NRMA
Delivering the magic to those dedicated to providing help
For one of Australia's most trusted brands and largest member organisation, The NRMA, the magic of SWOOP Analytics is the ability to immediately give people insight into their online behaviours at work.
By logging into the SWOOP dashboard, employees can instantly see their SWOOP Persona, which characterises an employee’s interactions and behaviours in online social networks, like Yammer. SWOOP also shows you how you can tweak your behaviour to change your Persona and become a better collaborator at work.
NRMA’s Digital Employee Experience Manager, Pete Johns, speaking at SWOOP Chat Sydney.
NRMA’s Digital Employee Experience Manager, Pete Johns, regularly uses SWOOP to show leaders and leadership teams how they’re tracking. Pete will often use SWOOP’s benchmarking tool to bring up a table with all leaders in a team or division to show their online personas.
Pete will put the benchmarking table on a large screen for all to see so they can compare and learn from their online interactions and behaviours.
“It’s important that’s done in a sensitive and sensible way,” he said.
“It’s not about saying; ‘Who’s doing the best?’ treating it as a scoreboard. It’s about saying; ‘How can you tweak your behaviour to drive more engaging action and more engaging activity?’
“Using the data served up in SWOOP, you can rapidly elevate the conversation from ‘metrics’ to ‘behaviour’. As a result of seeing the value SWOOP-led conversations can unlock, many leaders have then invited me into their team meetings to lead a conversation with their direct reports and wider team, saying; ‘I’d love you to come and talk to my team about Yammer and show them the SWOOP dashboard and the kind of data we can access’.
“It’s interesting to see the reactions people have to the data-driven insights SWOOP can give us. That’s unlocking conversations and those conversations are then unlocking opportunities for the business to learn and grow.”
SWOOP breathes new life into Yammer
In fact, Pete credits SWOOP with reinvigorating Yammer at NRMA, sharing one example where a General Manager invited him to a team meeting.
“There were six people in his team, his leaders,” Pete said.
“In the introduction he said; ‘I’ve always been really cynical about Yammer, I never saw the need for it and never understood what the purpose of it is. I saw it as just another channel like email that’s full of noise but now I’ve been completely turned around. I’m now an advocate for it and I really think we need to, as a team, look at how we can leverage it because I can see it’s actually a great tool that can help us drive engagement and business results. Over to you Pete’.
“What an intro! And all of that comes from SWOOP. SWOOP showcases the capability within Yammer and the business value that can be unlocked.”
By using the data from SWOOP to show leaders what engagement looks like, Pete has brought his senior leadership on board and has them talking and engaging in Yammer.
“SWOOP Analytics is worth its weight in gold,” Pete said.
“Show people what engagement looks like and use data to educate, enable and recognise your champions.”
What Persona are you?
SWOOP has identified five common online behaviour personas. The first three are positive personas and critical to an organisation:
Engager - Will be posting and/or replying and/or liking, but also receives replies and likes in a (roughly) equal amount.
Catalyst - Receives a lot more than they give, e.g. are seeding conversations that leads to a lot of replies/likes.
Responder - Tends to reply to others (or clicks ‘like’) but posts significantly less.
Broadcaster - Tends to post messages that are not replied to or liked, so the conversation is mostly ‘one-way’.
Observer - Interacts less than once every two weeks.
“The real juice in SWOOP from a stakeholder engagement point of view is around being able to almost instantly show how people can change their persona,” Pete said.
He said SWOOP creates an opportunity for conversations of value.
“Data does nothing on its own, what matters is the conversation the data inspires,” Pete said.
“That’s where the magic in SWOOP lies. The fact that I can pull up a dashboard really swiftly, I can say here’s an example of a group that’s really healthy, in an area that we know people are really engaged.
“Now let’s look at your group within the SWOOP environment. Let’s have a comparison.”
Groups, departments, campaigns and individuals can be compared transparently so everyone can learn what good looks like.
An experiment to rejuvenate Yammer at NRMA and create business value
NRMA put SWOOP to the test in a recent experiment, which went onto to win Gartner's global communications award in the Small Idea Big Impact category. After intensive research they uncovered a need within the organisation to help employees solve customer and colleague problems faster and share information more effectively. Frontline workers needed to be actively and intentionally empowered and connection between leaders and frontline employees needed to increase.
The NRMA opens its Electric Vehicle fast charging station in Bega, on the NSW South Coast.
Taking an experimental, learning-focused approach, Pete and his colleagues created a test case in the Group Customer Division, with sponsorship from the Chief Customer Officer. Pete said SWOOP was critical in those early days to get engagement from senior leaders.
“We set out with open minds, ready to learn from our people and their experiences,” Pete said.
“We weren’t trying to ‘push’ anything, we were genuinely looking to learn from what we observed.”
Yammer had been in use at NRMA for about eight years with relatively low perceived business value and the majority of employees had a negative view of Yammer. Pete had his work cut out for him.
“Colleagues had pre-conceptions and ideas that had become part of the narrative around Yammer and if I didn’t have SWOOP, I wouldn’t be able to go out and change those pre-conceptions,” Pete said.
First up, Pete and his team realised the importance of putting employee experience at the heart of the experiment.
An employee experience survey was built around SWOOP’s Enterprise Social Network Maturity Model to capture how people felt about the experience of connecting, sharing, problem solving and innovating.
“I used what I describe as the four steps of business value in the maturity model – connecting, sharing, solving, innovating - to see if we can use Yammer and SWOOP to develop a more innovative culture across our Group Customer Division,” Pete said.
Three new Yammer groups were created across the division of about 300 people, targeting three different types of community that already existed in ‘analogue’ form. For each of these Yammer groups there was a community leader and community admin who Pete worked with to clarify the purpose and objectives for their community, helping them take ownership of creating engaging experiences for their community members.
With SWOOP, Pete and his team could measure real-time activity, demonstrate what good looks like, and guide people to better behaviours along the way.
The experiment ran for three months in late 2018, starting with the first employee experience survey and finishing with the second, giving end-to-end employee experience feedback.
The results are in
Pete was blown away by the results. The employee experience surveys showed huge improvements in all areas, bigger than he could have imagined could be achieved over such a short period.In follow-up conversations people from all levels reported:
feeling better about coming to work
feeling like the culture had tangibly improved
that they had more fun at work
they felt more connected to the organisation, as well as their colleagues.
NRMA Roadside Patrol’s James Saad celebrates 30 years of helping NRMA members in the Sydney area.
There was also a steep change in leadership behaviour as the Senior Leadership Team embraced the experiment and became more active on Yammer, something that continues today.
“Our frontline were the true champions though, driving a massive increase in activity across our entire Yammer network,” Pete said.
“Why does increased activity matter? Because it means trust is being built. It’s that simple. To build our desired culture of trust we need to interact. We need to connect and communicate. Yammer lets us do that at scale, unbound by geography or time.”
Pete said NRMA is now using the lessons learned from the Group Customer experiment to reignite Yammer across the organisation.
“The organisation is opening up, people are learning about how to work and share information more transparently,” he said.
“SWOOP is key to reinvigorating the use of Yammer and delivering real business results.”
Hear more from Pete Johns in this short interview.
An NRMA Electric Vehicle charging station in Berry, on the NSW South Coast.
