From launch to lasting impact: Building trust in Reece's transition to Viva Engage
Reece Australia
APAC | Viva Engage Festival 2025
What does it take to build trust in a new platform? At Reece, we made Viva Engage feel like it was made for our people; by listening, simplifying, and committing to continuous improvement throughout the whole transition journey. Come behind the scenes of our Viva Engage rollout to see how we earned trust in the product, our process, and the team driving it all.
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Jordan is going to be presenting on behalf of Reece and he's going to walk us through the journey of building trust during their transition to Viva Engage from workplace. So I know that Reece's approach is all about listening, simplifying and committing to continuous improvement and we hope you enjoy this behind-the-scenes look at how you build trust in product, process and the team to lead a successful launch of Viva Engage. So Jordan, I'll hand over to you.
Wonderful. Give me one second, I'll bear with me. I've had to switch from a Mac to a PC recently and I have no idea what I'm doing still.
Please be patient, it's all good. We're off to a good transition, you should be patient. Wonderful.
All right, so hi everyone. I am Jordan Gilliland as Em just introduced me and I'm really excited to be here today to present on behalf of Reece and I do actually say on behalf of Reece because I actually sadly finished up with Reece last week but both Reece and my new employer Metro Trains were really happy for me to come and speak to you today so I give a big thank you to them. I am sure many of you online were the same as what we were at Reece when we woke up to that overnight email last year telling us that Meta was closing down workplace.
It was a big resounding, excuse my language, oh shit moment for everyone and we had teams messages that were just flying amongst all the comms teams, all of our leaders as we tried to figure out like what this would mean for us, what it meant for the business and probably the most importantly what it meant for our people. In a moment I'll also explain why the shutdown was such a big deal for Reece but rest assured we knew that there was going to be some serious work involved in transitioning across from workplace to engage but after the initial moment of crisis we started to look around as a bit more of an opportunity. So after almost like eight years of having workplace we were going to be able to make a change that we had kind of talked about and been like oh my god how amazing would this be to start fresh and all the stuff that we've done we could burn down the building and make a brand new one but we just couldn't because it was so ingrained in the business.
We're quite lucky that Reece has this really amazing use of workplace that you know people would almost be jealous of but it made it really difficult but here we were with this fresh start, the chance to create a platform that worked for our people as they were right now and we were able to use it for the learnings of what we had over the last eight years of workplace and then separate to that we saw it as a great opportunity in our comms team to build trust. By building trust on the platform and then us launching it and our people feeling like they were ready to literally engage from day one we knew that we could overall build trust in our team and just help our personal brand as an internal department which is a big bonus for everyone. So I'll give you a few fast facts about Reece for those who might not know who we are.
So in more than 100 years ago when HJ Reece started selling hardware supplies from the back of his truck in Victoria and it's now one of the biggest suppliers of plumbing, waterworks and HVAC products in Australia, New Zealand and the United States. So across the business there's more than 9,000 employees and around six and a half thousand of those are in ANZ and with ANZ as well there's around 670 branches give or take on it depending on the week as well as there's more than 10 distribution centres and there's a Melbourne support centre as well as different you know training rooms around the place there's different places people everywhere. There's quite a diverse workforce and quite diverse about the the audiences that you're trying to target.
So if you're a block watcher you actually might primarily know Reece as a provider of kitchen supplies to kit out your beautiful new bathroom but it's actually a surprisingly small part of Reece. So there's the bread and butter of it which is the plumbing aspect which is the bit behind the wall that you've probably never seen but as you can see here there's so many departments depending upon where we are. There's building builders in our on-site business, there's HVAC, there's refrigerants in your actual business, there's irrigation and pools, there's a whole bunch of different departments and they all have these different comms that need to go to them and yes there is these specific versions that we can go over you know all of Reece but there's a lot of audiences that we have to target and there's a lot of different comms that we need to get across and I'll give you a little bit of scope now.
So this is our workplace activity snapshot in 2024 and it gives a little bit of a sketch scope about like how big workplace was for the business. What it was used it was a bit of a catch-all so with such a long history and being one of the only consistent tools that we had between other digital channel transitions it was a huge amount of activity so from news to sharing to publishing knowledge both formal peer-to-peer we had pipelines set up for the regions to talk to each other from our branches, it was on leader communications, it was informed conversations, it was just sharing photos of pets and Reece which is a surprisingly big part as well as the Reece memes page. It seriously was used massively to connect and communicate and you can just see how big that was 216,000 posts and replies last year and almost 80 percent of our people were active at least once a month.
