Key insights from SWOOP Analytics’ 2025 Viva Engage Benchmarking Report
SWOOP Analytics
Viva Engage Festival 2025
We'll brief you on SWOOP Analytics' 2025/26 Viva Engage Benchmarking Report and show you the good, the bad and the ugly trends of Viva Engage usage, as well as giving you a first-look at a game changing app to help you deal with information overload.
-
We have the SWOOP team. To save time, I will not bother sharing my slides. I will just hand straight over to my esteemed colleague, co-author, driving force behind the Viva Engage Benchmarking Report, Sharon Dawson, who is joined by Laurie, our Chief Scientist, and Cai, our CEO.
So this trio have for many years contributed massive amounts to the industry knowledge around Viva Engage. I will hand over to you, Sharon. If you have slides to share, please do so.
Fire away. Share the knowledge. Thanks, Pete, and welcome everyone to our session on how to get the most from Viva Engage.
So in this session, we're going to take a look at some of the key insights from our 2025-26 Viva Engage Benchmarking Report, and we're going to show you how you can use these insights to get your people engaged and really cement Viva Engage as a key enterprise communications channel. So just to set the scene, over the past five years, we've really seen a shift in the way Viva Engage is used. During the COVID-19 pandemic, people were flocking to Viva Engage to connect and communicate with colleagues.
I'm sure you all experienced this. But in the five years since, we've seen an increase in Viva Engage being used as an official corporate communications channel. We're going to deep dive into what that means for you and how you can take some simple actions to cement Viva Engage as your key enterprise comms channel.
Oh, can you mute those again? Thanks, Pete. We're also going to address the issue of information and noise overload across Viva Engage and internal communications channels, and we're going to give you access to a free new tool we reckon is going to be a bit of a game changer for you. So let's start by introducing you to my colleagues.
So as Pete said, Dr Laurence Lock Lee is our Chief Scientist, and he's the brains behind all the data in this report. Cai Kjaer is SWOOP Analytics CEO, and I'm Sharon. I'm the Director of Communications at SWOOP, and we're all the authors of this report.
So we'd really like to make this session interactive. Please go ahead and ask any questions throughout the session in the Q&A and in the chat. I'll try to keep an eye on that and try our best to answer them as they come through.
Otherwise, we'll answer them in the panel at the end of the session today. We're also going to ask you a couple of questions along the way, so please join in the polls. But let me tell you about the data.
So in this year's report, we've analysed the real-life data from almost 17 million Viva Engage interactions from almost 3 million employees across 5,758 active Viva Engage communities and 73 organisations. So before we get into what the data told us, I'm going to launch this poll to get an idea of how you use Viva Engage across your organisation. So can you tell us, it'll pop up in just a moment, how important is Viva Engage in your internal communications channel mix? Here we go.
Here it is. I'll just see what those results come through as, give you time to answer. Well, probably no surprise, given that you're in this session today at the festival.
So we've got 51%, or around 50% saying it's an essential part of the communications channel mix, and 33% saying it's optional and some use it. Some have just started, and I'm really pleased that you've got it, but no one uses it. It's the lowest.
So interestingly, we can tell you that Viva Engage is actually a key enterprise comms channel, and we have the data to prove it. So I'll hand over now to Dr Lock Lee, and he can explain. Thanks, Sharon.
Well, we've been benchmarking Yammer before, and now in Viva Engage for 11 years now, and life really did get interesting from March 2020, when we all went remote, and that's when Viva Engage really did become the internal communications channel for nearly all of us. Now, we've had good six years of data since then, and there's been some interesting work patterns, I guess, evolving since that time. What we have seen, this is the good news, I guess, is that there are more people actually active on the platform, and it has been growing even since the beginning of the pandemic.
So 31.6% of people, when we say used, that's what we call active. So we don't count reads as active, frankly. So they would have had to at least push the like button to get into this data, just out of interest.
Now, generally, when we look at the reads, you know, 70 to 80%, I guess, of employees are reading Viva Engage. So you can see there's still a bit of a gap between those that are reading and those that are actually active on the platform. So we've got opportunity there, but the good news is it's growing.
