagement or want to amplify your organisation’s vision, this session will offer practical insights and inspiration.
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Let's get into things. So first up, we're thrilled to welcome Cat Owen from Medibank and Medibank is actually the home to the number one top performing Viva Engage network in the world. And Cat's actually going to share more about how Viva Engage has become such a powerful tool at Medibank to amplify their commitment to mental health.
I think it's everything from CEO led live streams. We've got their family roast campaign, which is just so fun and like such a beautiful story. But I need to leave it to Cat to tell that story.
So I'll hand over to you now. Thank you so much, Cat. Thanks, Fran.
And thank you, everyone, for the very warm welcome. It's lovely to see all the reactions and everyone joining in the chat. I will just share my screen.
Can everyone see that? Wonderful. Great. So as Emily said, I'm Cat Owen.
I'm the employee change and communications partner at Medibank. And I look after the customer side of the business. Before I kick off, I too also wanted to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which many of us are joining today.
I'm joining from Wurundjeri country in Melbourne, Victoria. And I'd like to extend my respects to elders past and present and emerging and also extend that respect to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders joining us on the call today. So many of you may know Medibank as a private health insurer, but we're actually much more than that.
So we are a health company and our vision is to create the best health and well-being for Australia and to create the healthiest workplace for our people. So the next 25 minutes, I'm going to share how we brought to life our external commitment to mental health and how we brought that to life internally for our people using Viva Engage to really spark conversation and connection. So before I jump into some tips and tricks, I'm hoping I've made it really practical for you all today.
And you can walk away with some things that you can try in your organisation. I just wanted to provide a little bit of context. So I'll start with the did you know.
Back in March, we conducted some research in partnership with News Corp Australia's The Growth Distillery. And that report showed that families are really struggling to support each other with their mental health and anxiety. So two thirds of young Australian adults say they would find it hard to talk to their parents about mental health challenges.
And half of all parents of 16 to 13 year olds say they would find it hard to tell their children they're struggling with their own mental health. And what this research told us was that one in four Australians feel they lack the necessary tools and knowledge to have mental health conversations with someone. So as a health organisation, we wanted to do something about that and play a bigger part in the solution and a bigger role, particularly in our customers' health and wellbeing and then broader across Australia.
So that's a little bit of the context and the why. And this all began back in March, as I said. So earlier in the year, we were preparing to announce an external announcement of $50 million investment into mental health with the aim of really improving access, prevention and innovation.
And this announcement was the start of a month, months and months long campaign, leading up to a second announcement, which you'll see on the screen. And particularly if you're in Australia, you may have seen our TV commercial featuring Sharon Strzelecki. She came out of retirement for our TV commercial and her never before seen children, Tim and Pam.
And this, she launched for us our family roast card game. So a physical card game and also an online card game. And that card game was really designed with the aim to get Australians talking.
So particularly families connecting and chatting about their mental health and giving them a tool to have that conversation. So you might be thinking, what does this all have to do with soup, Fever Engage? And today I want to share how we use Fever Engage to really help bring that external campaign to life internally for our people and share some tips with you so that hopefully if you've got a similar kind of campaigns running at your organisations, you can use some of those tips. So.
Let's start with our first tip. So before we, our people saw sort of the news splashed across the headlines on the paper, and we really wanted to ensure that they were the first to know. So we wanted to mirror this commitment internally and really provide opportunities for our people to engage with our cause and connect with each other and have really meaningful conversations.
So tip number one, give your employees the inside scoop. We have an existing channel that our CEO uses called DK Live. It's the live stream event option on Fever Engage.
And this broadcasts across the organisation. So we knew it's a really good way to get in front of as many eyeballs as possible across the organisation. And it also is great for two way engagement so people can ask questions.
It's not just us pushing out information. And it's also obviously recorded so those that missed it, we can then share it on Fever Engage and they can still interact with it post event. And so we use Fever Engage to share in advance that we were making this big external announcement both from the $50 million investment.
