Largest Bank in New Zealand, ANZ, embarks on a journey that leads to Yammer

Summary

Australia New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) was founded in 1835 and is the seventh largest company in Australia and the largest bank in New Zealand. With over 46,000 employees spread broadly throughout Australia and Asia, the ANZ communications team acted on a renewed desire to increase connection and engagement between their people.

Challenge

ANZ had quickly outgrown their first social enterprise tool. They had learned valuable lessons about what employees needed and wanted and what had to be done to meet strict security and infrastructure requirements. After visiting with both Facebook and Microsoft, the team narrowed their search down to a head-to-head between Workplace by Facebook and Yammer, part of Office 365.

Strategy

Not wanting to be swayed by the in-person demos and instinctual assumptions, the team took a human-centered design approach to selecting the right platform.

ANZ employees span four different generations and the assumption was tool preference would also be split down the middle. But after conducting deep-dive interviews, company-wide surveys, and third party-run user experience testing, Yammer came out as the clear winner over Workplace.

A few of the “nuggets of truth” that came from their discovery were that a company-wide social environment could reduce the risk associated with employees using external social platforms for work purposes. It was important to employees to keep personal and work social engagement separate and Yammer felt more “work-y.” Employees wanted a place that was authentic and safe; a place that felt uniquely ANZ. In addition to these nuggets, the Yammer experience provided functionality and features their employees needed such as being mobile friendly, easy to use, and integrated into their other workflows and systems.

Results

With the user experience at the center of ANZs decision making, vendor relationships and cost were removed from the decision making process. But a nice upside for ANZ – who have recently signed an Office 365 licensing agreement with Microsoft – they already owned Yammer. This allowed for funds that would have been spent on paying Workplace licensing fees being invested in a business development manager, four community managers and a robust change management approach. Following a soft-launch to 22,000 employees in Australia adoption grew to nearly 40% within the first two weeks of making Yammer available.

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