The other thing that I think was pretty interesting to me is that the growth, certainly in the last three or four years, and the amount of tagging that's going on, this is the app mentions when you're bringing colleagues into the conversation, or at least alerting that there's some information that they might be interested in. So this is good news because we've been promoting the use of tagging pretty much since the beginning to get people active on the platform. And the third one, major one, is this average multi-group participation score.
So we measure how much, how many people are active in more than one community. And of course, the more communities you're participating in, the broader experience you've been exposed to. And this is one of the signals that we use as a signal of innovation happening on the platform.
The one that goes with that is the curiosity index as well. So interestingly, we have seen both of those innovation signals bump up in the last year. So it'd be interesting to see whether that was just a one-off or whether it's something that's being sustained.
And of course, we can speculate as to why that might be. So really, it is a key channel to us. It potentially is a platform for innovation.
And yeah, I think really in terms of communications, it's really the place for two-way interactions. Yeah. So Laurie, there's some really strong data there to show that it is a key enterprise comms channel.
We've had those interactive users increasing. And like you say, there's high readership rates as well. But what we need to do as internal communicators is figure out how to capitalise on this data to improve engagement on Viva Engage.
So I'm going to hand over to Cai to tell you exactly how you can do that. Thank you, Sharon. Well, there's probably one conclusion that stands out from this.
And that is, well, if you haven't joined the party, today's the day it starts. So start using Viva Engage. There are some people we know, have you heard about them? They're going like, oh, what's the difference between that and Teams? And can't you just use your reactions or comments on a SharePoint page or something like that? So we've written a success guide that's called the role of Viva Engage in your internal comms strategy.
And you can see I put a little QR code to it there. That is based on a whole range of case studies from our benchmarking report and from previous Viva Engage festivals, plus interviews with a lot of industry experts. And Bernie, you're on the call here today.
You're one of the people that have contributed to that guide. And the common thread across this is the use of Viva Engage and using a superpower to enable open conversations across an organisation. So that would be my first tip to you.
Make sure you, if you are still scratching your head and go, what's that all about? Make sure you get the guide and that will help you position how to use Viva Engage. Then I think the next key action we need to take is to be much more deliberate about starting conversations. We'll get into a bit more of that data that supports that and that recommendation.
Ad mentioning, as Laurie has mentioned, is rising and is really good because there's actually something like 200% more replies you get when you ad mention someone than as opposed to if you don't. And asking questions also generates about 150% more replies than if you don't. So I've got a couple of links.
One is to a blog post about ad mentioning that gives you some really practical techniques for how you do that most effectively. And then also I've linked to a blog post that I co-wrote with Howard Price, a UK-based communications expert. His company is called True.
And he is a co-author of the book, Leading the Listening Organisation, which is, by the way, also, if someone can find a link to it on a bookshop, then please find a link to it in the chat. So I suggest you start by coaching senior leaders because that's going to give you a really big impact, like an outsized impact by coaching senior leaders, especially on ad mentioning and asking questions. And then finally, promote these communities, profile them, profile key people, for instance, on your intranet.
And then I'd say, run campaigns that are relevant to your company, whether they are about cyber awareness, health, safety, the use of AI, any of the topics, that's how to get started. So Weave Engage is really, really glad to see that the active use of it has increased over the last five years. But there's still some things that we are maybe starting to get a little bit concerned about with the way that Weave Engage is used because it's shifting a little bit.
So in the benchmark report, we're introducing this dance floor analogy. And the point we're making is that we can sort of see that there's a lot more people on the dance floor, but they're just dancing less. How does that work? There are more people on the dance floor, they're dancing less.
What we'd like to see, if you allow me to play with this analogy a bit, is more couples doing the cha-cha, and then maybe fewer solo breakdancers performing in front of the crowd. Do you know what I mean? So it's actually just being more active. And Laurie is going to share some data with us about this thing about dancing, breakdancing, the cha-cha, and let's bring some numbers to that.
Over to you, Laurie. Thanks, Cai. Well, yeah, as Cai said, the dance floor is still with more people now.
A lot of them are just acknowledging each other with a bit of a nod or what have you. So the reactions have been going up, but the active conversations have been going down. So 45% of posts received a reply, that's down from 49%.
And this is a trend that's been continuing for a few years now. So that's a little bit disturbing. The overall participation beyond just reactions, average number of posts per people has dropped from on average two last year to less than one now.
