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Engage Squared spins out staff wellness for Cricket Australia

Deploys Viva Insights platform to avoid overworked employees working long hours.

Engage Squared has been brought in to help Cricket Australia assess the mental wellbeing of its staff through the deployment of an employee experience platform.

The new employee wellness system, Viva Insights, was deployed in September 2021 and operates through Microsoft Teams – a platform Cricket Australia was already using.

A module of the employee experience platform Microsoft Viva and powered by Microsoft Office 365, the Viva Insights platform can flag groups of unidentified people that are overworked and are working long hours.

The system was brought in following quarterly employee engagement surveys conducted by Cricket Australia, which found staff wellbeing had taken a harsh hit during the pandemic.

“Quite often, people feel tired and overworked, and that the commute to and from the office that no longer exists had blurred the lines between their home life and their work life,” said Cricket Australia senior client services manager Emma Cashen.

“It was this tired workforce that was potentially going into a planning season and feeling under-resourced.

“What the surveys indicated was that the workforce had their busy periods at different times of the year, some were busy during a cricket season, others were busy in what is [traditionally] the off-season.

“We wanted to better understand what groups were going to be impacted at what point during the year. So, it was about how we use data from our engagement surveys to make sure we’re putting an action plan in place to try and protect those employees from those situations.”

Through the system, employees are presented with personalised recommendations on how to work optimally, with the organisation looking to educate its staff on how to view their insights at individual and team levels.

Then, Cashen said the next step is to take action based on the Viva Insights recommendations.

 “What we’re finding is people are always available just because we’re working flexibly at any time of the day. This means people don’t know that boundary anymore, so we want to help them create those boundaries at an individual level,” she said.

“Getting a reminder to take a moment and really have that mindfulness opportunity within Viva Insights is amazing to see. As an organisation, we’re supportive of people taking a moment.”

The work on Viva Insights is not done however, with Cricket Australia looking to integrate the results of its engagement surveys into the system itself, as opposed to its current form, which is conducted through Culture Amp.

“The idea then is we can really start to see the correlation between how people are behaving on a regular basis and the end result of our engagement surveys. We can see if there are any similarities as we go into our action plans,” Cashen said.

There is also discussion of expanding Viva Insights to the state cricket associations, providing what Cashen refers to as “an Australian cricket-wide view rather than a Cricket Australia-only view”.

“I can see some of the State Associations jumping on board really quickly,” she said. “They’ve got a big focus on their data as well for employee experience, and insights and employee engagement are part of their strategy planning.”

In addition, Cricket Australia is considering deploying other Viva modules as part of the system, such as the internal news-focused Viva Connections and the employee learning and training hub Viva Learning.

“Viva Learning would be an easy one to roll out next if we wanted to. We have LinkedIn Learning, which we can embed in Viva Learning,” Cashen added.

“But I think Viva Connections is going to be the biggest game changer for us. We have an intranet and an enterprise social media platform in place however they are standalone and they won’t work in the flow of your work.

“Bringing them into Connections makes total sense. It gives the organisation the ability to have a really clear communication channel and reach their staff when they need to.”