And then we gave our employees a sneak peek of the television commercial before they saw it on screens around Australia. So that really gave them the buy in and they felt quite special and engaged that we were sharing with them ahead of the game. But it also helped us explain why we were making this commitment, create that connection back to our vision.
And it also provided our leaders, particularly our CEO, to share his own story of his own mental health struggles. So right from the beginning, we were really sharing open and vulnerable stories in a pretty wide forum because we really wanted to create that space for employees to feel like they could do the same. So that is tip number one.
Tip number two is really focusing on tailoring external content for internal use. So where possible, don't reinvent the wheel. So given this was a really broad nationwide campaign, there was just a plethora of resources and content that we could share internally.
So we didn't want to recreate it, but we wanted to tailor it to our internal audience. So on the screen there, you can see a couple of examples. We used our employees who were involved in the campaign and our influencers to share that content and really encourage people to, again, engage with the content in a two-way format.
So ask questions, share their own experiences. On the screen there, we've got a TV segment on the morning show with Brendan Favola, who was one of our influencers and part of the external campaign. We've also got Ali Sutton, who is an employee and she's a psychologist.
So she had shared her tips externally, and then we invited her to share that internally. As you can see, there's some great conversations where employees felt that they could ask her questions about how they engage with their children, share tips that had worked for them. And this was a really nice way to lay the foundation for really open and honest conversations, both in person, but also online.
And that lead up to that family roast day, which was a few months after our initial announcement. So tip three is really around building momentum. So I think particularly with a topic like mental health, people are being quite vulnerable if you're talking about your own mental health.
So we knew that it wasn't a topic that probably people would feel confident sharing and talking about straight away. So we really wanted to build momentum and not just have that initial announcement of the $50 million. And then, you know, four months later, we had the announcement of the family roast card game.
So we looked at ways that we could really invite, again, conversation and people sharing their experiences. Off the back of our DK Live, we ran some lunch and learns. We had a session with a psychologist talking about mental fitness and this concept of really thinking of mental fitness like your physical fitness.
It's something that you always need to be training and working on. And we also ran a deep dive into the research with News Corp, the growth distillery, to give people some insights into what the data was telling us and then how we were using that internally and externally to shape the campaign and the cause and what we were investing that $50 million in. So by the time we got to our family roast events internally and externally, people were really feeling comfortable in sharing.
So they had that knowledge and sort of expertise in how to talk about their mental health and their mental fitness. And they were constantly seeing us talk about mental health, not only on Viva Engage, but across all our channels. So across our intranet, which we really used for the content side of things, our business unit newsletters, again, for content.
And then Viva Engage was really used for that conversation piece. It's our only platform that we can have two-way engagement and really hear from our people. And this, I think, demonstrated that it wasn't just a flash in the pan campaign.
So often, you know, you have the big bang start and then things dwindle. We really wanted to keep building on that momentum throughout the months in the lead up to the family roast. And it also created a lot of excitement for people.
You know, there was a lot of anticipation around when they were going to receive their pack of cards, you know, when it was going to launch externally, when would they be seeing Sharon on the big screen. So we used a lot of other internal channels as well, like digital screens and emails from our CEO to share as well. But Viva Engage really was at the heart of the conversation.
So tip four, I think it's nice to think that people will, you know, off their own accord, share on Viva Engage. And a handful, you know, pockets will that are particularly engaged with Viva Engage. But we wanted to create opportunities for storytelling and sort of invite our employees to share online.
So on the screen there, you'll see that we've got a few different ways that we did that. So we sent the card game out to all of our retail stores and we invited them to share how they had set up their displays in store to attract customers in to talk about the family roast. So that's Crystal on the left there with the card games in front of her.
We also sent out KitKats. So we had branded KitKats, have a break, have a chit chat. They were desk dropped across the organisation and in stores.
So, you know, yes, it was an opportunity to give our employees a little bit of time back to have a conversation. But it also created a fun way that they could snap a photo of their KitKat or of themselves with a colleague having a conversation. So that worked really well.
We also invited our employees to attend a organisation wide family roast day. So we again brought back our CEO. We invited four employees from the business to sit with our CEO and have a conversation using the card game at the centre.