So if you like, people are on the dance floor, they're doing a little bit, but we're actually losing some of that people-to-people engagement that we had seen in previous years. So next slide. So at SWOOP from day one, we introduced the behavioural personas.
There was the broadcasts, engagers, responders, sort of observers and so forth. We have seen a slight increase in the broadcaster persona. This is the persona where people are putting a lot of stuff out there, but not getting much back.
So it's more broadcasting. The engager persona is our aspirational persona because this represents people that are connecting other people. So they're good at what we say, balancing the giving and the receiving, in other words, the posting, but also acknowledging others as well as getting acknowledgement from others.
And that has been consistently dropping over the last five years. And the companion measure, the two-way relationship score, which is reciprocity, this is when people reply to each other in turn, that's also been continuing to fall at about the same rate as well. So this is really a strong measure of people-to-people engagement.
And unfortunately, we're seeing that going in the wrong direction. So I mean, summarising that, I think the conversations are shallower than what we'd seen in the past. We've seen that there is an element of broadcasting coming in more now, and maybe that's not surprising given the ownership moving more towards internal communications.
But we are at risk. We are also looking for this two-way interaction. We are looking for more engagement.
And certainly it's what we think about engagement in terms of people engaging with other people through conversation. And I think we're starting to see that drop disturbingly. So this is something we do need to work and be intentional about turning around.
But I think the good news is that we, you know, this is the helicopter view, right? So we're looking at across all the organisations at the top level. When we look, and Sharon will talk a little bit later about some of the communities, when we look down at the community level, there is definitely many communities doing wonderful things and staff engaging across those communities so that we know that good things are still happening and happening well. We're happy to be able to expose those to you all.
But certainly we need to follow those examples and maybe more aggressively than we have in the past. So over back to you. Laurie, just some of the outside research suggests that these behaviours, like when you were talking about there's less replies and more reactions, it's not just limited to Viva Engage.
So I guess I'd love everyone to think about is this something that you're seeing across all platforms like social media, in your private life, it's not just limited to enterprises? I'm talking about like less conversations and more reactions. So that leads us to our next poll. And we want to know if you think these behaviours are unique to Viva Engage or is it something that you're seeing the same sorts of trends across all social media platforms, like both enterprise and personal? Let's have a look and see what everybody, what everyone's finding.
Results will start popping up. Yeah, someone, we had a similar session in the APAC session earlier today and someone shared a BBC article saying exactly it was all about that, that even on social media people were no longer having conversations like they used to. Oh, someone else's, oh Mick has shared something there as well.
Yeah, the trends of social networks. So it seems like it's not just on Viva Engage, but obviously as we were talking about Viva Engage, the superpower is this two-way conversations. So Cai's got some actions that are sure to get some more in-depth conversations happening across your Viva Engage communities.
Over to you, Cai. Yes, thank you. Thank you, Sharon.
Indeed, I think there's some really strong recommendations here from us. One is, as we talked about, engage the superpowers, draw on them. It is undoubtedly the best tool in the M365 toolbox to enable open, transparent and two-way conversations that span organisational boundaries.
We have actually published seven of these Viva Engage success guides and they range from building the business case, positioning Viva Engage in the channel mix, I mentioned that one earlier, to nurturing communities, getting leaders and everyone else on board. And then the most recent guide we've written about managing information overload with Viva Engage. A lot of the content from these guides comes from our benchmarking reports.
It comes from being inspired by these fantastic talks at the Viva Engage Festival. So I would strongly encourage you to have a look at those and then they're full of actions. There's always, there's too much for me to cover in this.
So my advice for you, go and get the guides. Now, can you just give me one of the reactions in Teams, if you are in internal comms, just like a little like or a hand or an applaud or something, if you are in internal comms. Yeah.
All right. Okay. So there are lots of you on the call here today.
So the next one is for you. Actually, not you on the call, because I think you're doing this really well. But number two is, if you are in internal comms, resist any urge to treat Viva Engage as just another channel, because we know it is not just another channel.
So now I know that because you're here and that's why you don't think like that. But you might have colleagues around you who think like, oh, whatever, is it an email to post on Viva Engage? It's just a copy and paste and I'll do the same thing. It's not.