You know and critically our most active group of users what we call the heart of Reece which is our branch managers and essentially what this all means is that it's just a crucial part of how Reece worked and it was embedded as one of our primary tools that we got information done and you can kind of start to get a picture about why getting a transition was so important and why we kind of have to do this thing to build a trustable business to make sure that we were doing the right thing. So that's a bit of a snapshot right we got given this timeline everyone got given this timeline who had this journey with us we knew we had to do it we just have to do the hard work and the first step was really understanding our people so internally we went out and did a channel audit we went out and asked our branch managers we went and asked assistant managers region leaders how they were using the channels not what we thought they were using it but how they were using it and we asked them a lot about what they liked and what they disliked and take say it was a little bit shocking a little bit eye-opening as a little bit of a confronting thing when you think someone's using a tool in a certain way and they're like we don't ever look at that so we quickly learned what channels were being used in different ways than we had expected and the things we thought were universal turns out that sometimes they actually weren't quite so universal and we started to kind of be like no there's only one way to do this we have to be asking our people what they want and what's going to work for them we can't sit there in you know the ivory tower and make it for our network we have to make sure we're doing it the right way so we created our champion network to gather all the info we needed to make the transition work and we actually used us with friends for this one so we used data to figure out who was posting the most who was getting lots of engagement and who were our like kind of super users who were like these people are using the tool how can we make sure that other people also want to use the new tool and i actually think this is like one of the most critical parts of the transition working well was that when we're looking for what the product would be and how we're going to transition we kind of knew that it was going to work for them and we listened to them the whole way through and it's something honestly i encourage everyone if you're not doing it literally pick up a phone call and like ask someone to go end user like what they want or what you're trying to implement your new features the ideas that you want because a five-minute phone call will save you like months of putting something in and then realising it was completely the wrong option and trust us we've all been there so it sends check 100 so we did that and we got this kind of scary big picture here of what people like what people don't like and what they did and so we got this information we're like all right we need to use this and you can see a kind of couple of few call outs here so you know one of the really big ones that i didn't like was notifications volume noise but one of the big things i really did like is that it connected them to the wider race team and i can kind of connect across all the people in ANZ so they felt like there was one really big family one really big team no matter where they were across the country and there's this feeling that made you feel like you were this team first approach which is one of our big values that we kind of live at reeks and i think the most important part though is that they told us exactly what we did think is that they use it to get their work done it was a crucial part of the thing so we have to make sure that we're doing this right and the other thing that isn't here in this kind of list but something that we were told a lot was that they didn't want to feel like there was a barrier they had to break down they felt like they wanted to walk in on day one they felt like they knew what they were doing and they felt like it was kind of almost comfortable they felt like it was something that they felt familiar with and when you're transitioning from something like workplace which is quite obviously you know facebook in disguise it was not an easy task to kind of do so we're like okay there's going to have to be a lot of groundwork to make this feel right and have out everyone on board and feel like they can trust that we're going to do the right thing here so like i said they essentially found those theory areas that we were able to get down so we saw that they used to get their jobs done we saw it that they use it to connect with other people and race as a business and they use it for knowledge both informal and formal and so after quite a few vendor discussions drum roll and no surprise to anyone from this audience we said goodbye to workplace and we said hello to engage which is how our campaign was was say goodbye to workplace say hello to engage and we do pitch some stuff about you know let's get engaged and some wedding stuff and i wanted to send out like a ring pop to everyone but apparently that's quite expensive but you know it is so what does this mean for our people and how do we kind of start to say well i meant simplified communication and like i said a team first approach to all our communications which like i said key race value but it also meant the blank slate we can create something from scratch we weren't carrying any legacy content over with us which was a really big decision it was all going to be fresh fantastic and then the bonus on top of all of that microsoft integrations so how good is that like our people were able to access it wherever they want to use the tools they're going to have to use anywhere to get their work done and the cross platform collaboration could be used to enhance the channel and it's actually just got only better at a time so i don't know if people are using copilot engage at the moment but we recently went out and we talked to our region leads about how they could use copilot to you know enhance the way that they are looking at their um their region pipelines within the gauge and so like stuff like that has been a really great