NSW Department of Customer Service - The perfect Viva Engage community checklist
The Viva Engage community identified by SWOOP Analytics as the best in the world for 2025/26 is a textbook example of best practices.
✅ It’s led by an engaging, authentic chief executive.
✅ Supported by a strong leadership team.
✅ People are asking questions and receiving answers.
✅ It’s a safe space for people to share their ideas and opinions.
✅ There is a healthy mix of posts praising and recognising colleagues, and @mentioning them.
✅ Learning and job development opportunities are shared in the community.
✅ There is strong cultural awareness in the community, celebrating initiatives like Wear It Purple Day and R U OK Day.
✅ Most posts include images, videos or attachments.
✅ They use data from SWOOP Analytics to monitor engagement and ensure messaging is reaching the right people.
What may surprise you is that this community is for a state government insurance regulator. Yep, it brings together people who work in insurance and government regulations! Perhaps not the first place that comes to mind when you think of an active, thriving, engaging and innovative workplace.
Yet, SWOOP Analytics has the data to prove it’s exactly that!
As part of SWOOP Analytics’ 2025/26 Viva Engage benchmarking analysis, we assessed data from 5,758 active Viva Engage communities from across the globe, and the Viva Engage activities of almost three million employees. The NSW Department of Customer Service’s State Insurance Regulatory Authority (SIRA) community was ranked No.1.
SIRA is an independent agency within the Australian state of New South Wales’ Department of Customer Service, with about 450 employees.
SWOOP Analytics receives only the metadata and ID number of the community when conducting our ranking. We then approached the NSW Department of Customer Service (DCS) to ask for this community to be identified.
When DCS’ Digital Internal Communications Lead, Yae Morton, looked at the SIRA community, she was unsurprised it was ranked No.1 globally.
Yae Morton, Digital Internal Communications Lead, NSW Department of Customer Service.
“I was having a look at the group, and it ticks all the best practise boxes,” Yae said.
“They have an amazing, engaging leader. She's very authentic. She posts candid photos from her life and connects it to something that is of interest to her people.
“She's really great at being aware of what people are interested in and visually demonstrating it.”
Yae said Mandy posts on Viva Engage about once every two weeks, so it’s not a huge time commitment, yet her impact is obvious.
“She doesn’t post too much but it’s just in that really lovely cadence, and it's authentic and she almost always posts with images,” Yae said.
“She has an authenticity, and you can't recreate that. That's her, and you know that's who she is.”
Examples of recent Viva Engage posts from SIRA CEO Mandy Young. They’re short, simple but exude authenticity, and they connect with colleagues.
Supporting Mandy on Viva Engage is her senior leadership team, who also post engaging and authentic content.
“This community has also got people posting their questions that they need answered, and people jump in, and they have that conversation,” Yae said.
“It’s a safe space for people to ask questions, and people give their opinions.”
On top of this, there are plenty of praise and recognition posts where colleagues @mention their work mates to give them a shout out.
An example of a Viva Engage post highlighting the work of a colleague, while also highlighting SafeWork’s principles.
SIRA team members sharing a story of a colleague demonstrating a SIRA principle – Engage with the community.
There’s also regular learning and development advice, community awareness posts and the sharing of customer success stories. There’s no one specific type of post in the community. Instead, people feel comfortable to post about anything, Yae said.
The power of data
Importantly, Yae said, the SIRA community is facilitated by a communications team that relies on SWOOP Analytics to see who is engaging, which posts are resonating and how to tap into influencers to share corporate messaging.
“SIRA are definitely SWOOP users as well,” Yae said.
“They ask me about SWOOP reports, and the comms team uses the data to tweak things.”
A Viva Engage post encouraging colleagues to donate blood during National Blood Donor Week.
“It's not one thing that makes it a great community. It has it all,” Yae said.
A SIRA team member sharing a secondment opportunity on Viva Engage.
A screenshot from SWOOP Analytics for Viva Engage showing the SIRA community’s Most Engaging Posts. You can see the consistency of engagement across posts, rather than a few standout posts.
In ranking the 5,758 active Viva Engage communities in SWOOP Analytics’ 2025/26 benchmarking study, we looked at consistent activity levels, along with measures of two-way relationships, connections between members, sentiment analysis of conversations, growth in activity and more. We also added a dimension to assess whether a community is thriving (or not).
Building a thriving Viva Engage community
While the SIRA community topped SWOOP Analytics’ global benchmarking, close behind in No.7 was another DCS community. Again, it’s a community that may not be an obvious choice for an active, thriving, engaged community. The No.7 ranked community is Building Commission NSW, the state government’s building regulator.