So and the last comment I'll make is that learn from the best. That's why we are writing the benchmarking reports and highlighting companies such as you've heard already from Shailesh and Cecilia earlier today. What they're doing, read the case studies.
They're there because they have performed exceptionally well. And we do have one special guide that I want to also mention setting as called folds to aim for when using Viva Engage, because we are so often being asked about what good looks like. And we know that people are keen on driving two-way conversation.
So like, how do we know when people are dancing on the dance floor? So I'm just going to show you a couple of metrics here. The interactive users is sort of like our people on the dance floor and the two-way relationships is just one of the metrics that can show us whether or not they're actually dancing together. So grab the guide, because that'll tell you, it'll give you goals to aim for.
It's based on what the top 20% have achieved. So they are ambitious, yet realistic goals to aim for. And I think that's kind of like the perfect segue to you, Sharon, to give some examples about, I think the first one we're going to have a look at some of those that have done really, really well.
So over to you. Yes, thank you. Well, one of the best things about our annual benchmarking is identifying the world's top performing Viva Engage enterprise networks and the top performing communities.
So these are our 2025 Viva Engage champions. So in number one position globally for the top performing network is Australian health insurer Medibank. And it's the second year in a row that they've topped our benchmarking.
In the benchmarking report, we have a fantastic case study from the team at Medibank. And if anybody in Europe knows about Kath and Kim, you're going to really enjoy this case study. Number two globally is Westpac New Zealand, which is a bank.
And number three globally was British telecommunications company Arqiva, who I'm sure you're familiar with. For our EMEA region, Arqiva is the number one Viva Engage network, of course. All Points Fibre Networks was number two.
And there's a great case study in our Viva Engage success guide on dealing with information overload from All Points Fibre Network. So download that. You'll really enjoy that case study, I think.
And in third place for EMEA was PHS. So congratulations to all our winners. But as well as ranking the top performing Viva Engage enterprises, we also did a deep dive analysis into 5,758 active Viva Engage communities across the 73 organisations benchmarked.
And amongst those was Shailesh's and Cecile's communities that they were talking about. They were in the top. Oh, one was ranked number two, actually.
But coming in number one globally is another APAC customer. If you can just – yeah, thanks, Cai. And this – it was actually – it's a state government department of customer service for New South Wales.
But you might be surprised when you learn this community. It's actually about insurance and government regulation. So for me, that sounds pretty dull.
But I'll show you how it checks all the boxes for an engaged and active and a thriving community. So when we identify the top performing communities in our benchmarking, we only have the ID number of the community. We can't see the names or any details of the community.
So when we contacted the department of customer service and we asked – yeah, her name was – to identify this community, she looked it up. And she had a look at what was in the community. And she said she wasn't surprised at all it had ranked number one because it ticks all the right boxes.
So it's led by an engaging, authentic chief executive and supported by a strong leadership team. People are asking questions. They're receiving answers.
It's a safe space for people to share their ideas and opinions. There's a really healthy mix of posts praising and recognising colleagues and mentioning them. There's lots of learning and job development opportunities.
And most posts include images, videos or attachments. And they use data from Sweep Analytics to monitor their engagement and ensure that the messaging is reaching the right people. So this number one community, it's the New South Wales government insurance regulator.
And it's called State Insurance Regulatory Authority or SIRA. See, it does sound pretty dry. So this is an example of the CEO doing some authentic posts.
And that one on the left-hand side, it's a selfie that the CEO took during a work from home day. So you can see she's got business wear on top for the camera and active wear below. And in this like really short post, she asks people to share their working from home secrets in the comments.
And then on the right-hand side, it was a photo she took in the train window on a work trip from Gosford back to Sydney. So you can see they're just really simple, quick posts, but they're very authentic. They come from the CEO.
They get heaps of engagement. And then if we move on to the next one, it was really obvious in this community, there's this lovely mix of different types of posts. So here's some more examples.
The one on the left is a post highlighting the work of a colleague. And it also highlights some of their principles in the government department. And on the right, it's an example of a SIRA team member sharing a story of a colleague who was demonstrating a SIRA principle about engaging with the community.
So just praising some good work there. And on this one, you can see the post on the left. It's from someone who's encouraging colleagues to donate blood during National Blood Donor Week.