offering that we'll be able to kind of sell and give trust to the product so we kind of figured out okay well we're going to have engage so what we did is we defined our internal digital channels into these simple streams that we were kind of being able to sell the dream with if you want to say so we were able to kind of sit there and go well we're going to have engage let's get these channels and we can push back on spaces that people think they might need because we have in other spaces so for example anyone who used the knowledge library on workplace we were able to push back when someone said well what about having a knowledge library you know why aren't we going to have a product with that because we could say well guess what sharepoint is going to be where you store all of your knowledge your long-term knowledge and so we created a really simple way that we could sell it to our people work store share so work is where they were going to you know chat get the meetings done in and sharepoint which you'll see here is called brick which is the recent information center was where they're going to store their long-term knowledge and engage was where they're going to share it all and it allows to kind of like I said really bucket in and say well you don't need this you need this this is where everything's going to be so we did this we figured out our channels we figured out what our platform was going to be there was three areas that we then needed to build our trust in to make sure that our transition was going to be a success so those transitions here so obviously you know you can't launch without the buy-in and a top-down approach so we knew that if we were to get all of these people on board and probably in this order we'd have a positive flow and effect to the next group and then by doing all that they're going to trust us and they're going to get in the day one and it was going to be a success so our first one our leaders and particularly our operational leaders who use workplace as an important tool to share network information and you know updates they were naturally kind of very hesitant but having done the groundwork with our network champions as well as being in consultation with the leaders really early it meant that they trust that we had done the right product and we'd chosen a product that was going to work for them day dot I will admit they had a bit of a you know close relationship with our general managers who were really prepared to roll up the sleeves and really own it and roll it out to the network and they really helped deliver us on what to expect from engage into their ops teams so we presented internal leadership conferences to set the scene we set our SLT and our operational leaders up really early in an early adopters group on engage for anyone else's on so they can get used to it we touch base and leader briefings we were giving them go live readiness checks in the week leading up there was tons of touch points and no one was missed so no one missed out sessions and these were opportunities so that they could ask questions and that they were comfortable on launch day and it sounds like it was a lot and it really was a lot when you reflect upon it but they were really ready and they understood their role when it came to d-day their success early on of creating the groups and enrolling everyone in that meant that there was nothing that they actually had to do except get in there and make it so we had their pipeline groups create a form and order enroll depending upon where their branch was so they didn't have to do anything there was no adding the people there was no adding of teams it was super simple and they were going to go from day one and they really came to the party they actually role modeled they led the role out they owned the community they owned the content but most of all they were just ready to post they were just posting day one they were putting things in and commenting because they had got familiar and they were across it so great our leaders were on board our support centers and our content contributors were next and engage was the primary tool that raised for sharing information so in our support centers we have lots of people that we would call content contributors so people like our marketing our merchandising and our people experience or tech teams so we felt it was important that we got them moving and comfortable before the launch because we wanted them to be populating engaged from day one getting in there and making sure it felt like it was you know familiar so in the course of two weeks we held kickoff presentations with every single one of these groups we have about 10 of them across the business and we showed them you know the background and we showed them how to use it but we also taught them how to kind of do some of the stuff that they might want to do so the moderation or reports or admin privileges and groups and we just ran through what they would have as well as one of the big things we did which was merging and removing groups which was a little bit controversial because we cut down from something like I think we have like 8 000 groups uh when we left workplace to something around 1600 which still sounds a lot but across the pipelines uh it was it's not as bad as it sounds trust me so we used an opportunity to run them down we also gave them best practices about how to run their comms which was really well received and then we got them on early access around three weeks before our launch date and we told them to double post everything from workplace to engage which meant that we had that overlap time and it felt alive from day one and then one thing that maybe some people might overlook uh we also made sure that our tech support team was ready to go for day one as well so if service desk was getting phone calls about them they were able to at least give them a decent response or refer them on to us will give them a more comprehensive look at the engage and lastly it was our network we actually felt pretty good though because our leaders have been taken on the journey so they're all ready to come and if I'm really honest they actually kind of had to use engage to get their work done so all we had