And again, this was a really great opportunity for employees to hear really vulnerable and pretty heartfelt conversations both from our CEO and employees and then invite them to do the same. So these were all sort of ways we helped create and build that momentum and opportunities for sharing. And of course, prizes don't go astray.
So we wanted to connect in with our partners. So HelloFresh is a partner of many banks. And we were giving away $500 HelloFresh vouchers with the aim that you could continue that conversation at home with your loved ones over a tasty meal.
So that was another way to really help engagement. And we asked people to share their favourite family roast moments with us on Viva Engage. And then finally, we used SWOOP Analytics.
So we'd love to give SWOOP Analytics a little plug to monitor and track engagement throughout the campaign. So we set a goal at the start that we wanted to see both the hashtag mental fitness, because that's sort of how the campaign started. And then it morphed into the family roast.
And we wanted to see both those hashtags in basically top number one, ideally top five. But definitely our goal was number one. And as you can see on the left there, these stats are from the end of the campaign.
So family roast was absolutely up there as number one. And then we can still see that mental fitness is still trending in the top five, which was really great to see. I love the word cloud option in Swoop Analytics as well.
So you can see the types of words and phrases that people are using around the campaign. So, you know, we love seeing cards, family roast, connection, conversations. That was really the goal of the campaign.
And it was great to be able to, it was probably the first time at Medibank that we've gone so big with an enterprise wide campaign. So it was an opportunity for us as employee comms professionals to kind of show what we can do internally and not just have the anecdotal feedback, but have some really great analytics and metrics to show that this message was getting through. And it had a really broad reach across the organisation.
So that was just incredibly helpful to sort of keep us on track and, you know, tap into any pockets of the business that we could see that maybe weren't engaging with the campaign as much. Maybe we needed to have a little bit more, you know, use our influences to share a few more stories or get our leaders to jump in. And that's probably one thing I didn't touch on.
As a comms team, we really did help drive that broader messaging and encouraged our leaders to jump on Viva Engage, and comment, post, like, share their own stories in the lead up as well. So it wouldn't be a presentation if I didn't do a little plug for the family roast. And thank you, Sharon.
I think I see you've popped the family roast card game in the chat. We have just also launched that same tool for conversations and game, but a workplace version. So we were finding that when employees were playing it, some of the questions were a little bit too targeted to that family audience.
So you would skip through them or, you know, things might have gotten a little bit awkward as you found a different question to answer. So we've just come out with a set of same great conversations now just tailored for the workplace. So if you search family roast workplaces, it'll pop up as well.
I've probably flown through that. So I would love some questions. And just a shout out that this full case study of Medibank's family roast campaign internally is in this year's SWOOP analytics benchmarking report.
So it goes into a lot more detail, heaps more screenshots of things that we shared. We really do try to, we love the tips and tricks that SWOOP share with us. So in all of our posts, and hopefully you saw them in the examples on the screen, you know, using those bold, really catchy headlines, using emojis or GIFs or images to make your content pop.
Asking questions, and this is a great campaign where we could really ask questions for our employees and ask them to share and talk about their experiences. Using a hashtag was a great way to track. So yeah, all of those tips, I think, sort of came to life in this one campaign, which was, yeah, incredibly helpful from us to be able to show the benefits of engaging employee content and engaging employees early in a campaign as well.
I might pause there, Emily. No, no, that's okay. I'll help you out.
There's lots of fantastic comments and chatter in the chat. And it's just so good to see how one of these campaigns come to life. But it's also so impressive how you have woven that mental health message through everything you do.
It's not just using Viva Engage to amplify a message. It's like in the fabric of Medibank, right? It's living and breathing your values. And yeah, it's just such an impressive example.
So, yes, please do check out the case study if you'd like to learn more. We do have a few questions as well popping up in the Q&A. So if you do have any questions as we go through for the next few minutes for Cat, please do drop them in and we can start to cover those off now.
Maybe like a few sort of scene setting questions, Cat, because Medibank has been using Viva Engage and back then it would have been Yammer as well when you first got started. So how long have you actually been using Viva Engage for? That's a great question. Well before my time.