Like the SIRA community, Yae said the Building Commission community had a strong leader and a healthy mix of praise, project updates and new appointments.
NSW Building Commissioner James Sherrard shares a fortnightly video update on Viva Engage to connect with his colleagues.
Another example of a Viva Engage video update from the NSW Building Commissioner.
A NSW Building Commission team member’s Viva Engage post about a successful town hall.
A NSW Building Commission team member posting praise about the Building Complaints team.
A successful migration from Workplace from Meta to Viva Engage
A screenshot of the Service NSW Contact Centre Channel community’s Two-way Relationships from SWOOP Analytics for Viva Engage showing an average Two-way relationship of 37%, which is well above the entire NSW Department of Customer Service’s 19%. Service NSW’s 37% is well above the 2025/26 average of 15% across all 73 organisations benchmarked by SWOOP Analytics in 2025/26.
The third best performing DCS community identified by SWOOP Analytics is the contact centre for Service NSW, the state government agency helping people and businesses access government support, transactions and services including car registration and driver licences. It supports the 8.5 million residents of NSW, a state significantly bigger than the US state of Texas and three times the size of the United Kingdom.
This community stood out in SWOOP Analytics’ benchmarking due to its high percentage of two-way relationships, the most reliable measure of trustful relationships forming across Viva Engage.
What makes it even more impressive is the entire Service NSW agency moved from Workplace from Meta to Viva Engage in October 2024 after Workplace announced it was shutting down.
Dasha Maiorova, Senior Internal Communications Advisor at DCS, said this community is used almost exclusively for praise. People in this community are the workers who field every enquiry imaginable from the residents and businesses of NSW – from questions about getting a driver’s licence, to registering a death in the family and helping people save money on their electricity bill. Once the phone call is complete, customers are asked to stay on the phone and complete a short survey to ask about their experience with the contact centre.
Managers and supervisors then use the content of these surveys to create Viva Engage posts recognising the good work of staff.
“These are the people at the coalface,” Dasha said.
“They’re frontline and they have some very full-on conversations, sometimes when people are experiencing their worst days of their life, and are in a heightened emotional state.
“So it really is wonderful for somebody to actually hear that what you've done has changed someone's day, maybe changed someone's life experience. It is really positive.”
Dasha Maiorova, Senior Internal Communications Advisor, NSW Department of Customer Service.
A praise post in the Service NSW Contact Centre Channel community after a customer provided praise for team member who helped them find more than $3,500 in lost bond money.
When Dasha and Yae first learned how successful this community was in SWOOP Analytics’ benchmarking, they were a little sceptical because they knew it was used only for praise.
“But then I dug down and had a look and realised it is such a beautiful value and a show of their culture, and the fact as well that they've created this community themselves and built that praise into their processes,” Dasha said.
“It bucks the trend of what you think makes a shiny, well performing Viva Engage community. They’ve really made it their own space.”
Praise for a Service NSW team member after helping a customer to set up a new e-toll account.
Praise shared by a customer who rang the Disaster Assistance Line. It was the Service NSW team member’s first day working on the Disaster Assistance Line.
Data from SWOOP Analytics clearly shows the employee engagement across the state in the Service NSW Contact Centre Channel community. In the Segment Activity report below, each number on the left hand side represents a different region across NSW, showing the cross-enterprise collaboration across the state.
A screenshot of Service NSW’s Segment Activity report showing cross-enterprise collaboration.
Monitoring this data helps Dasha see where there might be any gaps in engagement across Service NSW.
“SWOOP is my daily bookmark,” she said.
This community has also been a catalyst to get Service NSW employees to make the switch to Viva Engage, when Workplace had been a staple communications channel for them.
The Service NSW Contact Centre community is a private Viva Engage community, which Dasha and Yae said may be a bit of a hangover from Workplace groups but at the same time, Yae believes it does help to create a safe space for workers, especially in a government department where there’s no room to publicly make mistakes.
“I think that sense of psychological safety for us is the key piece where people feel comfortable,” Yae said.
“They will post because it’s a smaller community and people feel safe and they like being a little bit more open with each other.”
Praise for a Service NSW team leader who helped a customer who was having trouble with their real estate.
Continuing to improve connection and collaboration
While the NSW Department of Customer Service is thrilled with its benchmarking success, Dasha and Yae said Viva Engage is still a work in progress, especially getting more frontline workers engaged.
They’re currently using SWOOP Analytics data to see whether using things like the Announcements feature, which will send employees a notification in Microsoft Teams, will draw more frontline workers into conversations.