to do was make sure that they were ready to buy in and they were so critically I guess what we really needed them to understand was why race was transitioning to engage and what was in it for them so they could be supportive of it and they could kind of understand why not streamline and simplify that experience and so we needed them to know how to use it we needed them how to set up and manage the settings how to reduce their noise and notifications and we were able to achieve that because our leaders understood it all and then we're able to back it up by our goodbye columns across all of our channels and they're all ready to go and switch over dates and then our launch was quick it was swift it was a secret everyone knew was coming we posted on workplace and we said you know bye-bye we're off say hello to engage and we turned our workplace on oh sorry turned to engage on and workplace off and to read only on the exact same day so there was no way that people could post every group had a notification said come find us on the new group over here and engage and it went really well there was all those no hiccups people got around it really quickly their leaders were pointing them in the right direction for any issues that they had and it felt very comfortable and there was a really good amount of trust like so trust that we had covered any problems trust that we hit the ground running and we have fun with it which is awesome so you can see here on our right like one of my favorite internal posts was the everyone loves a good mystery where we encourage people to put a face to their account and it was a playful post and spoke to our internal voice but the best part was that people were sitting there asking who was the face under the bag and uh people were tagging people in it making jokes and to be honest we didn't have the heart to tell them that it was a stock image that we'd photoshopped the bag over but you know there was some people who looked dangerously close to bagman anyway uh and another great interaction so i didn't mention earlier we had our recent memes page which is like a fantastic workplace page that everyone gets involved with and you know makes memes about the business and there was so many r.i.p memes about workplace and i never got into it and i photoshopped or edited our other comms advisor who was turning the switch off on workplace and put a video of jd from scrubs turning the power off in the hospital that signaled the end of scrubs tv show so you know it feels great when you're sitting there getting a couple hundred likes on a post once instead of posting someone else's uh post out there so it's great we had fun it was you know it was good it was it was a warm feeling for us and we continue to innovate so we've always taken the feedback from the network and our leaders and what they want to see in groups that they think will help them or better ways to use the platform to get noise and information and this has built trust the team so people feel heard and even if we can't make the change they want we make sure that we have the two-way communication to ensure that we've listened and we're looking for a solution or raising with people who might be able to make it happen and i know this is the thing everyone will see a result how we've done and the easiest metric that i can give you from how we've gone from day dot to six months down the track is what we would call like our engagement score internally and what we call that is uh 80 posts viewed a month for all registered users which is a number that we believe represents what they need to get their work done so when we originally started we were sitting around 56 percent uh you know from all the people who send these 80 posts from all of our registered users and that's our active users that's like that's registered so slightly different we've gone up to 68 percent when i last saw from october so really great results and it kind of just shows the continued i guess hustle or improvement and continue to make it part of it has been a really big part of kind of continue to continue on this journey with it and i was quite really proud to see the diverse workforce and some of the people who weren't there to log in like you know supply chain or you know that kind of stuff distribution census things and really excited about that and i think um so i i would love to be on the panel today but i'm unable come to it so i know um some of the things i would love to talk about and would have loved to talk about on this panel i kind of thought i might just pull up really quickly and sorry emma if i might just redrag and slightly overhear tips and tricks i don't know some nuggets of stuff along the journey that i thought maybe some people might be able to implement engage most of the transition across but some of this stuff i think we can probably do for businesses who are looking to kind of enhance their engaged journey a little bit more so i think the first one would maybe be don't be afraid to turn things off um i know some of the things we just we turned off like storyline for example as we thought it would muddy the waters um and we just didn't think it would be used and to be honest it was the right decision and it's something we still stand by but i think sometimes we get into a rut that we think maybe we need to use something just because it's there uh and so i think turning things off is great and the same applies to groups so we turned off the ability for anyone to create their own groups because just like i said before 8 000 groups at the end of the day was insane and i'm sure i'm not alone with that journey so i think we really have to think about what group exists and what purpose it has and could multiple groups be condensed into one group allowing like a single channel of truth or could even like a group be completely deleted and it really helped us go a long way to cutting down the noise um if everything was in one group and something could go to just one place to find their information the other one would be i think if you wanted to enhance engage one of the big parts of race is that it's part of the rhythm and routine of the business so i think if you want people to engage it kind of always needs