And there's some really supportive replies there. And on the right, it's just an example of a team member sharing a secondment opportunity on Viva Engage. So this next screenshot, it is a little blurry, I'm sorry.
But I just wanted to share it with you, because if you can see the numbers there, it's a report from Sweep Analytics of the most engaging posts. And what you will see, there's no real standout posts in this community, because every post has really similar strong engagement. So it really is a reflection of a very engaged community.
So no wonder they were ranked number one. So this Department of Customer Service, it's an example of how to do it right and create that perfect mix of content that people will engage with. But what we also heard in our interviews and from listening to you, is that people are feeling overwhelmed with communications, and that's leading to information overload.
So we decided to address this head on, and we wrote a new Viva Engage success guide on how to deal with information overload. Now, as we were writing this guide, Cai came up with an idea we think is going to be a game changer for all of you involved in internal communications. So I'm going to hand over to you, Cai, to reveal all.
Yeah, actually, yeah. So Pete and I, we worked on this together as well. Remember, Pete, we were sitting in a cafe in London, and we were white coding away.
But I'll tell you about the real basic principles of this. One of the things we realised is that Viva Engage can be used to help address information overload, because you can use it as really as effective as a comms channeling, maybe reduce the number of email-based newsletters that goes out. But if you sort of use it too much, then there's also a risk that people will see it as noisy.
So we thought, well, so there's obviously something in here about how much is actually being published, because that can contribute to information overload. So here's the real simple principle of what we wanted to do with the information overload calculator. We just want to find out how much content news are we producing? And number two, how much time does it take to read for the recipient? It's that simple.
So I'm going to show you this really quick, what it looks like, and you can play around with this. We're going to put some links in the chat for you to have a play with, but I'll show you how simple this is, and hopefully how impactful you agree that hopefully it'll be for you. So you go into the information overload calculator, there'll be links.
You sign up with a little log on button, but we don't store any of the data. It's really only to find out if anyone is actually logging in. So anything you type in here is anonymous.
We don't know who you are, but if you name, like if you put in the name of a newsletter and it says your company, well then, you know, maybe not be specific in that specific when you outline what your news channels are called. So we start here, three simple steps, company profile. I'm just going to click on load some sample data, but you'll get a sense of it.
You put in how many employees you have, and then because managers often use for cascades, you put in how many managers you have, and then you put in what are the core comms channels that you're using. You can remove some, or you can add some more if you like. That takes you about 10 seconds, hopefully.
Then you get to the content types, and I'm just going to click on load sample data so you can get some examples, and you modify these to suit your organisation. So put in internal news stories. I've got department updates, updates from leadership, and so forth.
You know the drill. You're experts in this. Then put in how many employees is intended to be reached, how often they go out, the frequency, what channel you're using, who's responsible, and then how long it takes to read it.
And I was actually talking to a company the other day. So they were putting out 10 news items on the intranet a week. So I'm just going to change this to 10 and make sure I've got intranet sort here.
And then the last bit, that's the simple bit as well. Well actually, this might be hard for you. How much time do we think people have to read all the things that we're publishing? I'm going to click on that load sample data here, and this example is 15 minutes per week.
We had somebody in the workshop saying zero, which I don't think is entirely true, but who knows. And then other people think, oh it's half an hour a week. So you use your best guesstimate here at how much time you think you got.
And then after that, you click on calculate my information overload index. And voila, up comes the results. In this case, because we increased it from 3 to 10 news items per week, actually the employees are overloaded, meaning we are sending out more than they have time to read.
So this should start some conversations about how we're actually putting out too many things. But not only are we telling you whether or not people are at risk of being overloaded, we're helping you put a dollar value on this. Because all those time it takes for people to read the things we're sending out, we can convert that into a dollar value by applying to an average cost per hour and how many hours you work per week.
And in this case, it's 61 million dollars. And now if you are in internal commerce, all I'm saying is that you have a really important role to play in all this, right? Because internal commerce are the ones that are coordinating the flow of information, your vetting quality, your scheduling messages so they don't collide, and you track messages whether they land or not. And if you don't do that really well, well in this case, it's 61 million dollars that are at risk.
So I think you have a really important role to play. And you can think of SWOOP just as the, I guess, as a kind of like a radar that gives internal comms visibility of all these things that are flying around, all the messages that are flying around. That's the role that we play.
