Virgin Media O2 - A vehicle for employees’ voices
When a Manchester-based engineer for UK telecommunications giant Virgin Media O2 needs to conduct a site survey in Birmingham, they will typically hire a car to get there. In fact, if you need to drive more than 120 miles, it’s been company policy for years to hire a car rather than use your own vehicle.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit and lockdowns around the world resulted in the car rental market collapsing. Suddenly it became incredibly difficult to hire a car anywhere in the UK as rental companies sold off their cars in response to the mayhem.
At the same time, people in the UK became more and more reliant on telecommunications to work from home, and connect with family online, so there was huge demand for Virgin Media O2 to build and sustain even better telecommunications services.
Virgin Media O2 workers had to get to sites and were, at times, unable to hire a car. Or they would be left waiting until the last minute to learn if a rental car was available. Remember, if you need to drive more than 120 miles, company policy is to hire a car and not to use your own vehicle.
You’ve probably already worked out an easy solution, right? Increase the mileage allowance to travel to sites in personal vehicles and reimburse employees. It sounds easy but in a company with more than 18,000 employees, it isn’t a simple process to make company-wide changes.
The first step is to identify the problem and alert those who have the authority to make the change. Virgin Media O2 values its employees’ voices and has a formal structure to allow employees’ voices to be heard at the highest level, which can result in company-wide changes – like the increase in miles on a personal vehicle.
Virgin Media O2 has a program called Voice which allows employee voices to be heard through Voice forums. There must be a vehicle for these employee voices to be heard and this is where Virgin Media O2’s digital workplace and use of the Microsoft 365 suite of tools, combined with Workplace from Meta as the company’s enterprise social network, comes into its own.
When an employee at Virgin Media O2 has an issue to raise, they contact their Local Voice Forum representative. Once a month, the Divisional Voice Forums (each representing the different business divisions at Virgin Media O2) meet on Microsoft Teams with the representatives from the local forums to discuss the issues raised by their constituents. Prior to the meeting, representatives add to an agenda which is a shared document in their team on Microsoft Teams.
Representatives from the Divisional Voice Forum, who are spread across the entire UK, use Microsoft Teams channels to discuss issues in the lead-up to the monthly meetings, and afterwards they share all their documents in these channels.
All communications, conversations, meeting minutes and documents are contained in one place – in the Teams channel.
Catherine Callan, Senior Manager – Partner Engagement & Performance, Virgin Media O2.
“We share everything in the team,” said CTO Divisional Voice Forum Representative Catherine Callan.
“If we have a meeting, we will put our minutes in there and then everyone will comment on it and you’re not filling everyone’s inbox. We make sure we tag the whole team. After a meeting we do all our comms on Teams and get feedback.
“We always ensure that cameras are on so that you can you feel as though you’re sitting in the same room together. I think that’s really important when you’re collaborating.”
One representative from each Divisional Voice Forum sits on the National Voice Forum, which also includes Virgin Media O2’s CEO and other C suite executives.
It’s at these meetings that big changes can happen. Again, all members of the National Voice Forum collaborate and communicate in a Microsoft Teams team, sharing documents in the channel and an agenda prior to the quarterly meeting.
In the case of the rental car difficulties, the issue was raised at multiple Divisional Voice Forums and taken to the National Voice Forum, where Virgin Media O2’s leadership was made aware of the problem and made the company-wide change to increase the mileage on private vehicles to 400 miles, if employees preferred this option to hiring a car.
To put it in perspective, the distance from Edinburgh in Scotland to Cardiff in Wales is less than 400 miles. It seemed the issue was solved. But there was one more step in the process – getting the message back to employees, especially those on the frontline who need to travel to sites.
Again, Microsoft Teams and the M365 suite comes into play. At the National Voice Forum, meeting minutes and all documents are shared in a Microsoft Teams channel. The draft of a Voice newsletter is also shared in the team on Teams and each National Voice Forum representative then shares the newsletter with their Divisional Voice Forum representatives in their own team. Each Voice Forum member can work on the document and ask questions to clarify for their own constituents.
Once the newsletter is finalised, it is shared with all employees across Virgin Media O2, with each newsletter coming from the relevant division, often with a personalised note for that division of the company.
“We make sure that we all agree, and that everything has been correctly captured and we work on it together and that way you know no one will come back and say; ‘Well that’s not really what was said’,” Catherine said.