I've been at Medibank for six years. So I think we would be close to 10 off the top of my head. And it really, as I said throughout, it's our only real channel for that two-way engagement for employees.
So intranet is we sort of see as our source of truth. That's where we share a lot of news and content. And then we direct back from Viva Engage to the intranet.
But Viva Engage is that opportunity for us to really connect. And it's gone. I think this campaign really showed us the power of employee-led content.
We created the, I guess, the topic that people could talk to. But it really grew a leg of its own. And so we started out sharing a lot from a comms perspective, from a marketing perspective.
But it really just grew and grew and grew. And we were seeing so many employees just jumping on and sharing their own experiences, which was pretty special given the topic of mental health. Yes.
Yes. It's so impressive. And I'm just wondering, like, if you take a bit of a step back as well and look across your network as a whole.
Of course, we know that you have a high-performing network because of the benchmarking studies that we run every year. You've been a consistent top performer. What are sort of like your overall engagement metrics? Like what does the success look like at the moment for Medibank on Viva Engage? So we've really been actually focusing on influences.
So we love looking at our top 10 influences. So I'm happy to talk more about that later this afternoon. But we have started an internal Viva Engage Influencer Awards.
So each month we post our top 10 influences. And this is a really great way to, you know, really at the start we were seeing the same 10 people in our top 10 each month. But as that momentum has built, we've started to see different people from different parts of the business get engaged and sort of showcase what good content looks like.
So in addition to that, we spotlight, you know, a post that sort of uses all the top best practice tips. We look at our trending hot topics. Those are probably the two.
We also look at just making sure that we're not relying on the same people to really drive that engagement. So where we can broaden our reach has been another one that we've focused on as well. Nice.
And then for your communities and the way that you have Viva Engage structured, like what does that look like as far as like regional or department or division type communities? What sorts of communities do you have at the moment? So broad. So we have the all company one is our main one, which is the bulk of what we used for this campaign. We also then have our business unit communities.
So there's Book Club, there's Microsoft Hot Tips, there's, you know, the Daily Meow, the Daily Woof. Our frontline teams really use Viva Engage to connect. So they're obviously dispersed across Australia and they don't have as many opportunities to connect in person.
And so our Medibank frontline community is one of the most, our highest performing community. And alongside that is a community called Fix It, where employees can jump on and highlight issues or concerns that they've got with the hashtag Fix It. And that highlights where we need to sort of turn our focus to, to fix any challenges and make things easier for people to get things done.
Amazing. People can go for their lives and set up a community if they wish. I love it when you kind of empower the employees, right, to determine their own destiny on the platform.
We do see different examples across the board of where that can be a little bit more locked down. But I think it's always a good way to encourage more of that open engagement. There are a few questions in here that I think would actually be really nicely suited for our panel session a little later on.
So if I do miss any of your questions, please do not fret. We will definitely cover them off with our speakers a little bit later. The question here, how much oversight and control did you have on the posts that your influencers shared? For example, organic posting provided with a template and key topics to highlight or was the full post kind of written and drafted on their behalf? So we really try, where possible, not to draft posts for people, but we absolutely provide tools and tips and give them a template.
So just recently, for example, we've got an AI week happening next week. And I've gone out to all our presenters to say, I would love you to promote your particular events. Here's an image.
Here's a draft post as an example. So, you know, catchy headline. Let people know what's in it for them.
How do they sign up with that call to action? Here's the hashtag to use. And some of them will run with it. They'll be really confident.
But we always say we're here to help. So if people want to run a draft post past us, you know, they can check it with us first. But we really like to sort of give them the tools that they need, but then not control it in terms of how and when they post.
Amazing. Fantastic. And Cat, I have to say another huge thank you as well for sharing your story and for also hanging around for our panel a little bit later on.
So if I could just get everyone to use their team's reactions to give Cat a big thank you. Thank you very much.
Meet the speaker:
Cat Owen
Employee Change & Communications Business Partner