And then hopefully you'll find this useful and that'll help you improve comms in your organisation. So I'm going to stop sharing this bit and then just let you finish off, Sharon, with a couple of extra links. Well, thank you for that, Cai.
So we can't leave without getting you to download your own copy of our benchmarking report. And we'll, Cai will put that up on the screen. And Frank, could you just share that link for the benchmarking report in the chat again, please? And if you need help setting goals and measuring communications efforts or dealing with information overload, and we can show you how SWOOP can help you with that, we're here to help.
So please message Pete or Nicole in the chat and they'll get in touch and I'd love to set up a demo with you. So thank you, everyone.
Information Overload Calculator demo:
-
One of the things we realised is that Viva Engage can be used to help address information overload because you can use it as really as effective as a comms channeling, maybe reduce the number of email-based newsletters that goes out. But if you sort of use it too much, then there's also a risk that people will see it as noisy. So we thought, well, there's obviously something in here about how much is actually being published because that can contribute to information overload.
So here's the real simple principle of what we wanted to do with the information overload calculator. We just want to find out how much content news are we producing? And number two, how much time does it take to read for the recipient? It's that simple. So I'm going to show you this really quick what it looks like.
And you can play around with this. We're going to put some links in the chat for you to have a play with. But I'll show you how simple this is and hopefully how impactful you agree that hopefully it'll be for you.
So you go into the information overload calculator. There'll be links. You sign up with a little logon button.
But we don't store any of the data. It's really only to find out if anyone is actually logging in. So anything you type in here is anonymous.
We don't know who you are. But if you name, like, if you put in the name of a newsletter and it says your company, well, then, you know, maybe not be specific in that specific when you outline what your news channels are called. So we start here.
Three simple steps. Company profile. I'm just going to click on load some sample data, but you'll get a sense of it.
You put in how many employees you have. And then because managers often use for cascades, you put in how many managers you have. And then you put in what are the core comms channels that you're using.
You can remove some or you can add some more if you like. That takes you about 10 seconds, hopefully. Then you get to the content types.
And I'm just going to click on load sample data so you can get some examples. And you modify these to suit your organisation. So put in internal news stories.
I got department updates, updates from leadership and so forth. You know the drill. You're experts in this.
Then put in how many employees is intended to be reached, how often they go out, the frequency, what channel you're using, who's responsible, and then how long time it takes to read it. And I was actually talking to a company the other day. So they were putting out 10 news items on the intranet a week.
So I'm just going to change this to 10 and make sure I've got intranet solved here. And then the last bit. That's the simple bit as well.
Well, actually, this might be hard for you. How much time do we think people have to read all the things that we are publishing? I'm going to click on load sample data here. And this example is 15 minutes per week.
We had somebody in the workshop saying zero, which I don't think is entirely true, but who knows. And then all the people think, oh, it's half an hour a week. So you use your best guesstimate here at how much time you think you got.
And then after that, you click on calculate my information overload index. And voila, up comes the results. In this case, because we increased it from three to 10 news items per week, actually, the employees are overloaded, meaning we are sending out more than they have time to read.
So this should start some conversations about are we actually putting out too many things. But not only are we telling you whether or not people are at risk of being overloaded, we're helping you put a dollar value on this because all those time it takes for people to read the things we're sending out, we can convert that into a dollar value by applying to an average cost per hour and how many hours you work per week. And in this case, it's $61 million.
And now if you are in internal commerce, all I'm saying is that you have a really important role to play in all this, right? Because internal commerce are the ones that are coordinating the flow of information, you are vetting quality, you are scheduling messages so they don't collide, and you track messages whether they land or not. And if you don't do that really well, well, in this case, it's $61 million that are at risk. So I think you have a really important role to play.
And you can think of SWOOP just as the, I guess, as a kind of like a radar that gives internal comms visibility of all these things that are flying around, all the messages that are flying around. That's the role that we play. And then hopefully, you'll find this useful and that'll help you improve comms in your organisation.
Meet the speakers:
Sharon Dawson
SWOOP Analytics
Dr Laurence Lock Lee
SWOOP Analytics
Cai Kjaer
SWOOP Analytics