to be like a carrot um but it's unsustainable to kind of keep using like competitions or asking for like photos or that kind of stuff there's just like it's an understandable way to continue to have people do it they need to have a reason to come back and engage was just part of the way that people got their work done at recent operations team and you know like i said earlier we created their pipeline pages where they post their weekly updates and they share the news but they also go there to share like the publicly shout outs for their teams or they get questions back from our customer queries and it's not as easy for like our support centers who might need not so much work i'm sorry engaged to get their job done but we encourage them to just hop on five minutes a day make it part of their rhythm routine because if they understand what the network is talking about and what the team are that they're supporting they're going to be able to do a better part of their job because they're going to better understand the problems and the issues so we'd be suggesting to them like i said to make it a part of their rhythm and routine as well and lastly keep it simple it's the race value it's like kind of there's a shining shining light keep it simple was the race value that we always stand by in comms and essentially it's you can't hope that people will know what to do so if we can make it as easy as possible from our comms teams for our end users it's going to be perfect so we always say you're teaching the fish but we kind of need to give them like the right tackle box first so like i said we set them up in groups and day one we adjusted all the way through and we just made sure that it felt comfortable for him I guess the kind of last thing as I wrap up is I want to give a little shout out and again to SWOOP for something that we use all the time which is the golden ratio um which is you know the one post to reply us three likes to make sure you get really good engagement across your uh across your channels and i will be really honest with them I don't want people to post once for every like two replies or three likes I might mute them because that would be a lot of a lot of voice going on there but we always used it all the time and i think it's a really great way to to tell people that they need to be posting replies and likes just as much as they're kind of posting themselves and the other thing that another shout out to SWOOP i'm just going to keep saying it uh something we really liked is the the personas i'm saying really got our leaders going especially from an slt perspective is the fear of being an observer or a broadcaster i don't know why for some reason that was something that's really like stuck with them and when we said that we you know we don't want you to be like a broadcaster they were like oh my god we don't want to be a broadcaster and so we suddenly would see slt they're hopping on they'll come in the post they'll personally respond to issues and we're saying oh my god they're just using engage on their own behalf because they don't want to be a broadcaster they want to be they want to be an observer they want to be someone who's going to be in there and kind of have like that right feeling um so that's kind of it i said it was a bit of a journey for engage and it's something i think you take a lot of like experience out of but it's one that by doing it and kind of keeping our team along the whole journey we're able to build a reputation of the comms team to be i would say more than like comms we kind of were part of a like a trusted strategic partner for our business and i think for anyone who's considering the switch or thinking of highlighting you know their networks there's probably hopefully something in there that you might be able to take away from that yeah thank you amazing thank you so much Jordan and thank you so much for taking time out as well to present this on behalf of reese and i could actually see like a few people who i know have recently moved across from workplace to be very engaged so i think your presentation Jordan i think you know great reassurance that you're able to almost like build up that momentum again and achieve really great things i'll give you one maybe like quickfire question oh sorry go for it might just have to grab someone on mute um quickfire question any pressure from leaders for using post on behalf of features or getting comms to post on behalf for them uh no they actually really like it so we we have almost no negative feedback whatsoever about it so we um obviously from workplace it's so easy you could literally go in there and you could post them off and they would never even know with engage you obviously have to set up delegate access a couple of extra steps but from a i think from the perspective of our leaders they love it because they're always always so much on the go especially if you're someone like breeze who has so many operational leaders who could be anywhere across the stage at any moment if they kind of buzzed us in and said hey we need to share this update i need to be in here we were able to get them to go across it and just post on their behalf and they were like this is the best thing in the world we love this we trust that what you're going to do is going to be the right thing i think the only one thing that i would say for that is because there is the extra steps um be quite proactive of it so we went through we added all of our slt for all of our comms team who were going to be posting on this um and as much we have small comms team so it was quite easy it wasn't you know 70 people posting on behalf of one ceo but we also went along and had a look at who else might be one of those people who might need to be there for like a crisis comm so we had our operation leaders um some of our region leads that we knew were in you know uh north uh queensland who might be particularly you know cyclonic or something like that um but and they kind of trusted us and they understood the process and felt that they can give us the access to do that fantastic and thank you again Jordan we really appreciate you sharing these insights
Meet the speaker:
Jordan Gilliland
Internal Communications Advisor