The newsletter is shared across all communication channels – in teams on Microsoft Teams, on Workplace by Meta (which Virgin Media O2 uses instead of Viva Engage), in Outlook and on the company intranet.
Adam Jukes, User Experience Manager - Digital Workplace, Virgin Media O2.
“We all like to consume things in a different way, so therefore really to get the most out of everything, you should communicate in different ways and not be restricted to just one,” said Virgin Media O2’s User Experience Manager, Adam Jukes.
“That’s the way I feel and the data backs me up with that.”
The example of increasing mileage on personal vehicles to address a nation-wide issue of hire car shortages is an example of how collaboration and communication is occurring across Virgin Media O2 using the M365 suite of tools.
It starts with a frontline worker raising an issue, goes up through the channels using the employee Voice Forums, a change is made at the executive level, and the message is then clearly communicated back down through the channels to reach the frontline worker with a solution to the issue.
“We did make that change as Voice,” Catherine said.
“We championed that and then we allowed people to use their own car up to 400 miles. It saved the business money and it took away the need to try and get hire cars.
“And that’s just with people across the entire organisation coming to these forums saying; ‘I’ve got this issue’.”
Many of the Divisional Voice Forums at Virgin Media O2 were identified by SWOOP Analytics as top performing teams in SWOOP’s 2023 M365 & Microsoft Teams Benchmarking analysis, with the CTO Employee Voice forum among the top 2% of the more than 67,000 teams analysed.
When SWOOP met with the CTO Employee Voice representatives to learn about their digital habits, Catherine thought we must have the wrong team because she didn’t think they did anything special in the way they worked.
“This is what we do everyday in our day job,” Catherine said.
“So in my day job, not my Voice day job, we do everything that way. We’ve got our documents up there and everything is on Teams so we can all work on it.
“Our team is dispersed so we work this way on Teams every day.”
While this way of working is now natural to Catherine and her team, data from SWOOP’s 2023 benchmarking shows only 24% of employees work collaboratively in Microsoft Teams channels.
Migration emphasised the trouble with using Microsoft Teams chat
In mid-2021, Virgin Media merged with O2 to form one of the largest entertainment and telecommunications operators in the UK, with more than 47 million connections. It also meant merging the two businesses into one.
Virgin Media O2’s User Experience Manager, Adam Jukes, said the migration emphasised the trouble with Microsoft Teams chat, and the copious amounts of knowledge and documents shared in chat that should have been posted in Teams channels to capture it permanently.
It became a massive exercise to find ways to migrate the information in chat. That’s why Adam is adamant people use the M365 tools correctly and post in Microsoft Teams channels, to avoid any similar problems in the future, and to make knowledge accessible to all who need it.
“Nothing was really contained within channels and then that gave us a real big headache when it comes to looking at the migration because the tooling out there isn’t scoped for mass migration of chat messages,” Adam said.
“Whereas if the business files had been shared within channels within Teams ,all of that stuff actually would have migrated far easier.”
Adam said this is why analytics from SWOOP are so important to show people their personal digital habits and to direct them to work collaboratively across the M365 tools.
“SWOOP gives us the facts and figures, for both personal and enterprise, to show us where potentially we’re going wrong and where we need to improve,” Adam said.
“SWOOP does paint that picture and without it you don’t really have a clue. You can only look at consumption, it doesn’t really paint the story.
“We see SWOOP as something that will bring a lot of value to the business because we’ll be collaborating better, potentially we’ll be having less meetings because of it, which is a cost saving.”
Changing behaviors with SWOOP Analytics
Adam said without data from SWOOP, there is no way individuals can know if their digital behaviours are good, or need improving.
“You need to know where you are, and you need to know what you can change and then also you need to be able to see that,” he said.
“We don’t have anything that can tell you as a person where you are, what you could do better. That’s where SWOOP fits in. SWOOP helps to change the behaviours.”
Adam said Virgin Media O2 could write guidelines to tell people how to improve their digital workplace habits, but without SWOOP giving employees the ability to go and see their own personal behaviours, it will never have the same impact.
Once digital workplace behaviours do improve, it will also bring ROI back to the business.
“As part of the SWOOP analytics you can look at things like time spent in meetings,” Adam said.
“We know meetings cost money and there’s stuff you can do in Teams that can result in less meeting time. All of this is cost saving.”
