Creating a Digitally Adoptive Culture

The City of Ipswich is a local government area in Queensland, Australia, located in the southwest of Brisbane, including the urban area surrounding the city of Ipswich and surrounding rural suburbs. Ipswich City Council (ICC) is the local government authority and currently employs more around 1,400 people. Council teams are spread across a range of departments and business units covering more than 400 occupations that deliver over 90 different services to a community of more than 175,000 people.

ICC embarked on a digital HR transformation journey in 2018/2019, encompassing a complete overall of their end-to-end HR systems. This included Core HR, Talent and Payroll, as well as a major upgrade of their Workforce Management system which saw Time Clocks introduced to all field staff. The impact to all employees was significant, and therefore a targeted approach to transforming the workforce to new and digital ways of working was essential to the overall adoption and utilisation of ICC’s investment.

Faced with high resistance to change, leadership challenges, and variable digital maturity across their workforce, ICC needed a solution that would drive positive brand-awareness around the initiative, and provide key insights into their engagement process to offer confidence in their Go Live strategy.

ICC were introduced to Communic8 as the digital enabler of their transformation. Communic8 quickly became an essential internal tool to drive change.

From the experience-driven content, delivered via digital channels, ICC were able to measure every interaction with their workforce. Key engagement insights were shared in fortnightly executive meetings to discuss strategies to improve high- risk areas, gather feedback and inform strategy. Coupled with a high-functioning Influencer group established across the business, the platform empowered the workforce with information, and the project team with insights - all with the intent of driving confidence in outcomes.

“We’ve seen great staff engagement, higher levels of knowledge of our project and Communic8 makes our messages stand out from the crowd”, says ICC’s Internal Communications Adviser, Kim Price. In terms of adoption, more than 90% of staff had enrolled on their time clocks before the project’s go-live. ICC recorded over 500 unique visitors to its new SuccessFactors platform within the first 24 hours of the launch, increasing to over 1,000 after the first seven days.

The average engagement of field employees was over 65%, with overall greater engagement with the digital medium in the field. Kim Price explains, “We have since started using Communic8 as an ongoing tool to communicate with our staff, for example with fortnightly communication. I find it invaluable in terms of gauging engagement rates on that piece of communication.”

Employee experience was enhanced at all levels. The change management content and framework developed for the digital HR transformation will be used as the standard for all future projects at Council. The Communic8 platform has also been endorsed by Council’s CEO for organisation communications. Analytics from Communic8 have been used to discuss employee engagement and mitigation strategies at fortnightly governance meetings.

“We have started SMS communication, particularly to our field-based staff – they don’t sit in front of a computer but they do have mobile devices in their pockets so we’ll be using Communic8 to send SMS messages, including emergency and safety alerts,” says Kim Price.

ICC have now been using Communic8 to more effectively, and efficiently engage their workforce as they respond to Covid-19. Using SMS from CEO and key leaders, as well as pulse checks to understand the health and wellbeing of their workforce, they are accelerating their digital engagement strategy and have established a sustainable, high quality workforce communications strategy that lays the foundation for the future.